The Crew

Authors and Performance: Simona Maicanescu and Alex SimuAssistant Director and Scenographer: Elena ButicăVisuals and Light Design: Dan BasuText: SimonaMaicanescuMusic and Sound: Alex SimuEnglish version: Roxana Cazan

Produced by: ARCUB Cultural Project Center in Bucharest,

Romania

Vagabond Soul is a fascinating story about the life of those on a perpetual move, as imagined by actress Simona Maicanescu and musician Alex Simu, two vagabond souls. Simona met Alex in May 2014, during the European Cultural Festival in Algiers. The idea of building a show together felt like a fantastic opportunity. Simona and Alex number among many migrant individuals incessantly exposed to the challenges of a new environment.

The show unsettles the questions : Why do we relocate? How do welove in another language? What do we do to provoke others? How substantial are our friendships? How can we make people value us? Can we fall in love with other cultures? Can we adapt to othermillieus? Can hearts beat to the rhythm of foreign tunes? What and where is home?

If these questions have troubled you as well, please come out and enjoy the show!

The Pitch

The Vagabond Soul performance brings to the stage an endless story about living on the road, imagined by actress Simona Maicanescu—myself—and musician Alex Simu, two wandering souls. Both Alex and I, conceive of ourselves as wandering souls in a vast world replete with thrills and dangers.

In May 2014, destiny brought Alex and I on the same stage, as we both performed in different shows, at the European Culture Festival in Algiers. Since then, we have decided to search for an idea that could naturally reunite us into the same show. We sought inspiration in our own stories and in thousands of other stories of restless wanderers. We were motivated by the need to understand the edginess of the ever-changing world, the yearning to identify and acknowledge love, friendship, fear, adventure, sadness, joy, and many more human experiences as they take place far away from where we each call home. We asked ourselves: How do we love in another language? Could we dance to some other music than “our own”? Do our hearts beat in the same way? Where is “home” and what does it feel to be there?

Today, for us, being home means being on stage. In a rapidly changing world, this is the only topography – besides the sweet tranquility of childhood – that remains pristine and neat. The performance exposes the joy of sharing with the audience the wisdom of words and the quiver of sounds created by great artists-explorers of the world. Swayed by a myriad of cultural contexts, they gained a broader view and a new pace of creation. Whether or not an artist, anyone knows that journeys transform us almost irreversibly. This performance is an invitation that challenges audiences to dream without limits or prejudice; it is a journey to an “endless” time and space.

Hannah Arendt, Etel Adnan, Samuel Beckett, Constantin Brancusi, George Enescu, Doris Lessing, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Sebastiao Salgado, Arthur Rimbaud, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, D.H. Lawrence, Reiner Maria Rilke … as well as other hundreds of wanderers had given us both humility and courage to show you some bits and pieces of the world seen by those who live beyond the borders of their birthplaces. For us, defining migration, immigration, and exile is a matter of perspective: Some ostracize themselves in their own country, others find their roots as they get further away from home. Through their eyes, the world is a lot vaster and incredibly more generous, and hence they could conquer it wisely through cultural crossbreeding.

The stage is a screen on which we leave our prints through words, sounds, and images. On stage, you’ll discover piles of books and musical instruments in and out of their cases. These are the witnesses of past and future journeys. Spoken words, instrumental sounds, gestures and glances… they symbolize, like always in a performance, the pretexts for emotions or thoughts, for life’s new metaphors.

The rest of the alchemy is up to you, the spectator—may your souls always garb your inner questions in the colors and traditions by which you live. As for color, the show will be performed in Romanian, French, English, and some snippets of other languages…

Art has no religion, no border but only one goal—to make the world a better place.

Short Description