by Ramona Abrudan, photo: Maria Ștefănescu
At the 2025 edition of the BABEL International Performing Arts Festival, the performance #notMe, presented in the “Mihai Dimiu” Studio Hall of the Tony Bulandra Theatre, offered audiences a performative experience of rare intensity — not a linear story, but an existential fracture, an interrogation of identity in the age of distance.
“Keep your distance. Shut your mouth. Basically, mute.”
This is how the performance begins. Not with an invitation, but with a restriction. Not with silence, but with a robotic, authoritarian tone that immediately positions the audience in a programmed discomfort. From the very entrance, the space transforms into a pool of shadows and vibrations, and spectators become part of a tense sensory territory, marked by rupture and unease.
Created by Casandra Topologeanu and discreetly yet radically inspired by Samuel Beckett’s “Not I,” #notMe reimagines the iconic “suspended mouth” through a whole body: a body tense, marked by anxiety, memory, and a silence that screams.
Andreea Tănase, the sole presence on stage, does not perform — she translates. Her movements — trembling, convulsions, collapses, and escapes — form a choreography of confinement, where each motion resists the pull of collapse.
The scenography is minimalistic yet deeply charged with meaning: projections of flowing water, black-and-white photographs, fragments of memory. The floor becomes a screen, the past invades the present, and a cold, vertical light, like in a dissection room, doesn’t illuminate — it exposes. The actress’s body floats between images and sounds in a time turned liquid, suspended between then and now.
With no clear words, no distinct lines spoken, the performance becomes a physical experience of rupture. Smoke, metallic sounds, and overlapping voices construct a sensory space where the pandemic — though never named — is always present. It hovers, it seeps into the gestures, becoming the shared wound of a faceless character with a pain recognizable to each of us.
And yet, what is there left to say when words have been evacuated?
The direction offers a poetic and unsettling answer:
Instead of speech — trembling.
Instead of reason — image.
Instead of catharsis — a phone ringing in an empty space, a body fleeing with its head hidden in a shopping bag. A gesture of disappearance. A final negation: “not me.”
But then… who?
In a festival that celebrates the plurality of theatrical languages, #notMe stands out as an act of artistic courage — a performance that doesn’t aim to please, but to shake. To pull us out of our comfort zones and remind us — with force and clarity — that there is another way to say “present” to the world: through silence, through trembling, through absence.
