Felix Alexa – un „clasic” de la debut

Abstract

Felix Alexa, theatre director and professor at “I. L. Caragiale” University of Theatre and Film, made his directorial debut in the early 1990s, during a time when the convulsive realities and energies of post-decembrist Romanian society were also producing radical changes in the artistic field. Theatre, for instance, was marked by the ascendance of a climate of effervescence, of quests, and of symptoms of hope indissociable from the sense of freedom and the disappearance of censorship. It is in this context that Felix Alexa has the opportunity to work in Paris as assistant director for Peter Brook, a moment with important consequences in his formative process. Alexa’s aesthetic discourse is characterized by his deciphering of a play’s content from the standpoint of certain personal themes and their present adherences, as well as by the equilibrium and formal rigour of stage composition. It probes the structure of the situations and of the characters’ psychologies. It does not experiment outside of the texts engaged, but within them, modifying their semiotics based on what it wants to convey and not on how it is conveyed. Its modernity arises from the substance of the dramaturgical work, whether classic or contemporary, from its value and message. “Theatre is tradition. Each generation climbs on the shoulders of the previous one”, stresses Alexa, claiming as his model Liviu Ciulei, who argued that “there is no irreconcilable contradiction between tradition and innovation, that everything can be grafted onto the predecessors’ legacy”. Thus, the “lessons” bequeathed by two remarkable personalities, Ciulei and Brook, assimilated creatively and not imitatively, define an authentic and original directorial universe in the Romanian theatre, establishing Alexa as a high-profile director.