Two contemporary dance performances premiere at the National Centre for Dance Bucharest on June 27 and 28, bringing to the stage two different ways of looking at how the world shapes the body.
Unauthorised Movements, created by Mihai Mihalcea in collaboration with Mara Bugarin, and Under Pressure, by Ana Costea, will be presented on the same evening at Stere Popescu Hall, inside CNDB. The two works start from different artistic territories but converge on a shared question: how do history, social norms, technology, pressure, exhaustion, and the need for self-regulation leave traces in the body?
For visitors interested in Bucharest’s contemporary cultural scene, this double bill offers a strong entry point into the city’s experimental performance landscape. CNDB remains one of the central institutions for contemporary dance in Romania, presenting works that connect movement with social questions, political memory, technology, identity and the body.
Two Performances About the Body and the World Around It
This double bill brings together two works that speak about the body not as something isolated from society, but as a living archive of what surrounds it.
In Unauthorised Movements, Mihai Mihalcea returns to a recurring concern in his artistic practice: the relationship between power, history and the body. The performance examines how different historical periods, political ideas, labour systems, and technologies of observation shape movement, behaviour, and presence.
Under Pressure, Ana Costea’s new work, moves towards another form of bodily pressure: the experience of a person on the autism spectrum and the invisible effort of adapting to environments that do not always recognise different needs, rhythms and forms of presence.
Seen together, the two performances offer an intense contemporary dance evening about adaptation, control, vulnerability and autonomy.
Unauthorised Movements: History Before It Becomes a Book
Unauthorised Movements starts from a strong idea: history reaches the body before it reaches books. Before events become archives, theories or official narratives, they appear in gestures, reflexes, postures and ways of moving through the world.
The work follows how time, labour, political imagination and promises about the future can become inscribed in the body. It also asks how bodies might escape the systems that observe, analyse, measure and optimise them.
Created from the lecture-performance Unauthorised Movements: from Taylorism to Dance and Digital Surveillance, the new performance brings together fragments of different eras. The beginnings of industrialisation, the domestic optimism of the 1950s and a present increasingly shaped by digital surveillance and behaviour-recognition technologies appear in the same performative landscape.
At the centre of the work is Mara Bugarin, whose presence carries the image of a woman moving through different historical periods and different promises about the future. Her body becomes both a place marked by power and a space where freedom is still being negotiated.
Under Pressure: The Body That Tries to Regulate Itself
Ana Costea’s Under Pressure brings attention to the experience of neurodivergence and to the pressure of functioning in a world built around rules that not everyone has chosen.
The performance explores adaptation, masking, overstimulation, exhaustion, and the strategies the body employs to recover balance. One of these strategies is stimming, which involves repetitive gestures, movements, sounds, or behaviours used by many autistic people to regulate their relationship with the world.
Often misunderstood or hidden due to social stigma, these forms of self-regulation are presented here not as symptoms but as resources. They become ways in which the body manages anxiety, sensory overload, social pressure and the need for safety.
Under Pressure also questions a wider social obsession with efficiency, productivity and constant availability. It asks what happens when the body can no longer continue, when rest becomes necessary and when survival requires stepping outside the rhythm imposed by others.
What to Expect
Visitors attending the CNDB double bill can expect:
- Two contemporary dance performances presented in the same evening
- A programme focused on the relationship between body, society and pressure
- Themes connected to history, technology, labour, neurodivergence and self-regulation
- A performance in English with Romanian surtitles in Unauthorised Movements
- An experimental cultural event inside one of Bucharest’s most relevant contemporary dance venues
Event Details
- Event: Unauthorised Movements and Under Pressure
- Dates: June 27 and 28, 2026
- Time: 18:00
- Venue: Stere Popescu Hall, National Centre for Dance Bucharest
- Address: 80-82 Mărășești Boulevard, Sector 4, Bucharest
- Recommended age: 12+
- Format: Double bill
- Tickets: Check availability through the National Centre for Dance Bucharest ticketing page
Credits
Unauthorized Movements
- Text and artistic direction: Mihai Mihalcea
- Co-creation and performance: Mara Bugarin
- Sound and video environment: Mihai Mihalcea
- Duration: 60 minutes
- Language: performed in English with Romanian surtitles
Under Pressure
- A work by and with: Ana Costea
- Sound design: Lala Misosniki
- Mastering: Dan Bărbulescu
- Duration: 42 minutes
The two performances are presented within the framework of Unauthorised Movements, a project initiated and curated by Mihai Mihalcea and produced by Solitude Project Cultural Association, in partnership with the National Centre for Dance Bucharest.
