Recommendations

Elena Copuzeanu is an artist with early background in Visual Arts. I met her a few years ago when she started making presentations on stage, presentations who routinely crossed the borders of contemporary dance and performance. The presentations themselves, especially on National Dance Centre scene in Bucharest, were obviously primarily under the sign of authenticity and full of motivation, coming most from the area of happenings. In those constructions and intelligent environments she often cleverly using video techniques mixed with dance moments. As a dancer and performer she has a special physical quality, an approach in which compromises are excluded, an incredible ability to improvise, a certain , energy, amplitude and last but not least deep concentration. Elena is a mature artist, but fully justified her shift towards performance and dance it completes the interesting, prolific and charming artistic profile. ‘’ Cosmin Manolescu is dancer choreograph, artistic director at Studio ZonaD - Paradis Serial and executive director Gabriela Tudor Foundation Bucharest

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“I met Elena when I was invited to Romania in june 2014, to lead a workshop and make a small piece with local performers. Elena was one of the three performers selected for the project and she came highly recommended by my host Cosmin Manolescu. We work together very intensely for one week to create a new dance for ZonaD. I found her to be an inspiring muse; she has a unique presence and her movement style is unusual striking. In performance she is totally fierce and commanding, but outside she is totally sweetheart. Elena takes risks, she is a strong women, and very expressive. She is a prolific and multi-faceted artist, form her charcoal drawings to her durational happenings.” Catherine Galasso/New York based choreographer

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Elena Copuzeanu’s work has a fresh, provocative, evocative and ultimately explorative nature about it. Her body based enquiry breathes and expresses curiosity, an insatiable desire for an embodied understanding of the world, an urgency, and a sincere, bold yet vulnerable display of a body and person navigating the raw environment of the space she performs. In her work, the entire body is both the archive and translator of information to the audience, relaying experiences into layered ‘images’ for audiences to ingest and question. Hybridized and interdisciplinary, her work straddles the spaces between dance, performance art, video and visual practices.

Alexandra Zierle & Paul Carter/ Live Artists & Visiting Lecturers

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 Elena Copuzeanu is one of the very first representatives of the younger generation of Romanian artists who engaged in the reworking of the performance as an artistic genre. She has set landmarks in the happening&performance practices. Back in the mid-90s, she succeeded to focus wider attention on group- or solo-performances developing both in the public space in its physical sense (the street) and in its virtual sense too (mass-media, posters, publications). Her 1994 "Homage to Mandela" (nothing to do with the late Nelson Mandela, but with a local, Bucharest thug of the same nickname) highlighted the aggressive invasion of public prejudices linked to the burgeoning consumer culture onto the personal/visual space of the individuals sharing the same urban milieu. Her further works, actions and events went more and more toward enacting the innermost reception of external, socially codified stimuli. Her intuitive works mirror the paradoxical cohabitation of socially codified gestures and behaviors and personally estranged, inchoate feelings. Her work is neither aesthetic, pleasurable, nor therapeutic, healing, but it keeps on being vivid and troubling. erwin kessler, art critic