Interview with author and director Alexandra Badea

Abstract

Alexandra Badea is a writer, stage and film director, settled in Paris for almost 20 years, involved in artistic projects in Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America. She is a graduate of the "I.L. Caragiale" National University of Theatre and Film in Bucharest, following a performance that marked the history of the 2000s at the Casandra Studio – LEBENSRAUM – Vital Space by Israel Horovitz. In Paris, Alexandra Badea attended the MA in Theatrical Theory and Aesthetics at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. The first three theatrical texts – Mode D'Emploi, Controle d'identité and Burnout were published in 2009 at one of the most important theatre publishing houses in France – Arche Éditeur, who subsequently published all her texts. In 2013 she won, with the play Pulverizare, the Grand Prize for Dramatic Literature, awarded by the French Ministry of Culture. Alexandra Badea writes plays, film scripts, novels (Zone d'amour prioritaire, 2014; Tu marches au bord du monde, 2020), hybrid performative texts. She addresses social and political topics questioning, with the rigor of a nuanced documentarian, relevant issues: identity belonging, labour relations, globalization, status of migrants, traumas transmitted from generation to generation, marginalized, silenced histories. In 2018, at the invitation of playwright and director Wajdi Mouawad, director of La Colline National Theatre, she staged the Points de non- retour trilogy. The trilogy, created between 2018 and 2021, was presented in 2022 in its entirety at the La Colline Theatre. Between February and April 2022, Alexandra Badea held, at UNATC "I.L. Caragiale", a theatre workshop dedicated to students from the directing, dramatic writing, acting and theatre studies departments, concluded with three performances for young audiences. In September 2022, at the National Theatre of Bucharest, the premiere of the performance Exil took place, on her text and under her directing.