Bookcover of Andrei Şerban: My Journeys in
Theatre and Opera. Andrei Şerban rehearsing
The Trojan Women in front of the medieval
cathedral at Fontevreau.
Publisher: Romanian Cultural Institute
Publishing House, Bucharest.
Photo by PETITJEAN

Acclaimed U.S.-Romanian theatre director Andrei Şerban leads ten Romanian actors in a public presentation following their participation in the Traveling Academy, an experimental theatre workshop organized in Romania and the USA under his patronage. The evening will include a presentation of the comprehensive album, Andrei Şerban: My Journeys in Theatre and Opera. Presented in partnership with the Romanian Cultural Institute.

The Andrei Şerban Traveling Academy was launched at the initiative of Corina Suteu, the director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, and is a laboratory-like setting created for young actors in Romania, allowing them to “evade from what one already knows and reinvent oneself from the scratch”, as one of the participating actors referred to his work in the Academy’s workshops. The Academy is organized in Romania and the U.S. by the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Bucharest. The first project in this frame resulted in the staging of Deadly Confession, a theatrical version of the non-fiction novel by Tatiana Niculescu Bran, a performance that succeeded in launching a real debate within Romanian society. The show was premiered at La MaMa E.T.C in New York in October 2007, and was subsequently staged, under Andrei Serban’s direction, at the Odeon Theatre in Bucharest, and presented throughout Romania, in France and Poland. For more information, visit www.icrny.org.

Andrei Serban has worked in the U.S. with American Repertory Theater, LaMama ETC, the Public Theater, Lincoln Center, Circle in the Square, Yale Repertory Theatre, the Guthrie Theatre, A.C.T., and the New York City, Seattle and Los Angeles Operas. In Europe, Mr. Serban has worked at the Welsh National Opera, Covent Garden, Théâtre de la Ville, Helsinki Lilla Teatern, the Bucharest Municipal Theatre, and the Paris, Geneva, Vienna, and Bologna Opera Houses, among others. He has worked in Japan with the Shiki Company of Tokyo. He has taught acting and directing at Yale, University of California, Carnegie-Mellon, Sarah Lawrence, the Paris Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique, and the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard. Mr. Serban has received grants from the Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundations. Several of his productions have been nominated for Broadway and Off-Broadway awards. He is a tenured professor at Columbia University, where he heads the MFA acting program.

6:30 p.m., Monday, Oct 5, 2009
Martin E. Segal Theatre. Free!