Vlad Benescu & Alexandra Mihaela Dancs

triluREELu is the plunge of two performers into a phone locked on the most diverse reels — from viral dances to motivational speeches. As they "swim" through the virtual immensity, the show becomes absurdly comic and technologically complex: the feed is on stage, digital scenography and bodies interact in hybrid 3D reels, captions and crowded music become language, vanity and rhythm grow into a frenzy.

Ephemerality, fragmented and random realities, high-speed stimuli, plus other dynamics of reel culture, are reinterpreted and recontextualized with humor and irony, in a choreographic-performative-multimedia puzzle that puts a finger on the screen of society.

triluREELu is part of The Body In REEL Time, a project of Art No More Association, conceived by Vlad Benescu and Alexandra Mihaela Dancs, co-financed by AFCN in 2025, which choreographically explores corporeality in the era of reels and examines, with humor and a critical eye, a world full of virtual dopamine and fingers tired of scrolling.

The performative installation proposed by Vlad Benescu and Alexandra Mihaela Dancs is based on the study of proprioception and the methods to improve it through balance training, from a choreographic perspective.

For three hours, the two performers explore the body's response to imbalance through interaction with a large tandem balancing apparatus. Their physicality adapts to its specific mechanics in a choreography of subtle movements capable of transforming the environment in which they occur. An endless dialog is thus created between the ephemerality of stability and the unpredictability of moments of unbalance.

This durational performance can be seen as a laboratory in which success and failure structure the experience, as a meditation on (re)finding balance in an unstable world, and as a study of the dynamics of the relationship between the two performers — in which trust, negotiation, support, mutual awareness, constant adaptation, resilience, and the power to start all over again are essential to maintain harmony in a continuously changing environment.

Mircea and Irina, the two characters of the piece, meet and fall in love when neither of them has anything left to lose. Caught in a borderline situation, they live the typical "one-night stand" on an atypical night — one in which there is no longer present, past, or future, life or death, dream or reality, but only doors opened between them all, corridors that become pretexts for melancholic, existentialist, and comic thematic tensions.

The lines are music, the light is disco, and the bodies pulsate on an army of techno bass, creating a hypnotic performative hybrid that reveals itself little by little. Prepare yourself for a theatre-danceophonic show — a moving sensation, between adrenaline and emotion, a story in which we can all recognize ourselves, but where nothing is what it seems.

Luați de VAL...s (2022) is the first dance performance created by Alexandra Mihaela Dancs and Vlad Benescu — performed at Casa Kerim, inspired by its architecture and history. Beyond the house on Parfumului 19, the creative process was nourished during the summer by working with the waves of the Black Sea, through long surfing sessions. Being "taken by the wave" became, for them, artistic practice.

Closeness and conflict. Negotiation and complicity. Tenderness and risk. Chaos. Energy.

"Want me to throw you a 'hâț'? When I come back from the courtyard, we put our heads together. Are we doing the same or completing each other? With the smell we reach the hair. Your costal rebord is comfortable. You play with the thread. I keep my eyes closed. I saw that you keep your eyes closed. You have a vein like a circle. I see you through tears. Cauliflower or mici? Medicine. We don't tremble from the start, we inspect ourselves and 'hâț'! On the rocking floor pieces. Let me tie your shoelace. Because I no longer see you, the way I move changes. I relax my palate and feel like yawning. We contemplate the trash. You cover me like a blanket. Two strands plus one or the other way around? May I touch the back of your knee? It's more than falling in love — it's melting into the other."
— from the working journal, 2022

The dynamics between us have their own initiative, their own path, they take us where they want, just like the waves that always seek the shore — not to end there, but to continually reform. We chose to throw ourselves in and let ourselves be carried.

Luați de VAL...s premiered in October 2022 at Casa Kerim — Hearth, where it continues to be presented as part of the Hearth season. In 2023 it was part of CNDB Itinerant (National Centre for Dance Bucharest), and in 2024 it was invited to Bucharest Collage Festival.

Somatic Freaks 1.0 · 2023

Their somatic practice has made its way into everything that involves movement — domestic, sporting, or artistic. They filter everything through it, the practice becoming a permanent process of training, maintenance, and recovery that constantly evolves through ongoing recycling of somatic sensations and knowledge. Not an obsession, but from the outside, the two could appear as Somatic Freaks.

Somatic Freaks 1.0 reveals an internal reality difficult to perceive from the outside. The two continuously describe what they do and feel happening inside with their musculoskeletal structures, entering a dialogue generated by conscious movement and the verbalization of every detail observed physically.

Concept, choreography, performance: Alexandra Mihaela Dancs & Vlad Benescu · Independent production, supported by Homemade Culture · Premiered May 2023, presented at CNDB — Stagiune la Mansardă, Fictions, my body II.