Nicoleta Esinencu

Portrait

Nicoleta Esinencu is a fighter. In her country, she practices the habit of speaking and thinking about things that have been heavily burdened by the course of history and are often met with silence rather than dialog. She tackles sensitive subjects such as the denial and discrimination of homosexuality and her country’s role in the attempted elimination of Jews. In addition, Esinencu is also a messenger who often has to explain her small country, the Republic of Moldova, which borders on Rumania and Ukraine, to other Europeans, for instance to people from Germany. 

This may also be why her theatre collective Teatru-Spălătorie, which she founded in Moldava’s capital Chisinau in 2010, has on the one hand been described as a critical voice within her own country and on the other hand uses its pieces and public performances to draw attention to the people who represent the Republic of Moldava – and who all too often feel forgotten and betrayed by both European and their domestic politics. In her pieces, she first and foremost addresses audiences in her country, and yet she knows that many of her productions rely on the cooperation with institutions from other countries (among them HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Goethe-Institut) and the guest performances that allow the collective to travel abroad.

Born in 1978, she was a child and young adult when her country transitioned from Soviet domination to independence. She experience directly how language became deeply politicized: whether your name was pronounced with Russian, Rumanian, or Ukrainian inflection decided whether you belonged or became an outsider. In her work as theatre director, she integrates these experiences into her productions.

When talking to the young woman whose face is framed by blond curls, she always appears alert and in motion. Esinencu teases out where daily lives are affected by political conflicts: she sees deeply into people’s hearts and immediately seems to sense where the real problems lie. 

In 2005, she became known for her monolog “Fuck You, Eu.ro.Pa,” which largely dismisses both the nationalism of the former republics of the Soviet Union and Western capitalism. At the time, her language was perceived as rather drastic, as enraged and tough. And yet many of her pieces, such as “Dear Moldova, can we kiss just a little bit?,” which uncover the concealment of divergent sexual orientations in both the past and the present, are touching precisely because of their language’s tenderness. In “Life,” a constantly breaking phone line remains the last connection between an elderly lady, who has stayed in her occupied hometown during the political crisis in Ukraine, and her daughter, who has left her home. The piece emphasizes that the ability to speak to one another is a precious gift that is all too often risked when neighbors become enemies, divided up along ethnic borderlines.

While the themes that Nicoleta Esinencu tackles appear rather grave, her theatre performances are nothing but lightly constructed frames that capture people’s lives in order to listen to their stories and understand where they come from. 

Katrin Bettina Müller

Biography

Nicoleta Esinencu (*1978, Chișinău, USSR / Republic of Moldova) is a writer and director from Chisinau, Moldova. 

A scholarship at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart brought international recognition to her work, namely through “FUCK YOU, Eu.ro.Pa!”, which won her the Romanian dramAcum theatre prize. The text was published in 2005 in the Romanian Pavilion 51st Venice Biennale proceedings. Esinencu has often been a guest of the Leipzig Book Fair, and the international literature festival Berlin. In 2009 she was invited by Goethe-Institut to be one of the 16 playwrights in the project “After the Fall – Europa nach 1989”. 

Believing that Chisinau needed an alternative art space, where artists could respond to the political and social events in the Republic of Moldova, Esinencu co-founded in 2010 the independent initiative teatru-spălătorie. The venue was forced to close in 2017, and since then the political theater collective teatru- spălătorie has continued its work without a stage. Their much-discussed theatre projects are informed by the social reality in the Republic of Moldova and the contradictions of the post-Soviet era from a critical viewpoint of pan-European history. 

HAU Hebbel am Ufer has been working in continual collaboration with Nicoleta Esinencu and teatru-spălătorie for more than 10 years. They were invited to Berlin for the first time in 2012 with “Clear History” as part of the “Many Years After ...” festival and then at “Good Guys Only Win in Movies” (2014) with their productions “American Dream” and “Dear Moldova, can we kiss just a little bit?”. In 2016 the commission “Life” premiered at the HAU festival “The Aesthetics of Resistance – Peter Weiss 100”. In 2019, the productions ‘Requiem for Europe’ as part of the festival “Comrades, I am not Ashamed of my Communist Past” and the HAU production “The Abolition of the Family” premiered in Berlin. The current co-productions “Symphony of Progress” (2022) and “Playing on Nerves. A Punk Dream” (2023) are once again commissioned by HAU Hebbel am Ufer and have been touring internationally ever since. Among her most recent works are also included “Requiem for Europe” (2018), a co- production teatru-spălătorie and Schauspielhaus Graz; “Gospel of Mary” (2018) a co-production TheaterRampe and teatru-spălătorie.

Her texts were translated into German, English, French, Bulgarian and Polish and were published in Moldova, Romania (at IDEA), in Germany (at Walther Koenig, Solitude Press), in France (L’Espace d’un instant), Bulgaria, Austria, and in Poland. The most recent “Gospel of Mary, the Trilogy” was released in April 2021 by the publishing house L’Arche (France). 

In 2019, Nicoleta Esinencu was a guest artist of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme. 

In 2022, Nicoleta Esinencu and teatru-spălătorie were awarded the International Tabori Award, the highest award in Germany for the independent performing arts scene.