"Watching a choreographed army parade, a real one, on the dance carpet of the National Dance Center in Bucharest in 2010, one was not invited to criticism but to a shift of horizon: to watch this show as one would watch a dance piece. No comment, just believing it, and watching yourself believing, indifferently (not with irony). The dance, the performativity, was the movement of the context, the movement of it becoming meta-context, because of the contingency inflicted within its structure (the outside of the theater, the military reality, was injected into the “autonomous” theater field). This was the Military Performance, a Postspectacle work. In Postspectacle, a trade was being made: the rolling further of the performance carpet outside of the theatre provoked the unrolling of the reality from outside the theatre onto the formal stage. And we were sitting in-between." (Alina Popa)
"I remember the excitement and the nervousness before the Military Performance (2010). Me and Ion (Postspectacle) invited a military unit to perform their drill with weapons on the main stage of CNDB. In the art scene we announced it as a contemporary dance performance. Mihai (the director) was stressed because the ministry of culture and the ministry of defense were supposed to come, and a scandal was likely to happen. We hoped for the best.
I remember watching it from a side, looking alternatively at the drill and at the audience reactions. There were two audiences: people into military drills / friends of the performers / military people, and the contemporary art / dance people. They saw two very different things. The first ones were watching a military show – the others were seeing the meta component of what was happening, And this performative, meta layer is what distinguishes an aesthetic experience from a show experience, art from spectacle.
The meta, performative, aesthetic dimensions are in sharp decline nowadays. I have more and more the feeling that soon just the military audience could exist. Coming from academia and spreading everywhere, there is a hectoring, militant literalism, an incapacity to deal with ambiguity, performativity and aesthetics. On top of this aesthetic incapacity there is also a lot of militarism in the air – war and weapons are not that horrible anymore – most people see the continuation of a war preferable to a “disadvantageous peace”. It's possible that the work would have been Military Spectacle instead of Military Performance nowadays." (Florin Flueras, note from Vague Retrospective, April 9, 2025)
