By Bogdan Florea

Nu Nu: born out of the solitude and self-imposed exile of two Romanian theatre-makers in the UK.

Is our work intercultural?

Vilem Flusser says the foreigner is ‘hateful and ugly to the native’.

British mainstream theatre is a ‘desert island’ (Deleuze). It instruments an interculturalism of centrifugation with an obsessive focus on language and tradition.

Theatre tradition and pure language dwell in a centre: the foreign element cannot spoil or make that ugly.

Everything foreign must be relegated to the margins, gravitating around the centre. Foreign actors should play stereotypical roles and foreign directors ‘infest’ British theatre (Sir David Hare)

Foreign artists are denied the professional dignity of full access to all roles. They are made to aspire to an untouchable centre.

A centrifugation process, where the foreign is purified, castrated, annihilated.

Have any foreign actors played Hamlet in British mainstream? How many foreign theatre-makers have risen to fame in the UK?

Nu Nu is No! No! – the hands of the scissors.

No! to the intercultural centrifugation proposed by British mainstream.

Interculturalism is built through subtraction/scissoring of the centre by the foreign element (n-1) not through addition (n+1) to the centre.

Foreign artists should attack the purity of English language and British theatre tradition.

Scissor away at language, creating English-becoming-Polish/Romanian/Chinese…, and not be absorbed into pure English.

Nu Nu’s intercultural paradigm is not British mainstream absorbing Romanian/Polish/Chinese… theatre-making but the reverse: British theatre-becoming-Romanian/Chinese/Polish…

An Intercultural archipelago of molecular theatres chipping away at the British mainstream.

Foreign theatre artists should become ‘absolute artists’ (Guattari): bleed the roles and language out of the mainstream into the streets, corner shops, woods, for whatever or no audience: shoppers, passers-by, trees, grass, animals…