Mihai Mihalcea, born in 1969 in Bucharest, is one of the few Romanian artists who can be followed without interruption from the late socialist years of dance training, through the turbulent independent scene of the nineties, through the difficult phase of institutional founding in the two thousands, through the performative turn of the two tens, and into the present, where he circulates between choreography, performance, video based work, curating, and educational programs. He graduated from the Choreography High School in Bucharest and later from the University of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts in choreography, which positioned him early in a double register, rigorous technical training and an appetite for conceptual experimentation.
Immediately after 1989 he joined forces with Irina Costea, Cosmin Manolescu and Florin Fieroiu and set up Marginalii, a small but very influential collective that used self pedagogy, collective composition and horizontal decision making as working tools. This group, active in the first half of the nineties, is one of the very first post 1989 attempts to detach dance from the repertoire logic of state theatres and to think it as a reflective and critical practice, a fact repeatedly acknowledged in later reconstructions of the field. During the decade that followed, roughly 1994 to 2009, Mihalcea created and toured a consistent group of choreographic works - You come to see the show and you’ll get an extra burger!, Memory for Sale (Childhood included) and Stars High in Amnesia’s Sky that were invited by institutions and festivals that at that time mattered for the mapping of European dance, Tanzquartier Wien, Tanz im August Berlin, Paris Quartier d Été, Springdance Utrecht, La Filature Mulhouse, Centre National de la Danse in Pantin, and several central and eastern European platforms. Press coverage in Le Monde, Berliner Zeitung, Libération or Dance Theatre Journal. ? As an artist he contributed to the international recognition of Romanian contemporary dance and, at the same time, he played an essential role in the steps that led to the establishment or activity of structures and institutions that have become landmarks of this art: IndepenDans Festival, Multi Art Dance Center, the Inter/National Center for Contemporary Dance, SubRahova, Caminul Cultural. He is co-founder of the first public institution dedicated to contemporary dance – the National Center for Dance Bucharest (CNDB). In 2005 he won the competition for the directorship of CNDB, which at that moment was politically sensitive, and he remained director of the centre until 2013. Under his mandate CNDB became the main support structure for several generations of performers and choreographers, many of whom are now visible internationally. This institutional labour is documented both in the press of the time and in later critical texts. For the projects developed at CNDB Mihai Mihalcea was nominated for “Paris-Europe Prix 2006” by Maison d'Europe et d'Orient, Paris.??
Between 2010-2019 Mihai Mihalcea performed under the name Farid Fairuz taking by storm the Romanian cultural scene with his critical performances and interventions on capitalism, sexuality, cultural production and religion that sharply mirror failures of the society. This project started from the fictionalisation of his own biography and allowed him to speak about orientalising and geopolitical fantasies, queer visibility, about the consumption of cultural difference inside a neoliberal circuit, and about the way local artists were negotiating legitimacy in relation with institutions. The persona circulated in dance contexts and in visual art contexts alike, Kunsthalle Gent, HAU Berlin, Rencontres Chorégraphiques de Seine Saint Denis, Paintbrush Factory Kunsthalle Bega, Black Box Oslo, as well as in festival formats. The goal was to produce distance and to test how authorship, language, gendered and racialised markers and institutional authority reconfigure the same body.?The work 'Farid Fairuz (2010-2019)' including costumes and props used in performances and choreographic works, performances for photo and video cameras, scores, series of performative interviews, photos and video documentations has been acquired by The National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC).
The 2011 initiative C?minul Cultural at subRahova, which he co-curated together with Manuel Pelmu? and Brynjar Bandlien inside the Solitude Project association, showed another facet of his practice, a socially and politically alert platform that invited artists, activists and researchers to work on topics mostly missing from the public Romanian discourse, gender, precarious labour, racialisation, urban dispossession and was a good example of shifting from stage to context and to see choreographic knowledge as a resource for public culture.
In the last years he was performing works by Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus at Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Tate Modern London, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, New Museum, New York, HAU Berlin, Kunshalle Wien/TQW Wien and he has been part of the collective work Blindspot (initiated by Karen Kipphoff) presented at Kunsthalle Bergen in the frame of Meteor Festival.
After 2019 he returned publicly to his own name and he returned to The National Centre for Dance as Program and Project Director co-curating projects and Iridescent - International Festival of Contemporary Dance and Other Reconfigurations of the Sensible, and also contributing to the educational program of the Dance and Performance Academy. ??In the same years he inhabited more clearly the visual art field, for instance with Album de familie at Salonul de proiecte in 2021, where he used a 1920 to 1930 nude photo album from the Mihai Oroveanu collection and invited a wide circle of friends, collaborators and queer community members to relate to the images on video in their own domestic spaces. This work makes again visible his interest in archives, in dispersed collectives, and in distribution of authorship. His recent activity includes performing, mentoring and curating new formats, from the FRAME10 monthly program at Reziden?a9 (where he mapped post 1990 performative practices in Bucharest), to collaborations such as the one proposed by Rokolectiv in May 2024 with the artist bela and fashion designer Oláh Gyárfás.?His recent creation Sweet Spot (From the Heart of Terror), premièred in September 2025 in the frame of Bucharest International Dance Film Festival.
DOWNLOAD CV (Update 2016)
Immediately after 1989 he joined forces with Irina Costea, Cosmin Manolescu and Florin Fieroiu and set up Marginalii, a small but very influential collective that used self pedagogy, collective composition and horizontal decision making as working tools. This group, active in the first half of the nineties, is one of the very first post 1989 attempts to detach dance from the repertoire logic of state theatres and to think it as a reflective and critical practice, a fact repeatedly acknowledged in later reconstructions of the field. During the decade that followed, roughly 1994 to 2009, Mihalcea created and toured a consistent group of choreographic works - You come to see the show and you’ll get an extra burger!, Memory for Sale (Childhood included) and Stars High in Amnesia’s Sky that were invited by institutions and festivals that at that time mattered for the mapping of European dance, Tanzquartier Wien, Tanz im August Berlin, Paris Quartier d Été, Springdance Utrecht, La Filature Mulhouse, Centre National de la Danse in Pantin, and several central and eastern European platforms. Press coverage in Le Monde, Berliner Zeitung, Libération or Dance Theatre Journal. ? As an artist he contributed to the international recognition of Romanian contemporary dance and, at the same time, he played an essential role in the steps that led to the establishment or activity of structures and institutions that have become landmarks of this art: IndepenDans Festival, Multi Art Dance Center, the Inter/National Center for Contemporary Dance, SubRahova, Caminul Cultural. He is co-founder of the first public institution dedicated to contemporary dance – the National Center for Dance Bucharest (CNDB). In 2005 he won the competition for the directorship of CNDB, which at that moment was politically sensitive, and he remained director of the centre until 2013. Under his mandate CNDB became the main support structure for several generations of performers and choreographers, many of whom are now visible internationally. This institutional labour is documented both in the press of the time and in later critical texts. For the projects developed at CNDB Mihai Mihalcea was nominated for “Paris-Europe Prix 2006” by Maison d'Europe et d'Orient, Paris.??
Between 2010-2019 Mihai Mihalcea performed under the name Farid Fairuz taking by storm the Romanian cultural scene with his critical performances and interventions on capitalism, sexuality, cultural production and religion that sharply mirror failures of the society. This project started from the fictionalisation of his own biography and allowed him to speak about orientalising and geopolitical fantasies, queer visibility, about the consumption of cultural difference inside a neoliberal circuit, and about the way local artists were negotiating legitimacy in relation with institutions. The persona circulated in dance contexts and in visual art contexts alike, Kunsthalle Gent, HAU Berlin, Rencontres Chorégraphiques de Seine Saint Denis, Paintbrush Factory Kunsthalle Bega, Black Box Oslo, as well as in festival formats. The goal was to produce distance and to test how authorship, language, gendered and racialised markers and institutional authority reconfigure the same body.?The work 'Farid Fairuz (2010-2019)' including costumes and props used in performances and choreographic works, performances for photo and video cameras, scores, series of performative interviews, photos and video documentations has been acquired by The National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC).
The 2011 initiative C?minul Cultural at subRahova, which he co-curated together with Manuel Pelmu? and Brynjar Bandlien inside the Solitude Project association, showed another facet of his practice, a socially and politically alert platform that invited artists, activists and researchers to work on topics mostly missing from the public Romanian discourse, gender, precarious labour, racialisation, urban dispossession and was a good example of shifting from stage to context and to see choreographic knowledge as a resource for public culture.
In the last years he was performing works by Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus at Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Tate Modern London, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, New Museum, New York, HAU Berlin, Kunshalle Wien/TQW Wien and he has been part of the collective work Blindspot (initiated by Karen Kipphoff) presented at Kunsthalle Bergen in the frame of Meteor Festival.
After 2019 he returned publicly to his own name and he returned to The National Centre for Dance as Program and Project Director co-curating projects and Iridescent - International Festival of Contemporary Dance and Other Reconfigurations of the Sensible, and also contributing to the educational program of the Dance and Performance Academy. ??In the same years he inhabited more clearly the visual art field, for instance with Album de familie at Salonul de proiecte in 2021, where he used a 1920 to 1930 nude photo album from the Mihai Oroveanu collection and invited a wide circle of friends, collaborators and queer community members to relate to the images on video in their own domestic spaces. This work makes again visible his interest in archives, in dispersed collectives, and in distribution of authorship. His recent activity includes performing, mentoring and curating new formats, from the FRAME10 monthly program at Reziden?a9 (where he mapped post 1990 performative practices in Bucharest), to collaborations such as the one proposed by Rokolectiv in May 2024 with the artist bela and fashion designer Oláh Gyárfás.?His recent creation Sweet Spot (From the Heart of Terror), premièred in September 2025 in the frame of Bucharest International Dance Film Festival.
DOWNLOAD CV (Update 2016)
