Mihai Florea, Co-founder of Nu Nu, talks about the theatre company, which was established by two Romanian theatre-makers in Bristol, UK. It works at the border between theatre and performance art, and with a particular interest in actors/performers that use English as their second (non-native) language. Given its 'foreignness', Nu Nu has seen itself caught - nolens, volens- in the Intercultural theatre debate. Mihai responded to the question: What could be the novel Intercultural relations deriving from Nu Nu's 'scissors' strategy on the British theatre scene? Talk presented at Intercultural Relations in Arts and Cultural Management Practice, the fourth seminar of an AHRC funded research network, Brokering Intercultural Exchange: Interrogating the Role of Arts and Cultural Management. The network is based at Queen's University Belfast (PI Victoria Durrer) in partnership with Heilbronn University (Co-I Raphaela Henze). www.managingculture.net

1. ROLL THE DICE AGAIN ON
INTERCULTURALISM
Nu Nu and the 'scissors' strategy

2. Nu Nu - motto
■ Loneliness has made us express ourselves in another language.

3. Vilem Flusser
■ The immigrant becomes more unsettling to the native, […] because he reveals the
banality of the sacred to the native. He is hateful; he is ugly, because he exposes
the beauty of home as nothing more than pretty kitsch. His immigration causes a
polemical dialogue between the ugly stranger and the beautiful native.

4. Desert Island
■ ''An island doesn't stop being deserted simply because it is inhabited […] It is no
longer the island that is created from the bowels of the earth through the liquid
depths, it is humans who create the world anew from the island and on the waters
[…] On closer inspection, we find here a reason for every island to be and remain in
theory deserted.'' (Deleuze)
■ Far from compromising it, humans bring the desertedness to its perfection and
highest point. In certain conditions which attach them to the very movement of
things, humans do not put an end to desertedness, they make it sacred. (Deleuze)

5. Levinas
■ The essence of language is friendship and hospitality.

6. Centrifugation
■ The foreign actor is asked to compensate for the work that the authorities should
do in communities.
■ The foreign actor cannot take on the stereotypical roles like the Polish cleaner, the
Romanian gang leader, the Italian crazy.
■ The foreign actor cannot play Hamlet at the RSC.
■ The foreign actor cannot...

7. n-1 not n+1
■ The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not one that
becomes two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from
the One, or to which One is added (n+1). It is composed not of units but of
dimensions, or rather directions in motion. (Deleuze, Guattari)

8. Recite Hamlet to a tree
■ I mean we should have the schizophrenic's capacity to range across fields.
■ The work of the analyst, the revolutionary, and the artist meet to the extent that
they must constantly tear down systems which reify desire, which submit the
subject to the familial and social hierarchy (I am a man, I am a woman, I am a son,
I am a brother, etc.).
■ ...to mobilize collective and/or individual, subjective and/or objective formations,
becomings human and/or animal, vegetable, cosmic.