497

“497” is a theatre-dance production about a famous event of the early twentieth century. Four Romanians, students in Paris, won the competition launched by the Touring Club de France. The Club offered a prize of 100,000 francs for a journey around the world on foot. The Romanians’ itinerary was the only one selected out of 200 enrolled in the competition. Their journey started in 1910 and lasted ten years. During this time, they wore Romanian folk costumes, maintained themselves by performing folk dances, and wore out 497 pairs of opinci (traditional peasant shoes). Only one of them completed the race, but even he got little enjoyment from the prize, as in the meantime its value had been wiped out by inflation. 
The creators of the production have used documents of the time, extracts from the protagonists’ diaries, to recreate the challenging journey. The historical event is correlated with present-day realities, leading us to question the raison d’être of consumer society, with its onerous economic mechanisms.