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On SHIFT - A jump into the future

Cyborgs, technology, video effects, immortality, future. These are the words that I brainstormed after seeing SHIFT , a dance work by Emiliya Toncheva, on its last performance on the 13th of March, performed by herself , Anton Dimitrachkov and Ralitsa Neikova. Emiliya is a young actress, dancer and choreographer active in Sofia, whom I met during some contemporary dance classes and had the chance to know more - personally and professionally - during other dance-related events. SHIFT is her debut as a choreographer and I was eager to see it. In this article I will review this performance, whose presentation is: “ SHIFT is fueled by the mystical unpredictability of technological progress and charts one possible scenario in which humans become cyborgs and tap into the gift and curse of immortality”.  Three are the dancers involved, all in skin-tight suits of different colours and similar techno patterns. The female dancers seemed to represent almost-humans, as their broader movements
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On Kitchen - A bittersweet performance

On a rainy Sunday evening, the 27th November, I jumped in my car and drove towards the HRC Culinary Academy of Sofia. I was going to watch Kosta Karakashyan and Antonia Georgieva’s work Kitchen : a site specific and “immersive” performance, that “recreates the intense atmosphere and psychological tension in a professional kitchen before the food reaches our tables”. Even though I go to the theatre quite often, I realised that it rarely happened to me here in Bulgaria to attend site specific dance performances. Therefore, I was even more thrilled and curious about the upcoming event, also because I hadn’t seen a work by Kosta in a long time. I got to know him at ballet classes, here in Sofia, and had the chance to watch his dance performance The Effort Trap and his short film Waiting for colour , which deals with the persecution of gay people in Chechnya. In fact, besides working in the field of dance as a director, choreographer, dancer, and writer, he is also an LGBTQ+ activist. Once

On Romeo Castellucci

Ромео Кастелучи is how “Romeo Castellucci” is written in Bulgarian-cyrillic. I read this name in a post on Toplocentrala’s facebook page towards the 20th September. However, maybe because of the lack of double consonants due to its transliteration, or maybe because, in spite of my being in Bulgaria and using cyrillic daily, this alphabet is still something unfamiliar to me at first sight, I didn’t immediately connect these characters to the name of the great Italian director I knew. But the following day I received some other notifications and I realised that, yes, some of ROMEO CASTELLUCCI’s works would be presented in Sofia, anticipated by a documentary movie on him!  This happened on 29th September-2nd October in Toplocentrala : four days dedicated to him, presenting the documentary film Theatron , the record of his Divine Comedy and the video-performance The Third Reich .  To be honest, I didn’t and still don’t have a very wide knowledge of his work, but I was thrilled about these

On Antistatic festival 2022 - #3: Bulgarian Dance Platform

In these posts I will tell you how I experienced Antistatic Festival 2022 and share some impressions and thoughts of the events I followed. To help myself with being concise and creative, I decided to choose for each performance three words that are representative of the work: a noun, an adjective and a verb.  For the third time Antistatic Festival organised within its frame the Bulgarian Dance Platform , in which a good amount of recent Bulgarian performances are presented and to which international artists, cultural workers and festival organisers are invited as guests/spectators. For the Bulgarian-based choreographers this is a great opportunity to show their work (and possibly get it shown in other countries). This edition of the festival included 12 events distributed in 4 days (11th-14th May) in the different locations of the festival: Toplocentrala, Derida Stage, Krasno Selo Cultural Center and the SAMCA Gallery. Walking from one place to the other reminded me of my first univer

On Antistatic festival 2022 - #2

In these posts I will tell you how I experienced Antistatic Festival 2022 and share some impressions and thoughts of the events I followed. To help myself with being concise and creative, I decided to choose for each performance three words that are representative of the work: a noun, an adjective and a verb.  On its second day, Antistatic Festival 2022 presented Strange foreign bodies , by Zufit Simon, in the new location for contemporary art in Sofia “Toplocentrala”, which is situated in Dogs Park, a few minutes from NDK, and has been hosting since a few months lots of exhibitions, performances and workshops. A plus of this space is the bar with terrace upstairs, which allows visitors to socialise while enjoying a drink and the nice view on the park. Here the two dj parties organised by Antistatic festival took place.  The choreography of Strange Foreign Bodies is inspired by the treaty 58 Indices on the Body ,  by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, resembling a philosophical list