Educational Platform
Without Distance
The Without Distance educational platform is an integral part of the International Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance Antistatic in Sofia. This year's programme, taking place from 7–23 May 2024, features three lectures by Boyan Manchev, Margarita Dorovska, and Angelina Georgieva, alongside a workshop led by Jason Respilieux.
The Value Of Dance
Lecture by Angelina Georgieva
Why dance? Different times and cultures propose different answers to this question. They intersect in the need to legitimate the significance of dance as an art form and cultural practice and to give it a value. How is it defined? This talk will discuss approaches to its conceptualization emerging from theory, practice and institutional policies.
Angelina Georgieva, PhD., graduated from “Theatre Studies” at the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia, where she is currently a senior assistant. She has specialised at the Free University of Berlin. She is co-founder of the online platform for contemporary performing arts dramaturgynew.eu, editor-in-chief of “Dance Magazine” and part of the editorial board of the theatre magazine “Homo Ludens”. She has authored numerous articles and has been co-organiser and contributor to number of initiatives in the field of contemporary performing arts.
Rediscovering Sense-ability
Workshop led by Jason Respilieux
Through improvisational and instant compositional tools and phrase material participants will explore how to — look, smell, taste, touch, hear. The senses become the starting point for a nuanced (re)search and create links with what surrounds. To look, to touch, to converse, to hear, to imagine. It is a search for singularity within the collective. It aims to encourage the moving body to accept habits, flaws, occurences and to (re)discover the senses through learning, observing and interacting with others and its immediate or imaginary environment.
Witches’ dances – Political Rhythmics of Space and Physical Counter-Techniques
Lecture by Boyan Manchev
The dances of the witches – an ecstatic and transgressive whirl under the full moon, has been explored in contemporary cultural anthropology and feminist theory as a phantasmal image-projection of mechanisms of cultural, social and gender exclusion, of forms of segregation and repression of difference. These interpretations are undoubtedly legitimate and necessary. In my lecture, I will in turn focus on a hitherto unexplored aspect of the witches’ dance. I will think of it as a sombre but shimmering as a summer full moon expression of the resistance of dance – of dance as a space of invention and experimentation with physical counter-techniques, affirming a subversive and inflammatory rhythmic, endangering constituted political space. With this proposal, I will try to give a new impetus to my theory of the “resistance of dance” developed two decades ago.
The lecture will be based on anthropological and cultural historical material as well as on fascinating examples from modern and contemporary dance.
Boyan Manchev is a philosopher and writer, Professor at New Bulgarian University and Visiting Professor at Berlin University of the Arts and Hollins University. Manchev is the author of twenty books, among which World and Freedom (2023), What is Ontology? (co-authored with Dimitar Vatsov, 2023), The End of Contemporary Art?, or The Future of Art (2023), and The Body–Metamorphosis (2007). He has also contributed as author, theorist, dramaturge, actor or curator to visual arts, theatre, cinema and contemporary dance projects. Together with Ani Vaseva and Leonid Yovchev, he is a founding member of the artistic collective Metheor.
Performance and the Body In and out of the White Cube – Time. Text, Action, Gesture and Ritual. Performing the Subject in Contemporary Art.
Lecture by Margarita Dorovska
The body has always been present in the gallery, even when artists and curators concentrated mostly on retinal perception. The talk delves into the thick intersection between contemporary art, making use of embodiment and performance on one hand and dance and performance, entering the gallery space or leaning onto contemporary art practice: the Gutai group, Claes Oldenbourg, Alan Kaprow, George Brecht, Nam June Pike, Shigeko Kubota, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Valie Export, Joseph Beuys, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, Judy Chicago and Suzanne Lacy and Adrian Piper to John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Pina Bausch, Jerome Bel, Trisha Brown, Bojana Cvejic, Douglas Dunn, Eiko & Koma, Tim Etchells and many others. And then examines this intersection in the Bulgarian context.
Margarita Dorovska curates for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center in Gabrovo, hosts a podcast for studio visits with artists and teaches at the School for Curators. Often works interdisciplinary. Until 2022 she was the director of the Museum of Humor and Satire.