This year, the Summer International Academy of Playwriting “Home for the Naughty” will take place in the village of Gabrovci, Sofia and Veliko Tarnovo from July 23 to August 5. “Home for the Naughty” is an international training forum for playwriting, connecting different genres through a single documentary framework. For two weeks, established and novice authors of playwriting texts and film scripts will participate in lectures and workshops, under the guidance of famous European and Balkan teachers and artists. The program includes four lectures that will introduce the writing of playwriting texts for theater, cinema, dance and performance – installations and three workshops of five days each – for writing scripts for short films, for theater plays and for audio plays and audio installations. We are delighted to introduce you to the strong Bulgarian participation in the lecturer team – Albena Dimitrova. Albena was born in Sofia and left for France a few months before the fall of the Wall. She graduated from the Sorbonne in Economics. As an economist, she researched mathematical models of systemic risks related to privatization in Eastern European countries and the mechanisms of corruption. Since 2006, she has devoted herself entirely to writing, dramaturgy, and performing. For four years, she prepared the artistic program of Sofia Dance Week, the first Bulgarian festival for contemporary dance and art, which takes place every September. Albena is the first author of Bulgarian origin to be invited to write a play for the regular repertoire of the Comédie-Française, directed by Francoise Zhilard . She also works with choreographers such as Aurélien Bory, Pierre Rigal, Brice Luru, Kaori Ito, and others. Albena Dimitrova published an essay entitled “The Taste of Bulgaria” – Portraits of Women in Bulgaria (Editions Le Rocher, 2008), as well as poetry “Méditance” 2009; “LivingDance” 2010, which have been translated into English, Chinese and Russian. She is the author of the play “The Other”, which was performed at “Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier-La Comédie-Française” in 2015. Albena’s novel “We Will Have Dinner in French” is already well known in France, and the play “Geometry of Rubber” is gaining wide popularity.
As an artist, how do you feel about the idea of holding an international drama workshop on the territory of Bulgaria?
An event that allows for meetings and conversations between artists is always filled with the possibility of the unexpected, and the unexpected is a motto and joy for artists. And of course I am glad that such an event is taking place in Bulgaria, that it is organized at an international level and by many professional people.
All speakers are carefully selected screenwriters and playwrights from different parts of the world. Most of you create art in different forms and dimensions. What will be your message to the participants?
Bulgaria is not a speck on the map of Europe and the world. Here, the civil mechanisms are still fragile and perhaps a little more trust is missing. The emotional world of people in Bulgaria is very rich, and it is wonderful that artists from different cultures can also feed off this emotional energy, still quite unformatted.
What is the main motivation behind your desire to participate in such a crazy and highly ambitious idea?
First of all, these are the people who invited me and in whom I have complete trust, Gergana, Silvia and Mitko, initiators, wonderful artists and pillars of the event. As well as the friends who introduced us, Nikola Mihov, an incredibly innovative and serious photographer of our time. And more objectively, I believe that the place of an artist is the movement and I find in this initiative and in its organizers precisely this ambition, to infuse the creative processes in theater and dramaturgy into a broader and freer movement and to open it to Bulgaria. There is a selfless move in this.
You are a prominent writer, novelist and playwright in France. What aspects of French culture, literature and life will you impart to the participants in the project?
I write and create mainly in French. I never deprive either my phrases or my dramaturgical projects in wordless dance of the presence of my “Prima” – the Bulgarian sensory culture. What results is something like a boundless melange fueled by the senses. The cultural accumulations between my French experience and my Bulgarian senses free me from the need for national belonging. I hope to be able to share these accents of pluralism in the thinking and creative process. The focus on which I direct my lecture in Gabrovci is space. The stage space – as a laboratory for creating authentic sensory and mental situations. In France I am fortunate to work with artists – choreographers who create with the mechanisms of gravity – that is, they seek the truth of movement without hierarchy between stage elements, light, sets, bodies, words… I hope this will be of interest to the participants, and above all to allow us an exchange without borders and nationalities. I think that in Gabrovci we will all be foreigners at some point and during the days of the academy we will create a super national language.
Which ideologies of French artists influence you the most?
I have a pretty bad relationship with ideologies. Every ideology closes its eyes at some point. This is structural for ideology. It has to choose a logical point of view for it and refract all views through this specific point of view. And for me, the lack of dogma and ideology is what I like and attract in the artists who influence me. The search for knowledge, constant interest, almost painful curiosity, and questioning and trying again! These are my favorite “ideologies” influenced by my French experience.
Which literary genre will you focus your efforts on so that nothing is left untouched by it?
I think that there will always be things left untouched, but what attracts me almost like magic is the novel. There is something quite infinite in this genre. Words have multi-layered dimensions. They are at the same time words in dialogues, descriptions in sets, invisible music in style, rest in sleep, vowels and consonants… And only the novel allows this. In an essay, the author and the reader are obliged to qualify the words, to give them a logical connection to an argument or a defended position. In the novel, neither the author nor the reader are in a mandatory relationship. There, the words belong to the characters and to the fiction, which is formed absolutely independently in each reader, and after publication they do not belong in any other way to the author, who becomes simply a reader in turn. For me, the reader completes a novel and I like this infinite freedom very much.
How do you see the contemporary dance of Bulgarian society and what would you change in the script?
If I understand the metaphor correctly, I should believe that there is a script and a director. And I believe that there is no script written, and even less an omnipotent director. I have the feeling that Bulgarian society massively expresses dislike and pain for the fraudsters, but fails to believe that it can create rules of mutual existence without fraud and corruption. This is quite contradictory in itself and blocks the directions of development and movement. From a dramaturgical position, an insoluble internal conflict does not make a play. At some point, one of the forces prevails and sets off in an undiscovered direction. We are all part, in one way or another, of unblocking this internal social conflict that Bulgaria finds itself in today. And we will also provoke the forces that will prevail tomorrow. One thing is certain, each of us creates and accepts the relevant rules by which the game continues.
Have you been to the village of Gabrovci? The organizers have taken care to provide the most comfortable and suitable creative environment possible. How are you preparing for this adventure?
With pleasure! I don’t know Gabrovo well. I’ve never been there, but I know the region quite well. The nature is incredible and in places pristine. And where the city attracts people from the villages for their livelihood, the deserted houses are taken over by nature. There is something very strong and powerful, sometimes sad, but certainly alive! This is so different from the deserted cities – ghosts that leave death behind. Like, for example, cities like Detroit after the subprime financial crisis… And as for my preparation, I am mostly worried about this: How will I speak English in Bulgaria, where they invite me to talk about my French experience?… Mmm, yes! I feel like I will be in the Tower of Babel!
Will you be bothered by the feeling that you are in a former reformatory school? Society still accepts them as something normal. I dare to ask you this question only because your work “We Will Have Dinner in French” deals with the communist regime. Can the transformation of this school be considered a small victory over social injustices?
I don't know exactly what "educational school" means, but certainly "Vuz" - nutrition seems important to me for the human spirit, when we are brought to have to take care only of our "matter" (the thought and sensory process is close to that of animals, an instinct for survival). That is why the preposition "Vuz", that is, above the "matter", seems to me fundamental for opening a broader worldview than that of survival. This is one of the beauties of human existence, which strives to overcome survival and enrich the depth of life experience. Without this preposition "Vuz", there would be neither fundamental science and discoveries, nor the Internet, and even less theater and dramaturgy. As for my latest novel, I am talking about neoliberalism, which is reflected in the lack of opposition. I do not think that we pushed the wall to be shod with Nike sneakers, nor that we were educated by the kingdom of almighty money. And I can't help but ask myself the question: Are we freer and more democratic today? Freedom of expression, which was one of the most severely sanctioned freedoms during communism, how is it used today? Just thinking that Snowden is being pointed at by "free societies" and treated like a Solzhenitsyn, a "traitor to the people and a criminal for security"... Doesn't this remind you of something?... Personally, this worries me just as much as our mass passivity and the opportunity, forbidden by ideological norms, to look at both the communist experience and neoliberal totalitarianism without dogmas bothers me.
You have long since left Bulgaria, but your participation in various smaller and larger events in the country shows that you have a strong attitude towards today's events and changes. How does connecting with your homeland affect your creative process?
Indeed, more than half of my life I have lived in France. I would even say that my conscious life has been spent mainly in France. And I find this a chance, a bit like leaving “Plato’s cave” and realizing where you come from and “how the shadows move on the wall in the cave”. But as in Plato’s parable, going out and opening yourself to the outside world is not an end in itself, nor is it an escape. I have this chance to love the “open cave” and that is why I do not close myself off in either France or Bulgaria, I simply open my eyes in both places.
Together with world-renowned choreographers Aurelien Bory and Pierre Pigalle, you created the performance "Geometry of Rubber." How did the idea come about and what brought you together in this creative process?
"Rubber geometry" is another name for one of the branches of higher mathematics, topology. Like Aurelien and Pierre, I come from the world of exact sciences. This certainly brings us together and entertains us. Aurelien's idea is to theatrically bring out the discovery of lack of form and to observe extremely precisely the change of states at the points of contact of change. This is also the subject of topology. Simply put, in topology the square and the circle are the same thing. What matters is only the process of overflowing without formal analysis into one state or another. There are stunning risks in the play itself. It is played by eight acrobats, and on stage the audience is four lateral, something like a square ring in the middle and in front of each side of the ring are the seats for the audience. That is, the audience's gaze comes from four points of view. The place where the play itself is played is a huge square tent, a miniature replica of which becomes a string puppet and is the subject of the performance itself. The audience realizes that the space in which they are located is also the content of what they are watching. Everyone tells themselves a story that we do not know. In the entire first part of the performance, each of the four audiences sees only two actors, and in the second half of the performance they discover all the artists on stage, who manipulate the string tent as an ensemble... There were people who returned to see the play four times, taking seats in a different zone of view. We had called the zones North, West, East, South - as a metaphor for the world. And just as we never see the world in which we live in its entirety, in our play people saw only a quarter of what was happening on stage. We thank Albena for the additional energy it will give to the participants in this forum, and you can follow more opinions and comments from "Home for Naughty" with us throughout the entire timeline 23.07 - 05.08, 2016.
