14th edition of the Antistatic Festival

Between May 28 and June 6 in Sofia will be held the 14th edition of "Antistatic" - live, which seems to be more important than ever. After an extremely turbulent year The International Festival of Contemporary Dance and Performance invites us to take another step closer to yesterday, when we met, hugged and danced together. That is why he chooses as his motto the wish "getting closer" and turns it into a regularity of his territory, bringing art and the audience closer. 

The program of the festival includes 15 events, including performances, meetings with artists, talks, as well as the premiere of issue 3 of the only annual in Bulgaria "Dance Magazine".

On May 28, at 19:00, the celebration against statics begins with a special opening with free admission, for which the choreographer Paula Rosollen (Germany) arrives in Sofia. She will work together with 20 Bulgarian performers of different ages and diverse experience to create the show "In Honor of Merc Cunningham". 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the dance legend and on this occasion we will see a single choreographic score, built by Paula Rosolin, based on the 20 solos of Bulgarian artists - only once in the "Sofia Arsenal - Museum for contemporary art ”. All this against the background of the music of Emilian Gatsov - Elby.

On June 1, flags will be flown on the Derrida stage and the "culprit" for this is again the choreographer Paula Rosolin, who with her second performance in the Antistatic program and in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Bulgaria, addresses this long-neglected means of communication. IN "Flags" Rosolien superimposed several semiotic systems and created his own language for communicating with dancers and audiences, turning the theater into a communication platform, so forget about satellites and broadband and join the lords of short messages.  

On June 4, at 19:30, the audience of "Antistatic" welcomes Tommy Paazonen (Germany) on the stage "Derrida", in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Bulgaria. One of the distinguishing features of the creative approach of the choreographer and former ballet dancer Paazonen is that with each subsequent artistic project he does something he has never tried before. Thus, at the age of 50, he realized that he had a form he had long avoided and it was time for his first solo project. Work begins on "Retrospection - 5 solos in 5 decades". With this autobiographical work, Tommy Paazonen returns to the stage as a performer after 23 years of choreographic and teaching work. 

"Before Covid-19, the development of contemporary art was driven by 'less is more' - the principle of Modernity. With the introduction of all the restrictions in recent months, leading to less communication, less live meetings, less dancing, less involvement, it seems inevitable that performance art will question this thesis and ask whether less is still more or nothing anymore ”- shares the author of the next performance of the festival program. "Less may be more, but sometimes it's just nothing." is the latest choreographic project by Willy Prager, inspired by the Spanish disco troupe Ballet Zoom, founded in 1973. For its implementation he works with students from the Academy of Dance and Performance of the National Dance Center of Bucharest, and the result of the collaboration we can see on June 5th on the Derrida stage.

There is no more appropriate finale for a festival than a performance summarizing its philosophy - "Dance Maniacs". This is the work of choreographer and playwright Simona Diaconescu (Romania), which we will see on June 6 in DNA - a space for contemporary dance and performance. The performance is dedicated to one of the most mysterious phenomena in Europe from the beginning of the 16th century. Then, in the central square of Strasbourg, a dance epidemic broke out. In time, scientists will call it "The Dance of St. Vit, Chorea Lasciva, a dance mania or choreography that mixes pseudoscience, theology, and medieval science fiction. Diaconescu and her team created a performative record of the events and focused on documents from that time that sealed the perspective of those watching the epidemic and never that of those who survived it. 

Expect a lively, passionate and exciting edition that gives us back the much needed feeling of closeness! 

The festival program is held in compliance with current anti-epidemic measures. 

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International Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance "Antistatic" 2021 is organized by: Brain Store Project Foundation, Informbureau Association and Nomad Dance Academy Bulgaria, with the financial support of the National Culture Fund; Sofia Municipality; Goethe-Institut Bulgaria; Nationales Performance Netz (NPN) - Dance Co-production Fund, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media; National Palace of Culture; DNA - a space for contemporary dance and performance; Derrida Stage and Sofia Arsenal - Museum of Contemporary Art.