site.bta18th Antistatic Festival for Contemporary Dance to Be Held in Sofia

The 18th Antistatic International Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance will be held in Sofia between May 7 and 21. The theme of the multi-venue event is “Signs of Resistance,” the organizers told BTA.

“What does it mean to resist through the body? Can a gesture be an act of disobedience? Ranging from the subtle refusal to the explosive movement, resistance in dance is both physical and symbolic,” Antistatic founders Iva Sveshtarova, Vilislav “Vili” Prager and Stefan A. Shterev say in a description of the event published on its website.

“In a world that demands conformity, we have to dance against the current. We do so together with artists who transform constraints into new narratives of resistance and visions of a shared, free future,” they say. “Signs of Resistance” is “not just a theme, but an invitation to rethink how movement can reframe the boundaries of what is possible.”

The festival brings together remarkable artists and theorists who push the limits of imagination and redefine some of the most painful issues of present-day reality, putting us on the wings of thought for an experience which we need so badly nowadays.

The Toplocentrala Centre for Contemporary Art will welcome some of the most original artists on the international dance scene, the festival management says. One of them is Deva Schubert, named best young choreographer at ImPulsTanz (Europe’s largest dance festival) for her show Glitch Choir, which she will now stage in the Bulgarian capital.

Christoph Winkler, two-times winner of the FAUST Prize and laureate of the German Dance Award, will present his show Four Non Blondes. His French colleague Sylvain Huc is coming with his Sujets. Croatian choreographer Sonja Pregrad, already familiar to the Bulgarian audience, will stage her latest show, O.

The festival will begin with a special event highlighting “dance memory,” which needs to be activated, explored, discussed and placed in a contemporary context. The message will be conveyed via Mila Iskrenova’s 1990 dance film The Wall, which will be screened at the Academia Gallery.

Antistatic’s educational programme, No Distance, which bridges the gap between art and audience, will be held at the Goethe Institute on May 7-9, with lectures to be delivered by Bulgaria’s theatre director Yavor Gardev, philosopher Boyan Manchev and fashion designer Neli Miteva. As part of No Dance, Swiss choreographer Maud Blandel will lead a workshop in which she will share her approach to “open” composition, based on the notions of interdependence and reciprocity.