PSR Without Distance Platform 2022: Moving in Squares

This year's programme of the "Without Distance", realized within the 15th edition of the International Festival for Contemporary Dance and Peroformance “Antistatic”, Sofia, educational platform took an approach focused at articulating the dialogue between the performing and the visual arts.
Performances in non-stage places (such as museums, galleries) have played a significant role in contemporary performing arts and dance discourse since the 1960s, but with few exceptions, this practice is not popular with most Bulgarian museums. To change this, educational platform “Without Distance” invited a group of artists to research pieces of art, dialogue with them, experiment with originality, authorship and conceptual artistic work.

The first part of the platform “Without Distance” was in the form of joint choreographic laboratory of Julian Weber with Bulgarian artists. Within the programme the German choreographer Julian Weber worked with the Bulgarian artists Galina Borissova, Stanislav Genadiev, Violeta Vitanova, Zornitsa Stoyanova and Voin de Voin towards researching the intersections between body and dance, with works of art from the collection of the National Gallery "Kvadrat 500". The results from the dance laboratory was presented in front of the audience on May 15, 2022, in the format of dance miniatures and performances, questioning the concepts of "body", "sculpture" and "painting".

The second part of the platform was an invitation to the audience for "Duets with Abstractions" - another project of choreographer Julian Weber, which started in 2021 and since then is recreated each time with specially selected pieces of art from the collections of the space where it is presented.

“Duets with Abstraction” was developed specifically from selected art works from the collection of the museum in which the performance takes place. Thus, the duets in Sofia, were put on selected works from the representative collection of the National Gallery “Kvadrat 500“. In collaboration with the musician Iku (Johanna Odersky) Julian Weber performed with the art works “The Glass Jug“ (1933) by the artist and sculptor Ivan Nenov (1902–1997), “Window” (1969) by the painter Nayden Petkov (1918–1989) as well as “Caprice” (1982) by the sculptor Lin Emery (1926 – 2021). 

“Duets with Abstraction” does not follow a classic dramaturgy with a narrative, a beginning and an end, but is rather developed as a continuous exploratory journey. The focus of the performance series is on a physical, somatic and sensual examination of the concept of abstraction in the context of the visual arts.  

The performance was presented on May 9, 2022, at National Gallery “Kvadrat 500“, Sofia.

Download the booklet in the upper right column.

Gallery pics © Teodora Simova