CINEMA AND TRUTH. THE REALISM DEVATE IN CAHIERS DU CINÉMA IN THE 1960s
(IN BULGARIAN LANGUAGE)

TIME AND APOCALYPSE IN THE FILM THE SUN AND THE SHADOW BY RANGEL VULCHANOV
(IN BULGARIAN LANGUAGE)

TIME, SPACE, AND FICTION IN THE FILMS MURIEL OR THE TIME OF A RETURN BY ALAIN RESNAIS AND PARIS BELONGS TO US BY JACQUES RIVETTE

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Graphic design: Monika Vakarelova

Cover painting: Mira Tisheva

Metheor, Sofia, 2023

ISBN: 978-619-7291-37-7

Because in theatre thought and touch are miraculous, the plural is possible in the singular, because in theatre both time and space become plural and reveal themselves as plural.
Because in theatre we understand the instability of the world – through our body with all its parts, including the mind.
Because in theatre friendship is fleeting but real, because communication is as inevitable as solitude.
Because in theatre you need to enter with love and friendship. In theatre you cannot help but love those you work with. Love without obligation (but obligatory), without horizon; love that doesn’t bind you outside the boundaries of theatre, but that absolutely obliges you within it. Theatre is absolute fleeting love.
Because theatre lives between repetition and difference, between work and pleasure (where work is a pleasure). In theatre, repetition doesn’t kill freedom, it gives birth to the possibility of freedom. Theatre requires virtuosity. Pleasure and technique, the pleasure of technique.
Metheor’s theatre is a theatre of miracles.

Ani Vaseva, Theatre of Miracles. Prologue

Theatre of Miracles is neither an apologia for, nor a paean to, theatre; nor is it an allegory of life called “theatre”. This book with a protean genre – it is not simply a manifesto, a theoretical reflection or personal recapitulation, but all of these at once – effects a transformation of experience; thus experience-theatre evolves into a philosophy. But also into a sharing of experience in which the distinction between object and subject wavers, engendering hesitation and indistinguishability; it is like a membrane, like a front through which flit will-o’-the-wisps, unhidden passions and innermost secrets

Boyan Manchev

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Cover painting: Mira Tisheva

Metheor, Sofia, 2023

Because in theatre thought and touch are miraculous, the plural is possible in the singular, because in theatre both time and space become plural and reveal themselves as plural.
Because in theatre we understand the instability of the world – through our body with all its parts, including the mind.
Because in theatre friendship is fleeting but real, because communication is as inevitable as solitude.
Because in theatre you need to enter with love and friendship. In theatre you cannot help but love those you work with. Love without obligation (but obligatory), without horizon; love that doesn’t bind you outside the boundaries of theatre, but that absolutely obliges you within it. Theatre is absolute fleeting love.
Because theatre lives between repetition and difference, between work and pleasure (where work is a pleasure). In theatre, repetition doesn’t kill freedom, it gives birth to the possibility of freedom. Theatre requires virtuosity. Pleasure and technique, the pleasure of technique.
Metheor’s theatre is a theatre of miracles.

Ani Vaseva, Theatre of Miracles. Prologue

Theatre of Miracles is neither an apologia for, nor a paean to, theatre; nor is it an allegory of life called “theatre”. This book with a protean genre – it is not simply a manifesto, a theoretical reflection or personal recapitulation, but all of these at once – effects a transformation of experience; thus experience-theatre evolves into a philosophy. But also into a sharing of experience in which the distinction between object and subject wavers, engendering hesitation and indistinguishability; it is like a membrane, like a front through which flit will-o’-the-wisps, unhidden passions and innermost secrets

Boyan Manchev

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director: Ani Vaseva
camera: Ivan Nikolov
music: Christophe Petchanatz / Klimperei
sound: Angel Simitchiev
graphic design: Monika Vakarelova

with: Georgi Angelov, Vladimir Borissov, Valentin Ganev and Leonid Yovchev.

Short video documentary, dedicated to Pavel Vasev’s exemplary work as a cultural manager.

The video is created with the financial support of National Culture Fund of Bulgaria.

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director: Ani Vaseva
text: Boyan Manchev
video: Ivan Nikolov, Ani Vaseva
live music: Angel Simitchiev
sound design: Angel Simitchiev
music: Christophe Pectchanatz
graphic design: Katrin Metodieva

premiere: 25 November 2024, Goethe-Institut, Sofia

with: Leonid Yovchev, Katrin Metodieva, Emona Ilieva and Nikol Vasileva
video with: Sigal Zouk, Laurie Young, Katrin Metodieva

The forest is the territory between nature and culture where time is enchanted. It is one of the most ancient cultural images that haunt the imagination. The topos of the forest is linked to the very origin of the performing arts – the secret Dionysian rituals performed on the borders of urban spaces and forests.
The enchanted forest is the forest of Pan, Artemis, Orpheus, the dryads, Bacchantes and enchanted beings from other mythologies, the initial space of music and fantasy from which the arts are inspired. The Enchanted Forest is an immersion in the tension between the fantasy of nature in the arts and the rituals of transformation and otherness, in the imagination of different forms of being – the source of our dreams, cultural obsessions and fears.

The performance is created by Metheor with the support of the Goethe-Institut and the Ministry of Culture.

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director: Ani Vaseva
video: Ivan Nikolov
theory: Boyan Manchev
assistant director: Mihail Zhekunov
music: Christophe Petchanatz
costumes: Ani Vaseva, Darina Stoimenova
ceramics: Katrin Metodieva
graphic design: Monika Vakarelova

Kadze is inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as by Tatsumi Hijikata’s hypnotic essay Kadze Daruma.

Kaze is a Metheor production, supported by Sofia Municipality and Bulgaria’s Ministry of Culture.

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Trailer

Part I. – Hoffman

 

Part II. – Der Sandmann

 

Part III. – Heimlich/ Uncheimlich

 

Part IV. – Automata

 

Part V. – Anselmus

 

Part VI. – Atlantis

 

Part VII. – Kosmos

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Trailer

Part I. – Hoffman

 

Part II. – Der Sandmann

 

Part III. – Heimlich/ Uncheimlich

 

Part IV. – Automata

 

Part V. – Anselmus

 

Part VI. – Atlantis

 

Part VII. – Kosmos

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Introduction to the Spiral Panic

an audiovisual immersive installation by Metheor

concept: Boyan Manchev and Ani Vaseva
video: Ivan Nikolov, Ani Vaseva and Boyan Manchev
sound: Angel Simitchiev

27 and 28 October 2021, 18:30 – 21:30, Structura Gallery

“Maelström. Introduction to the Spiral Panic” is the first event in a series by Metheor titled “Theatre of the Elements”. This installation has been realized by Metheor with the support of the National Culture Fund and is part of Tempus Fugit, a joint project of Goethe-Institut and Institut Français in Bulgaria within the framework of the Franco-German Cultural Fund.

*

It’s as if we’ve never gotten out of the state of spiral panic. The spiral is a paradoxical symbol – it is a figure of sustained motion, of the breaking of the tautology of the circle, of development and change as well as of destabilization, of the loss of centre and base, of giddiness, vertigo, falling into a bottomless chasm.

The terrifying and fascinating image of the gigantic Maelström described in Edgar Allen Poe’s famous short story, “A Descent into the Maelström” (1841), represents the spiral of the vortex at its maximum intensity. The gigantic spiral whirlpool, the vortex in which the ocean plunges into the abyss, is at once a decentering of every structure and appearance of the unimaginable monstrous structure of Chaos. In the spiral acceleration of the vortex, centripetal motion becomes indistinguishable from centrifugal motion, rising from falling, structure from chaos.

Maelström: Chaos – Structure.

Ignoring the clichéd allegories that exploit the spiral-vortex, the installation examines the figural potential that breaks through the swirling surface despite them. It focuses on the point of refraction, of inversion of the spiral’s motion – the inversion of the order of the meanings that swirl with the spiral.

The vortex allows no distance: Maelström wants the body of the observer.

Boyan Manchev

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concept, staging and dramaturgy: Ani Vaseva, Boyan Manchev and Leonid Yovchev
consultants: Futoshi Hoshino and Yasuo Kobayashi
artist: Stefan Donchev

with: Leonid Yovchev, Boyan Manchev and Futoshi Hoshino

Premiere – in the frames of Plovdiv 2019 (State Puppet Theater, Plovdiv, 20 September 2019). Hijikata and his double premiered in Sofia on 30 October 2019 at the Culture Centre of Sofia University and on 31 October 2019 at the Cinema House. It was be presented in Tokyo at the University of Tokyo’s East Asian Academy for New Liberal Arts (EAA) on 1 December 2019.
Ani Vaseva, Boyan Manchev and Leonid Yovchev gave the introductory lecture Radical Experience and Performative Counter-Techniques: Tatsumi Hijikata and the Beginning of Butoh on 30 October 2019 at the Cultural Centre of Sofia University.

Hijikata and his Double was accompanied by the publication of the book Dark Poem by Boyan Manchev, with photographies by Boryana Pandova. Dark Poem was presented in the frame of the Sofia premiere of Hijikata and his Double on 30 and 31 October 2019.

* * *

Metheor’s premiere is part of “Plovdiv 2019” program and is dedicated to Tatsumi Hijikata, the legendary inventor of Butoh – a radical Japanese dance form, which played a crucial part in the history of contemporary performing arts, half a century after the premiere of the cult and scandalous performance of “Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese people.”

Tatsumi Hijikata introduces entirely new body techniques and possibilities for the language, based on Antonin Artaud’s visions of a Theater of Cruelty. Metheor has worked in a similar direction over the last decade: the engagement with radical artistic practices understood as exploration of the possibilities (and limits) of the body, language, theatrical techniques as well as forms of existence, has been shared with Hijikta.

The concept, staging and dramaturgy of the performance are the collective work of Ani Vaseva, Boyan Manchev and Leonid Yovchev (Metheor). Leonid Yovchev’s solo work is combined with a performance-lecture by Boyan Manchev with the participation of Leonid Yovchev and Futoshi Hoshino, a consultant of the show, together with the philosopher Yasuo Kobayashi.

Hijikata and His Double is not a performance with a constant, repetitive form, but a work in progress: each presentation develops the material in a new, singular form, as a part of continuous research.

* * *

Who is Tatsumi Hijikata? Who is his Double?

Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986) is one of the most radical figures in the field of the performing arts in the second half of the last century, the founder of a new stage form known as Butoh: more precisely, ankoku butoh: the dark butoh, or literally, the dark dance. Hijikata tried to unlock the potential of the human body as an expressive instrument, going beyond normal performance techniques and even beyond the general patterns of body movement as such. More than half a century has passed since the first butoh spectacle. During that half a century, butoh was aesthetized as a somewhat macabre, somewhat didactically beautiful spectacular dance form, and Hijikata has progressively become a cult figure in the performing arts scene. Yet too little is known about his early programatic works, from which only fragmentary frames and documentation are preserved. Therefore, the starting point of this spectacle will be the attempt for a fantastic reconstruction of one of the key butoh performances, created half a century ago: Tatsumi Hijikata and the Japanese people. This fantastic re-enactment will also engage in a story about the life and iconoclastic work of the Hijikata; Hijikata’s Double will also roam in it.

Who is Hijikata’s double?

His Double is first of all, Yuneama Kunio – the person, who later on became Hijikata Tatsumi, adopting the name of a legendary rebellious samurai from the 19th century, being in the meantime Hijikata Genet, after the name of the French writer Jean Genet. His double is therefore also Jean Genet. But also Yukio Mishima. But he is also the weirdest and queerest of the decadent Roman emperors, Heliogabalus, the crowned anarchist. Furthermore, his Double is even the Japanese People. Last but not least, Hijikata Tatsumi’s double is, perhaps, the Bulgarian actor Leonid Yovchev.

This spectacle is dedicated to the reasons, the patterns and the flamboyant eccentricity and insanity of these weird transformations.

It will frontally ask the question: What is a Rebellion of the Body? What is a radical experience? What is radical Art? Is radical Art still possible?

This performance is the first of a sequence of philosophical-performative laboratory dedicated to the work and life of Tatsumi Hijikata, half century after his legendary show Tatsumi Hijikata and the Japanese People.

Hijikata and His Double  was part of the programme of Plovdiv – European Capital of Culture 2019, Focus: Japanese Culture Programme, implemented in partnership with the EU-Japan Fest Foundation. The project, supported by the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture, was created in partnership with the Cultural Centre of Sofia University, Cinema House and ETUD Gallery.

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director: Ani Vaseva
theory: Boyan Manchev
camera: Ivan Nikolov
editing: Ani Vaseva, Ivan Nikolov
music: Christophe Petchanatz / Klimperei
sound design: Angel Simitchiev
post production: opnnproductions
location sound: Dobromir Hristoskov, Georgi Valchev, Vasilena Popangelova
special technologies: Stefan Donchev
costume maker: Darina Stoimenova
first assistant director: Nikolay Kamburov
assistant director: Mihail Zhekunov
graphic design: Monika Vakarelova

cast: Svetlana Yancheva, Leonid Yovchev, Valentin Ganev, Veselin Mezekliev, Katrin Metodieva, Greta Gicheva, and Rosa

 

Premiere: 10 December 2021, Lumiere Cinema, Sofia

 

Daruma is devoted to chance – to the miracles that the wind can bring, to the unknown, to the ways in which events miraculously and unexpectedly coincide. “Fluke” or “luck”, the inevitable risk of chance – these are the forces that remain unpredictable, but which affect us most strongly. They are the knot in which the logical and the miraculous intertwine. When chance unfolds in its most exciting, most beautiful forms, it also unlocks the ability to trace causal relationships where they aren’t apparent at first glance and where they don’t always take the forms that are familiar to us.

Daruma is a Metheor production supported by Sofia Municipality, Bulgaria’s Ministry of Culture, and ЕU-Japan Fest. In 2021 Metheor was supported by the National Culture Fund.

Трейлър

Дарума

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Hoffmann’s oeuvre has left its mark on all fantastic fiction since the nineteenth century: from Gogol and Balzac, through Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire, to Kafka, Thomas Mann, Bulgakov, and contemporary fantastic fiction in general. His stories have become the basis of many musical works, the most famous among them being Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, and Léo Delibes’s Coppélia.

E.T.A. Hoffman is a strange and unusual figure. Unusual for the history of literature in general, but also for his own time and for the literary current to which he belonged. Whereas most of the great Romantic authors – Byron, Shelley, Blake, Coleridge, Pushkin, Lermontov, Novalis, Tieck – turned to the fantastic as a sublime substitute for reality, Hoffman invented a new form of the fantastic: grotesque, funny, mixing everyday reality with an eccentric imaginary world, but no less extraordinary and, most importantly, no less exciting and desirable. The fantastic in Hoffmann’s fiction is paradoxical and inexplicable. It brings together contradictory, often mutually exclusive, phenomena. Nowhere does the author bother to explain to the kind reader how these incompatible elements are combined – an approach that later became central to Gogol’s work.
The starting hypothesis of our work, which also underlies our creative interest in Hoffmann, is precisely a hypothesis on the fantastic. In our view, true Hoffmannmania, which indirectly continues to this day, cannot be explained without the “Hoffmann effect”: the effect of destabilizing the real, of extracting the surreal from the very structure of the banal everyday fabric of the real. The “Hoffmann effect” preceded and paved the way for the modern psychologization of art, as well as for the emergence of psychoanalysis itself. The iconic contemporary genres of psychological thriller and science fiction are under the sign of Hoffmann. We are interested in the inversion of the Romantic myth of the author as well as in the introduction of an alternative idea of creativity and an attempt to create reality, all of which were no less tragic than the Romantic ones, but without any ostentatious self-heroization.

The significance of Hoffmann’s work for modern theatre in this respect is key. Not only ballet, operetta, and opera of the nineteenth century owed much to Hoffmann; some of the revolutionary theatre directors of the early twentieth century were directly inspired by his work. Tairov staged Hoffmann’s Prinzessin Brambilla; Hoffmann also influenced Vsevolod Meyerhold, among whose favourite authors he was. This interest makes possible the hypothesis of a connection between Meyerhold’s method of biomechanics and Hoffmann’s automata, as well as between the uncanny in Hoffman’s work and Freud’s idea of the automatism of the unconscious, exploited artistically by Surrealism.

Hoffmann was created with the support of Sofia Municipality’s Culture Programme and Goethe-Institut Bulgaria.

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First instalment of the Let’s Play Literature series is dedicated to N.V. Gogol. Let’s Play Literature is a long term project, presenting classical literary oeuvres with contemporary theatrical means, working with language as a dynamic means.

director: Ani Vaseva

actor: Leonid Yovchev

The Overcoat

The Nose

The director Ani Vaseva about the project

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EX CORPORE – PLOVDIV
21.04 – BOYAN MANCHEV: THE ART AND ITS SHADOW, LECTURE, BNR PLOVDIV, 18:00
22.04 – EX CORPORE, BNR PLOVDIV, 19:00
23.04 – HIJIKATA, BNR PLOVDIV, 19:00
29.04 – TOTAL DAMAGE, DNK, 19:00

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PAST…

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This book shares the reflexive process behind Metheor’s theatre body of work in the period 2010-2019, offering theses on theatre counter-techniques, theatre oratorio, voice, language, body etc. 

The book is in Bulgarian language. Second, expanded and revised edition of “Meteor 2010-2019”, published in 2021 with the financial support of the National Culture Fund.

graphic design: Monika Vakarelova

painting on the cover: Boris Delchev

16/60/90, paperback, 504 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2022

ISBN: 978-619-7291-27-8

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translated in English by Philip Stoilov

Metheor, Sofia, 2021

Published also in French, German and Bulgarian.

“The Virtuoso of Life” is a poem about the limit – about Terra ultima. It introduces the images of the North – the stone and the dunes, the starlings and the stars, the colours of the Northern Lights – as the images of the limit of the world, but also of a limit world. Virtuoso’s question is the question of the limit as a form of existence: an existence that exceeds its boundary. The limit as radical autonomy and as the limit of autonomy. Within this limit the Subject meets the unimaginable other, experiences it, sinks into its erogenous relief. Within this limit, the elements themselves insurge as subjects-virtuosos.

The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982), who passed away ten days after his fiftieth birthday, and who was obsessed with the North; the ultimate Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, the author of the Metamorphoses, who mourned his fate in the forgotten paradise of Terra ultima, where time itself had frozen; Dr. Frankenstein’ Monster, assembled of dead bodies and animated by an electric impulse, the Monster who left the world on an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean, are the fictional characters composing the constellation of “The Virtuoso of Life”.

*

Boyan Manchev’s philosophical poem “The Virtuoso of Life” was presented at the opening of the exhibition Terra ultima (Terra Ultima, Swimming Pool, Sofia, 13-20 November 2021) in four language versions – in Bulgarian, French, German and English, with the participation of the actors Leonid Yovchev, Marcus Reinhardt and Christophe Petchanatz.

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This book reflects on and presents in critical perspective problems such as Brecht’s alienation effect, the natural in Stanislavski’s ideology, possibility in Artaud’s texts, Meyerhold’s biomechanics, how theatre is play according to Schechner, why roles are spectres according to Coqueline etc. Concepts such as “reality”, “acting”, and “illusion” are examined in light of the theses of philosophers who are key to understanding theatre theory, such as Diderot, Lessing, Goethe, Hegel, Schiller, and Schelling. Special attention is paid to phenomena such as “realistic theatre”, “conditional theatre” and “political theatre”, to contemporary theory and practice in the field of theatre, as well as to the specific case of “performance”. Theatre and Truth offers original thesis on the seminal for the history and theory of theatre problem of the Truth.

The book is published with the support of the Ministry of Culture.

The book is in Bulgarian language.

graphic design: Teodora Venedikova and Metheor

60×90/16, paperback with dust jacket, 604 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2020

ISBN: 978-619-7291-19-3

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graphic design: Metheor / strx

16/70/100, paperback, 354 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2022

ISBN 978-619-7291-31-5

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translation from French: Boyan Manchev

graphic design: Metheor

105/165, paperback, 120 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2022

ISBN: 978-619-7291-29-2

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A theatre play experimenting with the possibilities of the dramatic language in the original sense of the word “dramatic” – language of action, change and dynamic forms. A play without conflict. A play about happiness.

The book is in Bulgarian language.

graphic design: Georgi Sharov

published by “Meteor”, Sofia, 2017

ISBN: 978-619-7291-02-5

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translated in English by Katerina Popova

graphic design: eMetheor

60/84-9.5, paperback, 144 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2020

ISBN: 978-619-7291-08-7

Philosophy is in debt to poetry. But it is also in debt to science, whose poetic attitude philosophy has ceased to understand. Philosophy is in debt to the creative power of nature itself, and therefore to freedom. Philosophy must think what makes it possible; only then will it reopen its possibility.

Therefore: the clouds.

Besides being a difficult, if not paradoxical, object of science or figure of representation, or a privileged poetic image, could clouds also be a philosophical concept? Yes, is the answer of philosophical fantastics – the method introduced by the book Clouds. Philosophy of the Free Body. Yes, because every concept is a cloud. The cloud is a form that thinks.

Neither a Hyperborean nor a white horseman, the cloud is an enigma which, before being thought, thinks us.

*

The cloud is a form that thinks. New philosophy means a new form. That is why the book about clouds, the cloudy book, is also a prolegomenon to a new philosophy of form.

Ontology of the Cloud

The cloud is a more solid foundation for ontology than any other element. Anaximander knows that crossing the boundless inevitably leads to an area eternally shrouded in clouds. The boundary is a cloudy space, condensed space. There, time bends and warps.

Anaximander walked in our footsteps. He rode our waves. He drank of our breath, encountering our cloud, our mist that soaked the sea, pale-pink swirls rolling along its shimmering surface at dawn, accompanied by the hollow murmur of the dark water, by the silence of the gloomy depths. The unknown and the frightening visit us in these liminal spaces, in these spectral places. The ship sails on, every breath abates, as though air slides on air, there’s no momentum, no acceleration, nor is there inertia without a force. When the mist clears, what will we see there?

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edited by Boyan Manchev 

English, first edition 

typeset: strx / Metheor

cover image: Boyan Manchev, Ivan Nikolov, Terra Ultima 

printed in Bulgaria by Simolini-94

„Metheor“, Sofia, 2022

ISBN: 978-619-7291-28-5 

Content

Boyan Manchev, The Fugue of Time
Fragments on A Day That Has Everything
Maelström
Terra Ultima
The Virtuoso of Life
Yasuo Kobayashi, Boyan Manchv, What is Philosophy?
Chronology

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based on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
stage version of the text: Anna Topaldzhikova
director: Ani Vaseva
stage designer: Victor Georgiev
composer: Stefan Hristov
assistant director: Mihail Zhekunoff
photography: Georgi Dimitrov
graphic design: Stefan Donchev

with: Sabina Koen, Valery Georgiev and Leonid Yovchev

The Performance is production of Theatre Konstantin Velichkov, Pazardzhik.

Premiere – Open Art Stage at Shipka, RCIC, Sofia, June 2017.

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First, Arthur Rimbaud: je est un autre.

Not “I am another,” but: I is another.

Every time I try to get who “I am,” I cannot but get another one than me.

A double, a ghost, a mechanical replica.

Borrowing from Jacques Lacan, we could say: le moi n’est pas le je,

The ego is no the I.

Yet we keep confusing both, we keep imagining who we are;

but between the I and the ego, there is a gap, a Spaltung, a split.

This split is the mark of the unconscious –

not the unconscious, but the effect of its genesis: something is lacking

something is repressed,

something fell down.

Why?

Because of an encounter – 

a primal encounter with language, this virus (dixit William Burroughs);

with death, the “absolute master” (dixit G.W.F. Hegel);

with sexuality, this polymorphous libido (dixit Sigmund Freud)

with the origin and its promise of end,

with something bigger than me, deeper than me, older than me

– something ancestral, out of joint, radically other, deeply unhuman

something that will always prevent the ego from being a monad,

a self-sufficient entity

– something that always should prevent human beings from taking themselves for themselves.

As they exceed our symbolic, interpretative capacity, 

primal encounters are traumatic: 

They are like white holes, 

blank skins,

surfaces deprived of inscriptions

that are surrounded only by our imaginary, 

bordered by our attempt to deal with what Toni Morrison calls 

“the scariness of things with no names.”

If black holes don’t let light escape, 

white holes don’t let in darkness, 

they don’t tolerate the lines of inscriptions of meaning:

facing white holes, every writing process fails;

every narrative is torn apart.

Hence repetitions: the return of the repressed, 

that is to say the return of a psychological structure, be it individual or collective,

 affected by a collapsed part.

What comes back is what never came, never appeared, that is: 

that which never happened in what happened,

that which was unexperiencable in the experience.

An excess, to refer to Bataille.

The excess is recalled as what overwhelmed me,

a jouissance that I try to experience again, 

and again,

and again,

thanks to the dreamwork, failed acts, and art.

But every time I recall, re-suscitate, a primary experience, 

I experience a lack of meaning.

The repetition is therefore double sided: 

a recollection of the primal experience, 

and an experience of the immemorial.

That is to say marvel and horror.

– Marvel of the excess, of what allows me to be more than myself, 

marvel of the existence of others, 

of a world that has not my face,

a world alien enough to leave a place for love.

– Horror of the trauma threatening to swallow me, 

to disintegrate the imaginary narrative that I conceived around the white hole.

Who am I?

“I am, Lacan says, “in the place from which “the universe is a flaw in the purity of Non-Being” is vociferated.”

A human being is an attempt to make this place, the place of jouissance, habitable.

An attempt to give a form to the pre-human, 

unhuman forces that keep undoing any forms.

Being human means staying, as much as possible, unhuman.

Frédéric Neyrat 

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BY BOYAN MANCHEV

graphic design: METHEOR

published by Metheor, Sofia, 2019/2020 (in Bulgarian)

ISBN:9786197291148 

The New Athanor is in the strict sense volume one of Boyan Manchev’s book series ‘Philosophical Fantastic’, yet it also provides the figure of its unity: Athanor, the philosophical furnace, synthesising new concepts and ontological techniques.  

The stake of The New Athanor is a prolegomenary one. It deals with imagining the horizon of a forthcoming philosophy of nature. To face up to this challenge, The New Athanor opens with the question of the principles, thus drawing on the elementary power of philosophical concepts. It aims at mobilising conceptual counter-techniques as an alter-ontological force, in order to imagine differently the philosophical becoming-world of the world.

The New Athanor includes the Prologue ‘Principles of the Philosophical Fantastic’, followed by the first five books of the ‘Philosophical Fantastic’: ‘The Perils of Philosophy’, ‘Apeiron, the Boundless’, ‘Fire’, ‘Chaos’ and ‘Chaos Unbound’. The dynamic trajectory of the five books draws the outlines of challenging conceptions about time and causality, readjusting the compass of the subject in the high seas of the world. Will the helmsman of the incoming ship be the one who first embarked on the quest? Is this the same ship? Is this the same world?

The New Athanor is a methodological experiment where the philosophical quest engages in a shared adventure of concepts, theories and hypotheses from the domain of modern science, while at the same time mobilizes the latent potential of mythological and fantastic figures. Anaximander, Heraclitus and Aristotle encounter Chaos, Kronos and Aphrodite, and all of them join with Boltzmann, Prigogine and Atlan.

The New Athanor is a laboratory of the Philosophical Fantastic. The Philosophical Fantastic is not a hybrid genre, it is no mixture of philosophy and the fantastic. It is an experiment with the very form of philosophy: an experiment with new possibilities of articulating the philosophical form. The Philosophical Fantastic is an act of philosophy in the mode of desire. It yearns the invention of the New Athanor.  

 * Athanor, a fragment from the book by Heinrich Khunrath Truthful Report Concerning the Philosophical Athanor, Its Use and Effectiveness (Warhafftiger Bericht Von Philosophischen Athanor, Und Dessen Gebrauch Und Nutzen [Magdeburg: Johan Botcher, 1597]). Engraved frontispiece (signed Hein. Muller) on the title page of the Leipzig edition (1783).

Athanor – the philosophical furnace (from Arabic at-tannūr [رونتلا], ‘furnace’, ‘kiln’, ‘tandoor’, ‘a baker’s oven’, ‘hot spring’), is an alchemical device for maintaining a constant temperature required for the process of alchemical transformation of substance, its crystallization as lapis philosophorum, a philosopher’s stone.

The New Athanor is the philosophical furnace of images, which must synthesize pure concepts, the matter of the philosopher’s stone, of the philosophical crystal. Alchemy of the philosophical image, nuclear acceleration of philosophy. 

Nowadays, when thinking and imagination are being constrained no less than bodies, the Philosophical Fantastic sets the goal of inflaming imagination and thinking, of imagining new possible worlds. It restores to philosophy the task of being an active force in the world, and to the world – of discovering its fantastic pith. 

Boyan Manchev has been working single-mindedly on the project of a Philosophical Fantastic during the past ten years. The trajectory of this experimental methodology includes the books Miracolo, [Miracle] (2011) and Clouds (2017); the method was already outlined in The Unimaginable (2003) and L’altération du monde, [The Alteration of the World] (2009). 

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translated in English by Philip Stoilov

graphic design: Boyan Manchev, Boryana Pandova and Metheor

36 pages, including 14 black and white photos by Boryana Pandova 

Metheor, Sofia, 2019

Boyan Manchev’s theatrical-philosophical poem is organically related to photographs by Boryana Pandova. Dark Poem extends Boyan Manchev’s philosophy of body by experimental means, juxtaposing text, image and movement.

The book is the result of experimental work on staged actions and situations with the participation of the actor Leonid Yovchev and Boyan Manchev, related to Metheor ’s performance Hijikata and His Double (2019). Dark Poem is dedicated to Tatsumi Hijikata, the legendary founder of Butoh – a radical Japanese dance form, which played a crucial part in the history of contemporary performing arts. It was inspired by Butoh-fu [舞踏譜], an experimental form of notation invented by Hijikata, as well as by Eikoh Hosoe’s photographic series Kamaitachi, with the participation of Tatsumi Hijikata (1969).

Half a century after Hijikata’s scandalous performance Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese people (1969), Dark Poem puts forward the question on the possibility of the (artistic) revolution.

“Together with Tatsumi Hijikata, we raise the question of the rebellion of the body. What does body rebellion of the body mean? We are interested in the way the body always exceeds itself. Life always stands out. The body always stands out: in ecstasy and pain, in birth and in death.” 

Boyan Manchev

*

New Bodies

I, Hijikata Tatsumi, address the people today.
I release my infant warriors. I will not perfrom seppuku, but I will cut off one hundred thousand heads. 

No, I will not cut off one hundred thousand heads, but I will assemble one hundred thousand new bodies. An army of excess. New bodies, a new raw titanic race, a race of football players unmarked by an X-spot, a new anatomy, new organs,
a new gender, a new star. 

My infant football players, my mud-spattered criminals, we will glue together new bodies with mud and slime and loose veins. We will use the loose tongues of the veins to connect the knee joints, while the heels will pass through the ear canals, we will flow into our own veins in reverse, and the violent wind of the North will ventilate the brain folds in our lungs. This is how bodies dance upside down. This is how the small suns of the atom scatter like new constellations, galaxies, universes in our placenta, in our protein soup, in our boneless cosmos. 

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Boyan Manchev

In the middle of the sultry day, at the seemingly dullest of noontide moments, when time follows its usual course as if nothing could ever break it, when danger is out of mind, then all of a sudden its course somehow comes to a standstill: time stops running. The moment freezes: as if the wings of butterflies freeze fluttering around the blooming spring flowers, as if the buzzing of bees stills to a freeze, the air stops quivering, everything is at once in motion and in calm. Time has stopped. 

What is this? What is this paralysis of the commonplace? What is this extraordinary force, which petrifies time so that it comes out of its joints and remains paralyzed? What is it that breaks the course of springtime? The Greeks invented a name for this freezing moment followed by a sensation of an impending danger and paralyzing horror. It is called panic, from Πανικός, ‘of Pan’. The word ‘panic’ designates the approaching of the god Pan.

* * *

There is a capitalist panic, there is also a philosophical panic. 

There is the apocalyptic spectacle of the “Event”; there is also its critical or philosophical use value. I will designate it as philosophical panic. The worse the diagnosis, the more actual it is. The catastrophic diagnosis is necessary for the performative value of critical discourse: the catastrophe must last in order critical discourse to last itself. This performative use of critical thinking requires it being installed in the position of self-exegetical agent of the present – literally in an apocalyptic position (from the Greek ἀπό-καλύπτω, ‘to reveal’); but what it reveals is only its own instance. Phenomenology of panic disorder: panic establishes a continuous order, where the difference between inside and outside is erased. The interruption of time becomes a paralysis of the reflexive capacity, that is to say of the capacity to produce distance, difference, the capacity of flexion of a self; it installs the sensation of a pan–objectivity, a pan–actuality; of an actually infinite, unsurpassable limit. Panic diagnosis erases the differences, the complex singularities of the situation as well as of its complex temporality, its heterochrony. Panic disorder has its origin in a pathology of time, in a time path-ontology; in particular, in the suspension of the power of the temporal vector in the vertical axis of the Actual, extrapolated as an unsurpassable horizon. Thus the discursive Apocalypse offers itself as an unsurpassable horizon of the Real. At the same time, the hypertrophy of the actual reveals its abyss as an unsurpassable, therefore ontological condition. Pandemic quarantine appears today – or yesterday, already – as a symptom of the quarantine of existence in the present. An ontological confinement.

* * *

It is in this horizon, the horizon of ontological confinement, where philosophical panic and capitalist panic become structurally indistinguishable. Panic diagnosis is isomorphic to what it denounces: it performs massive homogenization and simplification, always tending towards an apocalyptic horizon, the unsurpassable horizon of the present. Thus, we have heard recently fellow philosophers speaking of an invention of panic, that is of the invention of a panic moment aimed at a biopolitical mass control through state of exception, the paradigm of the modern state. There is no doubt, we have witnessed the enactment of technologies of collective psychological control, the experiments with a collective inhibition. However, to generalise this diagnostic, homogenising it with all forms of exclusion, exception  or biopolitical control, not to mention the complex history and structure of these forms, ultimately results in the paralysis of any possibility of counter-action; in two words, in a state of panic.

What is indisputable is that the “lightning of the event” triggers a collective effervescence, an excitement of thought in the face of the unexpected, even if it would be the worst. It’s the inflammatory power of the event. Panic is almost magically transformed into its opposite, into viral social production. Indeed, the networks were in flames! If the media jargon – and especially that of social networks – has long been extolling the viral metaphor, we must not fail to recognize the emergence of the pandemic symptom. The truth of networks is the viral spread. 

A leftist thinker recently wrote, and rightly so, that the time of the virus goes against the time of capitalism. We can add to this diagnosis that the time of pandemic suspension itself endangers capitalist time, threatening to hamper or even halt the frantic acceleration of capital. However, we can further identify an isomorphism, which draws the tension between these two temporal orders, in particular: the isomorphism between the structure of viral spread stricto sensu – the spread of COVID-19 and the viral spread of capital flows, of material and immaterial goods, exercised by the capitalism vaguely called neoliberal, and which I tend to call speculative or performance capitalism. It is this acceleration that is, so to speak, the regulatory horizon of capitalism today. The fantasy of an immediate effect, of an immediate production of value, is the telos.

In short, the obscure object of desire of actual capitalism is to be a virus.

* * *

Yet, a virus of lethal power and exponential speed has arrived. A virus: a form of life that is both “primitive” and uncannily “hypermodern”, that reflects the capitalist structures of expansion, using them as its vehicle. COVID-19 would never have been so “efficient” without its capacity of hacking the global techno-economic networks: its microscopic intelligence has enabled it to act on a marcotechnological scale, a planetary scale. This is why the first effect of the virus was so spectacular, and so catastrophic too: the fluid Leviathan of today has been petrified before the image of its Double; his outburst of panic is caused by terror before his own abyss. His panic attack is the panic attack in front of himself.

The virus has chased ghosts from its crypt, and now they wander unbridled in the dumbfounded space of the globe, they invest what would no longer bring them any profit. Thus, at midday, at the most banal moment of the day, the undead Leviathan found itself surrounded by its own lethal power, for which its circle of synthetic salt – the witchcraft of its speculative economy – no longer has any sense. The financial Leviathan fell in his own trap in Pan’s forest: he got entangled in the jungle to which he himself has tried to reduce the world. Having saturated all vacant space, having blocked all the exits, he fell into his own trap: the false substance trying to seize the whole world – forms of existence in their totality, the totality of “nature” – to consume it. This lethal, irrational desire had to face its own limit, in the image of its Other.

The suspension symptomatically revealed the irrational, if not counter-rational, principle of the hegemonic political and economic structures – on the one hand, the rigidity of the obsolete apparatus of the “Monopolist of legitimate violence”, the State, the structural inadequacy of its immune system to the contemporary forms of biopolitical regulation (the hegemonic biocapitalism of speculative networks, having commodified the forms of life formerly governed by the State) and respectively, the progressive but total submission of old governmental principle to the new “fluid” hegemony, made possible by the deliberate acts of the new type of political “elites”, the neoliberal populists; and on the other hand – the need for unlimited, continuous and all-encompassing expansion as a necessary condition for the survival of the perverse, viral capitalism. Thus, the inability to cope with the new form of viral spread stricto sensu ended up mining the fundamental principle of performative circulation: the principle of permanence, the requirement not to stop under any condition. Even if it was only a few moments – one or two months at most so far – they will nevertheless mark a historic break, a caesura, by demonstrating not only the possibility of an interruption, of a suspension of the “normal course of affairs”, but also the deep pathology of the said normality. After this interruption, whose uncanny exponential speed and “microscopic” origin were unimaginable before, only exalted adicts would remain in state of terror and awe in front of the Capital Leviathan.

* * *

Under the vertical light penetrating the abyss of this caesura, in the thunderbolt of the event, the shadows of the crypt dissipate: the false stability of the financial system, of the circulation of credits depending on the viral madness of consumption, also becomes sharper than ever before; the new poverty of the public structures of the so-called “developed states” is also becoming dramatically visible – not only the reduction of funds, the dismantling of sectors that are no longer deemed profitable, such as public health, resulting in savage privatization, but also the ineffectiveness and inadequacy of its structures, and the structural pathology of the distribution of goods in general. What we live today is a crash test on a planetary scale (I evoke Frédéric Neyrat’s strong image), by which the hegemonic technoeconomic powers experiment with disaster management, with massive restriction procedures, by examining the thresholds of tolerance and resistance of the “population”, thus revealing the deep structures of power which would not hesitate to seize the direct governance of the lives of “its subjects”, which are preparing this seizure for a long time indeed.

The COVID-19 pandemic thus reveals as clearly as possible the pandemic of today’s capitalism, of its structural pathology. And the process of “normalization” cannot but confirm the diagnosis. The viral exception is over, long live ordinary pathology!

* * *

A lethal power has tried to saturate the world, to absorb all forms of existence, the whole potentiality of life, to consume it, to seize the all: it has tried to take the place of Pan.

The false Pan has now got in trouble. He is in suspension.

The Great Pan is back: Pan mortuus non est.

April – May 2020

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graphic design: Boyan Manchev, Bignia Wehrli and strx

16/60/90, paperback with dust jacket, 535 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2021

ISBN: 978-619-7291-21-6

What is freedom? Is freedom a condition of existence itself, or, on the contrary, is it only its utopian horizon? If freedom is a condition of existence, then can we know it at all, and if yes, how?

What is freedom in the philosophical sense? Must a philosophy of existence, or an ontology, start with the idea of freedom? Is an ontology other than that driven by the idea of freedom, possible?

Based on a surcritical reading of the Critique of Pure Reason focused on the paradox of freedom in Immanuel Kant, Boyan Manchev asserts the idea of freedom as an ontological condition of existence and, at the same time, as a necessary modality of the philosophical act.

The first volume of Freedom in Spite of Everything, Surcritique and Modal Ontology, examines the hypothetical modal foundations of transcendental philosophy, seeking to mobilize them surcritically towards an ontology of the necessary world, hereby opening up the horizon of the second volume of the book.

Freedom in Spite of Everything is the most elaborate expression to date of Manchev’s project for a modal ontology of existence, developed over the past two decades.

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Theatre

Cinema

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Ani Vaseva (Sofia, 1982) is theatre director and researcher. Co-founder of Metheor. Assistant professor at New Bulgarian University, Sofia. Since her graduation from the National Theatre Academy in Sofia in 2009 she has directed more than twenty theatre productions. Part of her theatre texts have been published in Metheor.Collected Theatre Texts  in 2018.

Vaseva is also a theatre and dance scholar, academic teacher and translator. In 2007 she published the book What is Contemporary Dance, based on her PhD thesis (she received her PhD degree from Bulgarian Academy of Science in 2014).In 2020 was published her book Theatre and Truth, in 2022 – Metheor. Theatre of the Impossible, and in 2023 – Theatre of Miracles. She has translated in Bulgarian Joseph Campbell’s Eastern Mythologies (2004), Jonathan Burrows’ Choreographer’s Handbook (2017) and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dreams in the Witch House (2022).

Ani Vaseva is co-director of Hollins Dance MfA Program Summer European Semester (Hollins University, VA) since 2023. Since 2014 she has been guest-professor at the Theatre Department, New Bulgarian University. Between 2015 and 2018 she has been teaching history and theory of theatre and literature at Theatre College Lyuben Groys, where she was also an acting professor, leading acting class 2017-2018, together with Leonid Yovchev. In the last decade har articles have been published in various editions and she has been giving public lectures in major cultural institutions in Sofia, Vienna, London, Berlin, Zagreb etc.

Her theatre work and her work in the visual arts has been presented in ACUD Theater, Berlin; Gallus Theater, Frankfurt; TanzQuartier, Wien; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto; < rotor > Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Graz; Steirische Herbst, Graz; Whitechapel gallery, London; Sofia City Gallery, Vaska Emanouilova Gallery, Rayko Alexiev Gallery, Structura Gallery, National Palace of Culture, Lumiere cinema, Home of Cinema, swimmingpool and the fridge, Sofia, among others. As producer in Metheor she has accomplished vast amount of theatre productions as well as publication projects, educational projects, local and international collaborations etc.

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THE KILLER AND THE WHORE

GORGONS IN THE STORAGE ROOM, OR, APOCALYPSE NOW

THE BLUE ROOM

POWER FRIDGE POINTS

SVIDRIGAYLOV

PRAESENTIAE

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BOYAN MANCHEV

Boyan Manchev (Sofia, 1970) is a philosopher, Professor at the New Bulgarian University (since 2001) and Guest Professor at the Sofia University (since 1997), Universität der Künste Berlin (since 2010) and Hollins University (since 2014). He is also former Director of Program and Vice-President of the International College of Philosophy in Paris (2004-2010), Professor at the HZT – UdK Berlin (2011-2017) and co-founder of Metheor. Manchev has lectured widely at European, American and Asian universities and cultural institutions.

His current research, which proposes the perspective of a radical materialism and dynamic ontology, is in the fields of ontology, philosophy of art and political philosophy. The search for a new philosophical form and possibility for new expression of ethical, aesthetic and political experience has been central to his work in the past twenty-five years.

Manchev is the author of twelve books and more than two hundred book chapters, catalogues and other publications in various languages. Among his books are Persister. La liberté sauvage et la nature à venir (forthcoming, Paris: Éditions Dehors, 2020), Freedom in spite of Everything. Surcritique and Modal Ontology (Sofia: Metheor, 2020), The New Athanor. Prolegomena to Philosophical Fantastic (Sofia: Metheor, 2019), Dark Poem (together with Boryana Pandova, Sofia: Metheor, 2019), Clouds. Philosophy of the Free Body (Sofia: Metheor, 2017, in Bulgarian; English edition 2019), Meteor. Selected texts for Theatre (together with Ani Vaseva, Sofia, 2018), Logic of the Political (Sofia: Critique&Humanism, 2012), Miracolo (Milano: Lanfranchi, 2011), L’altération du monde (Paris: Éditions Lignes, 2009), La métamorphose et l’instant – Désorganisation de la vie (Paris: La Phocide, 2009), The Unimaginable (Sofia: NBU, 2003). His book The Body-Metamorphosis (Sofia, 2007) deals extensively with contemporary art, performance and dance.

Manchev is member of the editorial committees or boards of the magazines Lignes (Paris), Materiali Foucaultiani (Rome / Paris), Critique and Humanism (Sofia), Stasis (St.Petersburg), Transeuropéennes (Paris), Transeuropa (London), the research network Terra (Paris) and the publishing house Meteor (Sofia).

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LEONID YOVCHEV

Leonid Yovchev (Veliko Tarnovo, 1983) is an actor with multiple roles on the theatre stage and in the cinema. Since 2010 he is a core member of Metheor, performing in many of its productions and sharing the conceptual responsibility. From his graduation from the National Theatre Academy in Sofia in 2007 until 2011 he is part of the Army Theatre ensemble and 2011-2018 of the National Theatre ensemble. Since 2018 he is working as a freelance actor.

In the academic year 2017-2018 he was acting professor, leading an acting class in Theatre College “Lyuben Groys”, together with Ani Vaseva (until the both of them left the college, due to ideological and esthetic reasons, in 2018). He also gives workshops and lectures and participates in different educational, experimental etc. formats.

Besides the multiple productions of Metheor, the Army Theatre and the National Thteatre, he performs in shows of Off the Channel theatre, Sfumato Theatre, Konstantin Velichkov Theatre, Vazrazhdane Theatre, The Red House etc. Full list of his roles in theatre and cinema here (the list does not include his multiple roles in short movies and student productions).

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ACUD THEATER

ALARMA PUNK JAZZ

ANTISTATIK

CINEMA HOUSE

CULTURE CENTER OF SOFIA UNIVERSITY

DNK

ETUDE GALLERY

ETUDE FOUNDATION

EU JAPAN FEST

THE FRIDGE

GALLUS THEATER

GOETHE INSTITUT BULGARIEN

HA-HA-HA IMPRO

HOLLINS DANCE

INSTITUT FRANCAIS BULGARIA

KANAZAWA COLLEGE OF ARTS

LUMIERE CINEMA

MINISTRY OF CULTURE IN BULGARIA

NATIONAL CULTURE FUND OF BULGARIA

NDK

NEW THEATRE NDK

OPEN ARTS FOUNDATION

PLOVDIV 2019

CULTURE PROGRAM OF SOFIA MUNICIPALITY

STAATSBIBLIOTHEK ZU BERLIN

SFUMATO

STATE PUPPET THEATRE PLOVDIV

STRUCTURA GALLERY

SWIMMING POOL

TAM

TOKYO UNIVERSITY

VIERTE WELT

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LIST OF THEATRE WORKS

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SHORT CV

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARTISTIC ACTIVITY

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SHORT CV

LIST OF ROLES

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The post METHEOR first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

book cover, layout, graphic and art design: Filip Panchev

editor: Nadezhda Radulova

proofreader: Polly Mukanova

72 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2020

ISBN: 978-619-7291-18-6 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-619-7291-20-9 (hardback)

I. AXIOM

Dead Peace

An Utopia for the Tribe

Death to the Grammatical God

The Savior, Name for a Suitcase

the blinding angelic gas…

The Beautiful and the Rational

21.03.2009

as I submit…

Blind Date

Love in Kevlar

Ivan Shentov

Shelter

II. GRIEF

On August

A Curse

those men in my backbone…

“Watching You” / “Writing Me”

Soliloquy for Two Voids

To the Dark Streets

To the Three Beloved Ones

To Write

Things

What

On the Weight of Your Absent Embrace

III. GRIEVING AXIOMATISTS

Dark Theorems: A Portrait of Tzvetan Marangozov by Zlatomir Zlatanov

Void Formulae: A Portrait of Zlatomir Zlatanov by Tzvetan Marangozov

Criminal Axioms: Self-Portrait by Krassimir Kroumov

A Note

“Watching You” / “Writing Me”

“Watching you”

your body

seen from behind the picture

of me drawn with the bruises

of the bold

brush that you brandish

with wrong

and rotten

memories of the borderless

image of my body that you have not seen

*

“Writing me”

there is my body my fingers

skeletal scratches lusting

to fool the distance between

with the flawless easiness of a flash

here are my finger my body my loyal stringer

all easing word after word

the distant desire

with the unruly urge of a uraeus

where my fingers are there are your bodies

written while they walk in

the sentences I cannot brush in

the strokes I cannot hush

wrapped when the words lull the drive to draw you

and while the stylus withholds the poem as

to sing not the song I have not written

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Conversation between Ani Vaseva, Boyan Manchev and Futoshi Hoshino after the opening night of the show TOTAL DAMAGE

March 2016, DNK, Sofia

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With the participation of Leonid Yovchev, Emona Ilieva, Valery Georgiev, Maria Panayotova and Futoshi Hoshino
direced by Ani Vaseva
based on Boyan Manchev’s book Clouds, including texts by Yasuo Kobayashi, Futoshi Hoshino and William Blake

September 20, 2017, Lyuben Groys Theater College, Sofia
as a part of the Bulgarian-Japanese Forum “Philosophy and its Other”

“Clouds” raises the question of the freedom of the body and the metamorphosis of the subject, trying to inflame the imagination beyond the constraints of ossified forms. The book introduces a new radical method, defined by Manchev as “philosophical fiction.” The cloud book begins with excess; it must end with excess. The excess is the ease itself.

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A visual poem by BOYAN MANCHEV

Project of METHEOR with the participation of Ani Vaseva, Stefan Donchev, Ivan Nikolov and Boyan Manchev / strx

The installation Terra ultima, a limit land, introduces the image of a fantastic North – the limit of the human world, beyond which the subject enters the wilderness of the unknown; a limit of nature, where nature, facing an unimaginable future, emerges from its course. A space of rupture where bodies rise.

Poem about rupture and coincidence, about obsession.

*

The visual philosophical poem Terra ultima is an experimental intermedia installation, including photographic, video and digital formats, developed by Boyan Manchev in collaboration with Ani Vaseva, Stefan Donchev, strx and Ivan Nikolov, united by the conceptual line of Boyan Manchev’s philosophical poem The Virtuoso of Life.

*

Boyan Manchev’s philosophical poem “The Virtuoso of Life” will be presented on the opening day of Terra ultima in four language versions – in Bulgarian, French, German and English, with the participation of the actors Leonid Yovchev and Marcus Reinhardt.

“The Virtuoso of Life” is a poem about the limit – about Terra ultima. It introduces the images of the North – the stone and the dunes, the starlings and the stars, the colours of the Northern Lights – as the images of the limit of the world, but also of a limit world. Virtuoso’s question is the question of the limit as a form of existence: an existence that exceeds its boundary. The limit as radical autonomy and as the limit of autonomy. Within this limit the Subject meets the unimaginable other, experiences it, sinks into its erogenous relief. Within this limit, the elements themselves insurge as subjects-virtuosos.

The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982), who passed away ten days after his fiftieth birthday, and who was obsessed with the North; the ultimate Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, the author of the Metamorphoses, who mourned his fate in the forgotten paradise of Terra ultima, where time itself had frozen; Dr. Frankenstein’ Monster, assembled of dead bodies and animated by an electric impulse, the Monster who left the world on an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean, are the fictional characters composing the constellation of the Virtuoso of Life.

*

This installation has been realised by Metheor with the support of the National Culture Fund and is part of Tempus Fugit, a joint project of Metheor, Goethe-Institut Bulgaria and Institut Français in Bulgaria within the framework of the Franco-German Cultural Fund.

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May 2012, Sofia

The World of S stages imagined/virtual and actual archive as a work of art, combining document and fiction, in order to create a work of art transcending the perceived as natural limits of what is to be imagined as The Real. 

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a play by Miroslav Christov
translated by Yana Punkina

The performance THE ALLEATER by Metheor premiered in November 2012, at the fridge, Sofia

director: Ani Vaseva
design and photography: Georgi Sharov
sound: DataTransporter
with Galia Kostadinova and DataTransporter

THE ALLEATER: A tooth fell from my mouth. (Pause) First, then second, third for the last week. There are one, two, three …, left for the next. (Sings) „Sharpest incisors, fastest molars, slickest wisdom teeth”… I can eat only asphalt crème soup… with a straw. Oil, petrol, gas. They effect me as caffeine and disturb my sleep. Petrol helps my digestive juices to do their job. They work at full speed. The entire organism functions at full speed. It grinds, digests and benumbs. It sends signals to every cell. All the cells open, and doves fly out of them, they fly high, high in the heights, to the ratings, the charts, the statistics, the stock markets. We’ve studied this in mechanical metaphysics class: (Talks like a teacher) “Dear students, my studious black stars, the mechanical metaphysics is the mother and the father of each of us. With it you study in order to achieve future success, or in other words, to achieve the all-devouring. Success, as you know, depends on how fast you attain the spagetization. Now open your textbooks and recall what spagetization means. Close to the centre of the horizon of events – the spherical surface that surrounds the entire mass of the black hole, the hunger of the alleater becomes big enough to tear atoms apart. When you finish your education, in your diploma will be inscribed: “Spagetization specialist”. (Pause) For that reason my dear alleaters, be good, study mechanical metaphysics, and don’t forget that your future lies on the vigour of your jaw. Chew carefully and digest your food well so that you’re always cutting edge. Ivan, spit the desk out, dear child, have you not eaten breakfast!? Didn’t they give you your favourite gravel pap this morning?”

Pause

THE ALLEATER: Are you here? (Pause) I would like to talk to you. I would like to-talk-to-you. For some time, I’ve been thinking, we need to talk about our relationship. My thoughts keep leading me towards you. They drag me… Are you here? You have grown up so much! You have grown up so much… Is this why you ignore me?

Pause

THE ALLEATER: (Talks like a pop star) I’m a star, everyone adores me and flatters me. They fondle me. They give me constellation necklaces. They give me flowers. I’m singing, my face shines. I grow bigger and bigger, bigger. I can’t. I can’t take it anymore. I will burst. I explode. I curl up like ball. Thick darkness falls. I can see only my navel string; I reach out for it… Now your star has no appetite. Will you suck the star? Will you kiss it? Will I disappear? Will you engulf me? Or… should I… like… leave?

Pause

THE ALLEATER: I wake up with colics. Holes in the stomach. Something is stuck in my throat. I am tortured by memories, thoughts, sensations. They whirl around… Where are you? You’re not here. I miss you. Sometimes I think I hear you growling. You’ve turned mean. Are you here? Hello! We need to talk. When did you become so… or have you always been like that? (Pause) We need to talk, one last time, really… Do you want me to sing something for you? Like the old times. Like only your star can sing. (Pause) (Sings) „My soul is robbed, my soul is eternally hungry”. (Talks like a pop star) Thank you. I heard this song for the first time when I ate my navel string. I lick my fingers, rub them against my lips. My tongue tingles. I hear the voice and I close my eyes. I get excited. It seems that the voice springs from the epicentre of the intimate, as if you are singing! I am dancing naked on the dance floor and around me in the thick dark matter glitters small star brocade. I feel free! There is no womb to hold me. No memories. Feeling of pure emptiness. The song ends, I open my eyes. There’s nobody here. Plates are served on the tables, full of stewed chakras, marinated in karma and servility. The silverware gleams desolately on the sides of the white plates. Nobody applauds. It is sad, in a way. Thank you. In my childhood I loved eating flowers. Oh, I adored eating flowers! When they saw that I had appetite, they brought me to the school. I am in the special class for burst superstars. The garden is ruined, swampy, full of maggots and worms, but during the breaks we play heavenly lights. The teachers call the sky „Star factory”. As long as you can control them, you can create whole new worlds. We imagine that we are creators. Mud seeps between our toes. One of our assignments is to imagine how we devour parts of the firmament, in order to enlarge the capacity of the school yard and to create new playgrounds for field games. Discipline and education are the most important things here. Requirements are very high. There is high fence, locked door which leads outside. Outside the whole world revolves around you, the teachers say, they are strict but fair. It revolves like a record, they say, but we can’t hear it. We only hear children’s songs. (Sings) „Come to me, come to me, together we will eat, come to me, come, come, come…” What else will we eat? We’ve eaten so many things. We learn to scrunch stones like crisps, to devour meteors like chocolates, to chew satellites like cotton candy, to sniff star dust for better health. They stuff us from dawn till dusk, with breaks for walks. Sometimes parents with permits come to visit my school mates. (Talks like an anxious mother) „Oh, mummy’s hungry boy! You look skinny! Do you eat all regularly? Don’t frown, mummy will buy you white doves when she gets paid, so that you can nibble in your spare time. Oh, sweetie, don’t snarl like that, it isn’t pretty!”. They look concerned, preoccupied, worried, but tears of tenderness run out of their eyes. After all, most of them pay a lot of money. There is no tuition for our class but sometimes I think that we have paid the price with our explosion. Unfortunately after the explosion you forget your life of… supernova. I don’t remember anything. Nobody visits me. My tutors say that it is good. (Talks like an excited teacher) „Well done, well done, be an example for everyone else. Be an example! Become a successful student! Successful student! Ein erfolgreicher schüler! Earn A-s in digestion!” And I earned A-s. One of my favourite subjects is history. (Talks like a teacher) „For 2000 years the education of alleaters has not changed. Gradually the process has speeded up and mechanized. Today the multinational cuisine is in trend. The physical world now offers a variety of flavour options that satisfy one’s appetite to the fullest extent. Mechanization itself has reached such high levels, due precisely to the improvement in appetite, and its ultimate idealistic form is the all-devouring. As we like to say, your good appetite and your working saliva are enough to make you true culinary specialists. During break we like to visit the fast food chains at school. (Happily) They are like small chapels in which we seek privacy, with sandwich in hand. We add nails, rubber or larvae between the buns, and chew well – it is important for di-gest-ion, and we pray to you. (Prays) „It is important that everything that falls into you is well chewed and digested, that it does not stick to the teeth, nor in the throat, nor cause indigestion”. We are always obedient, we do not slurp, we move in formation, with bright faces that radiate courage and dignity. We are dedicated to the idea. We smile. Dentists take care that our teeth are always well lubricated. We are filled with admiration before the vast possibilities of ingestion. We are the students who gratuitously pursue the Hunger, we only ejaculate when Hunger has been satisfied. We are trained by the best methods of education and we follow the instructions and recipes that we are prescribed. We are an army of brave alleaters that enters with a bang in the kitchen of life to propagate the grandest bases of mechanical metaphysics. We chew, digest, process and provide for the creation of a better eaten world.

Pause

THE ALLEATER: Yes, yes, you need. You always need – to multiply, to tickle people with your tentacles… to scatter your tempting crumbs everywhere. Pi-pi-pi… Little chick, I’m going to eat you! Thank you. Yes, it is important to become imperturbable. In the afternoon: fixtures, aluminium, marble, cobalt and nickel in the evening, and silicone dessert with bits of granite. In second grade we started with… (Excitedly) the feelings. In the morning – something lighter – vanity soup, hope a’l anglaise or watery idealism for lunch, in the evening Shakespeare’s thoughts or humanism crushed with moral values. Neoliberalism, cataclysm and onanism were offered for dessert. I stick my spoon in the astral mush; I handle the fork deftly as a fencer. I skewer everything on it. Everything fries on slow fire. A calf has dropped its eye on my rapier’s point. Veal eyes, cow’s or buffalo’s eyes. Spanish, Icelandic, Norse eyes. Japanese, Greenlandic, Czech eyes. Eye jerky. Don’t moo! Skewer on the point of my rapier! I feel like a king with my fork. My mouth is throne and my teeth are soldiers lined for combat! Often For we were served carnal pleasures for dessert. Мmm… Delicious! It is so carnal that my legs go soft, I melt and fall asleep. (Sings) „But, here, Hunger arrives, summoning His alleaters!” First he arrives on a horse, then with steam engine, wearing patent shoes. We await him enthusiastically at the station. Then he jumps with parachute. We wave a greeting. Sometimes he comes with an airplane, and sometimes he surprises us, arriving by feet. He bows. He is so polite. He teleports. He brings us presents, the teachers are in rapture. We celebrate because he is here. (Excitedly) Garlands, fireworks, parades! (Talks like a strict teacher) „In spagetization and mechanical metaphysics you’ll find progress, children. Do not be afraid, your wishes will be fulfilled. Knock with your forks and Hunger shall be given to you”. We start knocking, stamping, howling and chattering our teeth. We eat everything we find. At the end we start knocking at the door that leads outside. We knock until it breaks before our eyes. See our bellies, swollen like larvae that will sneak out of their cocoons any minute now, and will fly towards you in the open space, in order to dismember it. And then we receive. I receive you, No-thing… We go out and stride in the wide world, mouths wide open. We devour, chew, digest. We glorify Hunger. „We are hungry! We are hungry! We are hungry!” I implement all that is needed for your unending roar to be heard… Now it gets difficult to play with you. You’ve grown, you’ve become so magnificent and… sexy. And it seems that I have shrunk and I don’t excite you anymore.

Pause

THE ALLEATER: In hunger history class they never stop talking about you: (Talks as a strict teacher) „Praise the Nothing! Praise the Nothing!” They carry banners, sing songs, handout honours, medals and awards to the best ones. In logic and psychology classes – strong teeth, tough jaw and slick tongue sneak in and gut the matter. During break the megaphones advertise you. (Sounds like a TV ad) „Have you eaten your own navel string, do you shamble while walking, then it’s time to acquire a universal helper: a little black whole in your centre. Follow the game – for better metabolism! (Sings) I’m little black whole, children’s best friend. I wake up early to suck from you”.

Pause

THE ALLEATER: My teeth get sharper. They nurture me like their firstborn son. They measure the length of the throat. They say to me: „How deep this cave is”. Ha-ha… Some can’t bear the ordeals. They die of indigestion. They burst into pieces. Our mentors urge us to overcome our weaknesses. If I can’t digest a piece of steel, stuck in my throat, or a rusty nail obstructing my stomach, they don’t feed me for days and I get wild. I start shaking. I start quaking. Something in me begins to rattle… Pe-ris-tal-tic!… We hear the megaphones howling more and more – (Sounds like a siren) Hungeeeeer! Hungeeeeeer! I felt proud that I was one of the hungriest, and that my jaw was one of the strongest. The truth is that I was hungry for you! I thought I was destined to be one of your closest alleaters. A real valedictorian of the class!

Pause

THE ALLEATER: (This whole monologue sounds like an “administrative” prayer) When they set me free they tell me that from now on you will take care of me. You’ll be my mentor and guardian. Your voice will guide me. You’ll carry me in your arms through the kitchen portals, where with your floury seed you will knead from me the bread of mechanical metaphysics. Squish me, knead me, enter all my cavities, tickle my senses with your cutlery, convert me into a follower of your cult style of eating, use me to propagandize the supreme ecstasy of the all-devouring, the conversion of matter to soup, when we will merge into one. I eat your flesh and drink your blood, but I do not speak to you with my mouth full, because I am educated and I have a diploma in my pocket. Suffocate me with hugs! Speak to me, speak to me! I want to hear you, because yours is the kingdom of Hunger, and from your mouth run the slobbers that cure the defects of the matter, and attract the lowly in spirit. Don’t turn your back to me and, even if I am imperfect and my teeth ache, take me for a walk in the gardens of the world, so that we could dung the ground and discuss the business marketing strategy of harvest. Call me on the phone when I’m lonely, and extract from me what is most useful for your performance. When your potency requires skilful hand, do not hesitate to contact me to help you in the most venerated way, and on my knees I’ll prove you that your most loyal subject is not a random lickspittle, but a priceless workaholic and experienced office assistant. Only by your majesty and most magnificent marauding I succeed to be someone with a glorious destiny and to be purposeful in my acts. And while to you I’m just nobody, I ask you to be clement and merciful to me, because only with the thought of your power I manage to cause the chaos needed to fill the jars of ideology. I will fulfil all the clauses, paragraphs and subparagraphs, only do not forget to call me, to speak to me when you wish, because I’m anguishing. Please, call me at least once, do not neglect me in this low and outrageous way. You provoke me to declare hunger strike in the name of your neglect. Let your funds swell and multiply, and I, your loyal bee, be complacent and serve you even when you’re gone. Even when you’re missing… I miss you. Speak to me! Tell me that you are the comfort for us – alleaters – and show us the way to your sacred chambers, so that we are not lonely in the evenings. Tell me that one day I’ll live in you, I’ll feed from you, and I, myself, will be your food, and we will cross the threshold of universal unity. Is it soon, this moment when we’ll connect in a common mass without form or limit? In an infinite quark-gluon soup, back in the paradise of matter. Can you hear me? Can you hear, Nothing?

Pause

THE ALLEATER: You taught me to eat everything on my way. Sometimes they even threatened to sue me because I feed with people’s belongings. Мe?! Ha-ha. An alleater in court?! (Sounds like a judge) „Mr. Alleater, you are accused of having eaten the property of such and such …” I myself am court. Vessel without a bottom… See how I skewer everything on my rapier. From what is eaten they start to produce all kinds of products, even food… People feed on my excrements, on whatever I vomit. Everything goes through the conveyor. You’re the only thing left… Only you… you become bigger and bigger. Heavier. Gradually I begin to understand that I am involved in some kind of production process. You keep growing, yet the objects multiply. Thus more things to eat are accumulated. I don’t understand, are these presents for me or is it… a real circle! After each greater absorption even more mass production occurs. Marriage proposals to my stomach rain from the Most Important Persons. They write that my mechanical degradation is the sexiest, especially when my stomach is on the verge of bursting. The value of my saliva’s shares rises with every passing minute. The level of my gastric acids breaks records and hits the top of the charts. My teeth are a cult. I look to all of this as to an investment in your future, as a necessary sacrifice for the sake of my love for you and for the sake of a future paradise. Entire cities, states and civilizations start coming out of me. My belly becomes vast as a desert.

Pause

ТHE ALLEATER: Me they nurtured like their firstborn…. so that I could love you and satisfy you…Fill the jars… The conveyors…. Only-you… Only-you… Now… your star… has sung her song…. The Hungriest in the World… All is… Eaten, boned, wrenched from the womb…. Why are you furious? … Do you want my bones? … Can I resurrect in you? … Forgive me, don’t leave me… I, promise you I’ll find strength for more appetite. Tell me, will you forgive me? (Angrily) You‘re silent. Tell me, my dear, my darling, you probably do not have a form… The sun has a form, but you are not the sun. You must be the end of the sun.

Pause

ТHE ALLEATER: (Confused) Who have brought me here?… Despite the hunger… It doesn’t matter… I’ve got hangover from my satiation… There’s no way back… Back… (Pause) Ah, you turned the sirens on! Ha-ha. Aren’t you a wag? Is it my turn to leave the game? Don’t you want to play with me anymore? Have I grown old? Am I old, really? I am a superstar! (Victoriously) Ha, ha. Superstar! Little black star!

Pause

ТHE ALLEATER: Damn you! You and your wrapping goods! You never really cared for me! I was the pillar of our relationship. And now, now… Yes, this is your game, one-two-three, set the rules, sharpen the knives… hit the target with a prompt bite, take the valuables… One-two-three… Don’t be shy! Take the valuables, then swallow. Come on, play with me!… You don’t even have a voice… Only some stupid rumble, like stomach spasms… Come on, high five… Salvation from you is a reaching hand… Through your guts, I curl up like ball in your stomach, full, mischievous…Shhh!… All who fell into you deserved it, if falling was allowed in the game you didn’t break the rules… Am I in?

Pause

THE ALLEATER: Here I am – a toothless superstar… A real king! Doomed to be swallowed or saved by a heavenly miracle, a law, article, ordinance or other heavenly provision… In the last round… Who am I boxing against? Am I boxing against you?

Pause

THE ALLEATER: I’m sick of listening to your rumbling, your ruckling, your muffled voices… Eat this burden, eat this load, this hunch… It’s time for monstrous hug, isn’t it… Sleep, sleep… Be an alleater… Blinded by the darkness… I knew nothing… I knew nothing of the things they taught me… You stayed… Only you did… You’ve grown so big… Did I make you so big?

Pause

ТHE ALLEATER: Did my life pass in your mouth? Have you been feeding on me all this time? How do I taste? Did the taste of your graduate student bring you pleasure, the taste of your valedictorian? Tell me, have I helped you to do your job better? Have I helped you in the production of the new, better eaten world? Has the day of all-devouring come? Will you grace me with the paradise of the eternal satiation, of the superabundance of elementary particles, atoms and molecules, floating in an infinite, amorphous soup, dancing and disintegrating into components, matter and antimatter, colliding and mutually annihilating in a gastronomic trance? Has everything been devoured? … So now we can gaze lovingly into the infinitude and drift on the surface of the chaotic broth of minerals, plants, animals and creatures, disintegrated to their smallest parts? … To drift carefreely on the still surface of the heavenly soup with our little white boat named „Frost”, until we find our island. Our little island, built from the remains of the former world. There you and I will live in each other, in our own house with a big yard, a swimming pool and a dog house. I’ll take care of the garden and tell you about the times when all was food, and we’ll laugh like mute interlocutors, unable to distinguish each other. At night we’ll go out with the boat to fish in the endless ocean. At the end heavenly boredom will override us, and we will open small fish restaurant, and even though we’ll never have customers, since Hunger will be dead for a long time, we will write with our common hand the menu for the day, while the cosmic night licks the waves of the new world. It’s coming! The new world! It’s here!

THE END

The post THE ALLEATER first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

PERFORMATIVE READING OF BOYAN MANCHEV’S
„CLOUDS.PHILOSOPHY OF FREE BODY” BY METHEOR

The post ARCHIVE – EVENTS first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

 A play for you was produced by Metheor in 2014.

A PLAY FOR YOU

Can we make a play for you. About your constant loss, about how you live in past moments, about how you see yourself frozen in other places, in past paradises and you know that you belong there, but there does not exist anymore. Can we make a play for you. About your knowledge that everything good is past and only bad is coming. From now on only worse. Fewer paradises in the present, more paradises in the past, in the same time beautiful and scary, because they are behind and you are in them, but they are gone and you are not in them.

The places that do not exist anymore, the places where the miracle is present and shines.

Monsters are born from the mouths of the monsters. And in ours the sensitive, super-reactive star-fish tentacles spread, with their own corpora cavernosa, bulging with juice and mucus and pulsating seeds, waiting for an astray finger to rub against them and to shoot up, towards the ceiling of our cave and there to grow little roots in the palate, to grow like soft stalagmites and to hang down in our vocal organs, in order to change them slightly but irreversibly, to introduce in our speech the mumbling of a new little starshaped organ, formed to stop us from speaking flatly, evenly and clearly, to make us, weather we want it or no, part of the family of the underwatersquatting bubbling punks, in whose company you couldn’t sit in a restaurant, because in the most inappropriate of the moments they would spill their mucus on the floor, the waiter will slip and spill the hot soup in the décolletage (or on the bare back) of a sophisticated lady with shimmery dress, and the bowl would be fatally shattered in billions porcelain specks that would float in the air of the stunned restaurant, and some would even drift on the air currents and will glide above streets, rose-mallows, wisterias, pines, willows, shores, limitless shores, shores with no end, then will reach the ocean, will drip like milk drops in its salt and there roots will grow, will grow like carnivorous porcelain flowers, hemmed with salt crystals, attacking sailors out of the blue, jumping with their heavy but fragile bodies out of the foaming waves, cracking the bones of the sailors with striped blouses, chewing their pipes and nothing remains, nothing to remain, always nothing is remaining but the remains, and they are also floating, floating amidst carnivorous porcelain flowers, amidst mermaid’s hairs and sea dragon’s scales, float, float, until they touch the shore rim, the rim withdraws, then stretches, feels with its sandy antipode the remain, licks it, takes it gently, feels it well, puts it on its surface and there you find it. There you, with your small gnarly fingers find the sailor’s ear and you will put it in your bungalow, because there all the wonders of the sea are carried, all the things that make the paradise alive for longer.

Can we make a play for you. About your abrupt transition in acid state, when you are outright unbearable. This acidity effervesces and brims over, leaks down the bed edge, drips with thick drops and corrodes the parquet varnish, gradually digs a hole into the wood, then in the cement, in the concrete, the drips start dripping loudly on the basement floor, annoying the woodworms, fall on the floor and open steaming crater in its crumbly surface, create a real canal in order to reach the underground waters that crack and tilt the houses on the streets nearby, the acid acidizes the soil in the whole neighborhood and in the gardens acid rose-mallows with rusty colour grow, and from their blossoms peak little yellow teeth, ready to bite every incautious finger or nose, acid wisterias creep on walls and hedges, prowl after the habitants and the passers-by to spit them with their komodo-dragon-like poison and to wait the pray to come back in their arms by itself, half dead, thinking that it actually would be useful to become someone’s food, acid snails dart on the clumps of fermented dirt, and all the cats became rusty and in tiny, almost discreet hordes float like ginger hairy sea through streets and roofs, even the chandelier is acid and menacingly wobbles its pending crystals, full with suspicious fluid, pushed by wind with sulfurous odor.

Because there is no other universe but yours and all the paradises, all the miracle islands are crowded in it, but it has the tendency to stretch in one specific direction and this direction is backwards and this creates a feeling of doom, of decay, of the overwhelming knowledge that all paradises are past, they have never happened for real until they go in the past, their present could never be fully lived, they could never be seen while we are inside them, we have to look them with the melancholic, porcelain eyes of the time that is already other, so that they could turn in real paradise, every paradise is in the past and is gone, but exists only there, paradises exist only to pressure us, to make us know that they are no more present, that they exist only in the past, to tell us – there are no more of our kind, because there have never been, except in the past. Melancholy is our true state, because we have only lost things, we have them only like lost, we have never had them like things that have been had, they can never be had, because in the loss is the happiness of our unhappy present, whose eyes are scratched in the back slits, blink with bloody eyelashes under the shoulder blades and love to be in pain, but lightly, because the feeling of happiness in the present may last only a moment, just enough to turn immediately into past, flashes the lightning and then drowns everything in long and dense fog, in contemplation of the family of the paradises.

Can we make a play for you, about how how how how how how how how how how how

Can we make a play about your despair and how you in fact are а gang of disheveled imps, running with their little paws through the fields along the shores, rub their back in the corn stems, entangle nails in the corn hair, drag bottoms on the ground, scratching scabbing wounds inflicted by hysterical joyous pinching, push each other snorting, we snort as infernal piggies, gasping from the galloping around the fiery gehenna, because in the fiery gehenna are planted our porcelain hearts, gleaming with black shimmer in the core of the fiery gehenna, heavier and more fragile than the heaviest and most fragile things in the world, we grunt and spray spit, from our disheveled forelocks sturdy, sharp hairs fly out, singing like strings when lodging in the hardened magma rocks, and in the pores little naked Lucifer’s offspring sits, their tiny tails shudder with nervous pleasure each time when their bellies feel new heat wave from the stormy gehenna, because our porcelain hearts, sparkling as diamond doves, frozen motionless amidst the flames, reflect and quadruplicate the warmth of the lava goo, because our hearts are cold, they are of ice, they cut with blades sharper than the sharpest things in the world, and the disheveled imp gang trots clumsily through the coastal fields, we can run and in the same time contemplate the swallows, hovering screaming above the full with the purple blood of the sunset lake, that lake, which in the winter merges with the sea, because the high sea waves devour the dunes, that form a dike during spring, summer and autumn, and in the winter the lake transforms into half-salty, but a little bit sweet part of the sea and then the sunset blood, the purple blood of the sunset dissolves like ink from the sea to the lake and the ducks shoot at the hunters with big guns, spray pellets in their fat calves, with big cartridges fill their lardy pot-bellies, and small dolphins drag fishermen on their spears through the noisy waves, clapping with their water hands, wild in their happiness, not that momentary happiness that appears only for you to say “I am so happy that I want to die”, that appears only to become past, happiness that can live only in before and feed your melancholy, that grows incessantly, so incessantly and not at all slowly, that it will engulf the world, the whole world and all the universes there, where there is only one universe and it is your universe.

Can we make a play for you, about your entrances and exits, because you are castle, you are fortress with orcs at the towers, you are bowellike dungeons with bacilli and dogs with poisonous drool prowling in the folds, you are fortified wall with loop-hole slits watching the besieging behemoths, you are pile of rocks, fallen from the destroyed towers, amongst them glows the long white hair of the living in the tower princess, now speckled with her transparent blood, you are ditch, full of poisonous mud, above it manticores fly, they roar to warn you that dragons fly towards your sky, and we are riding those dragons, we shall come, we shall come and eat all of your corridors with their torches, we shall chew your curtains and canopies, we shall tear your beds and sofas, we shall brake your pots and we shall trample your flowers, we shall eat you, we shall grind your goblets and knives, we shall shatter your ceilings with our sharp claws, with our fiery breath, because you are our castle, you are our garage, in you we will deposit for safe keeping forever our iron chariots with spikes, so that the rust won’t eat them, so that they won’t melt under the acid saliva of the ginger cat throngs.

Because you are the angel of disappointment, you bring despair and sorrow, that sticks to the hooves of the horse, that sad horse, sinking in your mud, because you are the sorrow itself and the furious disheveled imp gang may cleave your flesh as much as they like, but your sorrow is constant, because you are the angel of disappointment.

Can we make a play about how stupid you are, because your universe is not unique and you are a just peel that is going to die, lonely peel among thousands greedy universes, scattering out, always out, their monstrous organs, formed by old wounds, by layered scabs and clots, new organs for reaching, not suckers, but sucker-tentacles, they are watching you with their hard eyelids and suck your white core fluid (your porcelain evaporated milk) and feel your hair and cheekbones, the bare calves of their antennae pulsate like soft spasmodic diamonds, lapsed into unconsciousness rudimentary protrusions swindle, carried by the hard mass motion, seductive mushy feet pop in, crushed under the trunks, playfully moving toes, their tails suddenly curl up with pleasure, clearly, although through all that noise is audible how their vertebrae giggle lapsed in hysterical infantilism, like your seizures sometimes in the evening, or in the morning, when you chuckle until you are exhausted and kick in the air, jump on the bed and look like bitten by rabid squirrel humpbacked dwarf, the concussive thunderbolts of the childhood, that grace you with the luxury of still hitting you, of mercilessly tossing your gnarly body, designed to grow old like a child, the vertebrae in the universe’s spines giggle like that, like hysterical white-haired children, having giggling seizure, that looks like it will never end, that becomes crying, not sad crying, but crying like I can’t laugh anymore and I just have to let some water through the eyes, otherwise I don’t know what else to do and even if it becomes real crying, just as hysterical, this is pleasant crying, crying of the opportunity to cry, natural ending, culmination of the laughing crisis, kicking and screaming, without which those childhood crises are left unfinished and then there is the danger of drooping, because endings are always problem, and the universes have surrounded you, and stare at you with their glassy wounds, through which dried up lymph nets are stretching. In the loneliness of cosmos, you remain a child, and the question is only if you can lapse in infantile seizure when you are alone, or when you are alone you are condemned to melancholic childhood in the past, the universe doesn’t care anyway.

Can we make a play for you, about how you can mourn over your past forever, because the past is your form of present.

Where are all the sunrises of the world, the sunrises of endless opportunities, merged with the sunsets of the reverse side of the world. There gather all things that are not. Dogs, fountains, empty spaces, hairs, fingers, backs, holes, swollennesses, lacks, mussels, chestnuts, trousers, dog collars, places, screens, skins, windows, profiles, us like completely different people, with other shape and other places, their future and our past and it isn’t the same at all, and it isn’t funny at all, nothing of this isn’t funny at all, does that those places don’t exist now mean, does it mean that practically they have never existed, does it? That those sprinkled with rain windows and tempestuous clouds over the mountain, that the thrown on the floor socks and exactly this shoe on the curb, that the naked leg on the chair, that all of this and all of everything else is just a mirage, that it is part of world conspiracy of the memory that is there only to tease is. Does it mean? And the past joy and despair doesn’t exist, because their objects are now only mark on sheet, or on photo paper, or on digital memory. Does our past exist, does it exist, or the joy is impossible because it is always past of that is not only not there, but has also never been there? The sunsets are hidden in the cave of the misshaped pancakes, nail clippings, dog hairs, with all the unneeded unnecessary things and there is nobody to let them out, only dense cozy darkness is left, and in it everything disappears and there is nothing past and nothing whatsoever.

And could the moments before we knew what we know now exist at all?

Can we … no, we can’t make a play nor for you, neither for whomever else, because the past is impossible.

* * *

In your hair remains are entangled
Remains of what remains
The remaining of everything remaining
That what has been
That is already
Because the other has been.

In your hair seaweed is entangled
Rubber, disintegrating seaweed
In whose crawling worms
Hundreds of eyes yawn
Dozens of mouths look with wriggling tongue
Thousands of noses shiver with bluish nostrils.

In the root of your hair
Is contained the beginning of the cosmos
From your hairs springs the cosmos
Such as it has never been
And will never be
But it exists, rooted in your head
Like endless warm crown
Warm from the crackling energy
And in the same time – icy and frozen
The way it was for eons
Because it has always been there
The cosmos is born in your hair,
Among bluish seaweed,
Swinging with the tide
Of the tenth moon
Of the pseudogalactic sun.

From your hairs a new world won’t grow
Never, never
Just the cosmos will last above your forehead
The only cosmos that does have an end
And beyond the end begin the eyebrows.

* * *

Like marshmallow the space around me expands and squishes. The matter stretches, in places almost transparent, in places thickened and looks like it pulsates due to the stretching. The crumpled point of matter, in whose core was me, дisperses, softened by invisible jaws and salivary glands. The beginning of my cosmos, the ball of something, spreads not because of a gas explosion, but of moistening and pulling. Its threads engulf me, connected with all my points, pull themselves out of me in the same time holding me in the centre, like dense mushy net, like chewing gum, like milky mass. Like lovecrazed lizard cry written with flexible notation. Like unbreakable matter looking for directions, before all forms were invented.

Unfolds, coils, stretches, thins out, even torn in some places, in other forms stringy ligaments, lashing like whip through the vacuum, mute space that can’t even be named endless yet. The matter spreads like infection, strains from within, already exhausted, exhausted before the motion has started, but with inexhaustible growing potential, even if torn, even if mushy, forms its mushy antipodes and touches, touches further and further away, forms and conquers, contains and mushifies.

There was the core of coziness. The place equal to an old dog, sleeping in rainy afternoon, cuddled with its tongue out on a cushion on the floor, dreaming about running through high grass, under meatball sky. The core of coziness had enveloped me like skin, even not like wrapping, because our places were not distinguished. Now, with the growing stretching, streams and winds burst, the leaves in my basement scattered, my window curtains ran away. Melted minerals drip from my hair and trickle trough the threads, the centrifugal force leads them towards the periphery, where they start forming stalagmitelike forms, soft and mushy, but with discernible tips. My hair threatens to crack, to flower in purple slits, cut through like fine netting of blood corals.

In the base shadows start to settle, fast and evasive, dart through the murky fluid, looking for the coolness and immobility of the bottom, scared of the spreading of the lucid matter, clearly understanding that the world of uniform silence will perish very soon, scattered in new forms and nuances, that the tranquility and lack of differences era is at its edge, that all boundless waves of nothing compressed in one point, will be irreversibly plastered in somebody’s memory, unattainable and even completely forgotten.

Candies of hard crumbly sugar with peanut core. The lead filling of the new galaxy weighs down, but due to the lack of whatever forces, besides the brand new centrifugal, the weight doesn’t matter and the lead fluid spreading through the dead universe’s veins is light as sugar candy.

The universe forms miniature sky stretched like palate above the newly created cavity, air pocket surrounded by fresh bone matter. The children of that mouth, little vigorous teeth, clack in each other and spin on their roots sliding on the tongue. Boneless forms, spineless, formless forms, growing simultaneously everywhere, but not with the same speed, growing irregularly, because they don’t care how they will look, no eyes, no differences, just soft squashy matters that if accidently touch each other suddenly withdraw inside themselves.

Years ago, billions of years ago, billions of other galaxies perished, all of them perished of sorrow and disgust, of terror and revulsion, of impossibility and intolerance. This one is brand new absolutely sparkling. I live in the new universes. My durability is short, few petite billions of years equivalent to few blinks, just until the corrosive spots on the smooth surface appear, until the infection of life splashes the new world with its sordidness. Then I evaporate and am no longer. I skip the drama and the pathos, all that violence and cruelty, polished with deceptive beauty. Where life is I am not.

Under the fluffy duvet of the quiet street and the afternoon tea we are protected from the ugly, bloody truth of life. There we can imagine totally new dangers and adventures, happy endings and happily sleeping afternoon dogs. Only us, only us.

The solitude of happiness is locked.

Flood, where is the flood, where is the flood that will wash the life and things, will leave emptiness in the nothingness, so that we could return to the core of coziness. In the storm eye another eye smolders, amidst the lightning’s blinding fire, amidst the thunder quakes, in the cracked flesh of the thorn sky, between the cloud rags, shines through the advancing, the prepared for millions of years final show, the grande spectacle of our world, weeping sadly in its own lap, with tears of anger and impatience, waiting to be destroyed, scattered, exhausted beyond its limit, waits all its unhappinesses and the miniature, isolated happinesses to be annihilated with the mightiest bang after the initial one. The final explosion though will have more work, the fire will light itself, the lightnings will set fire on each other, the rain torrents, big as continents, will drag the whole mud and all the stones. The last spectacle will be the most spectacular. Then, in the silence after the second big bang, just one bubble will float, the core of coziness, with its afternoon dogs and cool sheets. The bubble that deserves to live in the vacuum of the monstrously immobile cosmos.

From the bubble in which the image of the memory for the coziness core remains, a new world won’t sprout. Because the reproduction circle is hacked once and for all. Now everything is single and unique. Single in a way before impossible in this so repetitive universe, where everything was different, but alike. Without horizon of relativity the cozy bubble bears the only possibility for its understanding in itself, it has engulfed the whole, the only potential for coziness of the endless cosmos. If the cosmos is endless, could it be long? Or fat? In the fat cosmos the debris of our world does not float, except one, except one.

Chocolate starts, coloured stars, stars with cinnamon and sea salt scent, stars sprinkled with glitter, stars with pig tails. Stars slide on sidewalks, shoe stuck on the edge between the curb and the pavement, light evening breeze, stars trimmed with seaweed debris, stars like moons, stars like bottom, stars swelling with oxygen, stars giving birth to eggs, stars hard as diamonds and sparkling like fish scales, hair lock falls down the bare back, anticipation that isn’t yet presentiment, development of events in unexpected and impossible direction, beyond the banal and beyond anything available, stars pulsating with the orange light of garbage truck, stars leaving stale sweetish scent of rottenness, stars speckled with seagulls, stars at the end of the world and in the centre of the universe.

In the image of the skin second image is frozen, they layer like prints, like tattoos on dead skin, the image of image glows with its inky reflections, blinds with its matte radiance. On the image of the image of the skin wrinkles swoop, the paper crumples and bends, spreads and leaks, flaps its butterfly wings, flutters on the window sill, falls like autumn butterfly on the pavement of the floor, sprouts in the soil of the carpet, blossoms under the table shadow. Skin skin skin touches everything, the whole world, touches it with its fine sharpened bristled tentacles, overexcited and thirsty for a world, bouncy playful lustful touch touch touch with their cavities and bulges with their ears and elbows, insides and outsides. Colloid veins protrude from the slits, in their turn protrude curious limbs from the skin edges, make their way towards the outside surfaces, and in the darkness one little eye waits, waits, looks, waits.

Life is incorrigible.

* * *

And in the end of that drama
So big
So big
So pregnant with events
So depraved from endings
Let us move to another dimension
In the land of endless intentions
There, where everything is forthcoming
Where potentials are inexhaustible
Possibilities mature and grow plump
Desires swell and curve
Possibilities tentacles grow and creep
This is the beginnings fortress
In the trenches the middles lie
And guard the beginnings from an endings attack
And from their head getting eaten.
They fly, swoop near the ears
Dangers for the fragile embryos
Shoot them with fruitless intentions
Dead end streets
Preliminarily doomed
Utterly hopeless
Absolutely mutinous
Nasty staring evil
Impossibilities
Anti-intensions
Preliminary endings
Excessive cravings.

Because, as we all well know
Desire condemns the excess to death
What is big falls out
Of the space edge
Up! It spills and is no longer
Falls falls falls
Bump
It bumps its waves at the bottom
And quietly settles
For years.

The land of embryonic beginnings
Is encircled, as we have already said
With trenches
And the trenches – by cordons
Cordons woeful rabbits
Rabbits-killers
Rabbits-avengers.
They stare with their yellow gaze
Frozen with malice
And do not move
Do not flinch
Do not blink
They only wait for a clever sequence
To try secretly
Slip by them
And lightly set
Their evil look on it
And the poor sequence
Freezes in terror
And remains like that
Under the mighty shadows
Of those rabbits-wolfhounds
Hairy soldiers of providence
Cumulous punishments
Clawy guards
Of beginning.

And inside, in the core,
Amidst the quietude of the nothing
Amidst the silence of inaction
Where only the desires growing could be heard
Fruitless garden
With wonderful flowers
Inside, in the heart of beginning
Little beautiful corps lies
Transparent and hard substance
Miniature dead body –
The frozen truth
Of the beginning.

The post A PLAY FOR YOU first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

 A play about us was produced by Metheor premiered in 2018.

A PLAY ABOUT US

The atom is 99.99% void. If the atom is the size of planet Earth, the proton is as big as a football field. The rest is void. An entire hollow planet. Void, void, void. Atoms are void. They are made of void. We are hollow. We are much more nothing than we are something. We are nothing. The void fills me up from the inside. Dissolves me. I am a grid of translucent fibers, whose bonds are coming more and more loose. I am nothing. Everyone is nothing. Every human body is much more void than full. The substance of matter is an illusion. The physical laws of our universe are mystification. There is no way for me to be substantial if I am much more void than full. It is simply not possible. I am air and wind. I am cosmos. I part from myself, my bonds are coming loose. The structure of my flesh becomes looser and looser, foreign atoms and cells weave into my structure, the protons and neutrons cease to be concerned with each other, the molecules cling to one another, mingle their members, my cell walls dissolve, the cells begin to merge, to bleed into one another, the bones, the solid porous essence penetrates the soft tissues, the fibrous and vigorous muscles spill into the bones, the skin grows larger, sinks into the muscles and the air, becoming skin and muscle and air alike, I begin to dissolve into the space around me, to disintegrate into separate particles, to vaporize, the void in me grows ever larger, the particles part from one another, I lose my outline, the only thing that keeps me whole is the consciousness cogitating the particles, I feel, I feel with every particle, every speck of me feels everything, I feel the air, I feel the floor, I feel the walls, I diffuse, making my way down, down through the floor, through the building foundation, through the concrete, through the iron, through the dirt, through the rocks, through the little worms and moles, through the bugs, down, down to Earth’s crust, simultaneously expanding in all directions, all around, all around, all around me is me and me only, walls, corners, chairs, I penetrate through you, I run through your bodies, your cells adopt mine, their walls dissolve, particles of my skin go through your skins, the grids of our structures dissolve and merge, my bones go through your bones, my muscles go through your muscles, my eyes go through your eyes, I leave particles of me inside you, I keep dissolving, through the outer walls, through the bricks, through the plaster, the street, the pavement, the trees, the people, the cars, through me run dogs, children, policemen, trams, birds, domes, rooftops, from Druzhba to Obelya, from Mladost to Lyulin, I am everywhere, I keep stretching, Pernik, the Iskar, Turnovo, Plovdiv, Rousse, Sinemoretz, Romania, Turkey, Italy, Bangladesh, Alaska, Patagonia, animals, animals, animals run through me, jungles, sands, glaciers, cities with millions of people, the subway runs through my sinews, trains rush through my veins, submarines float through my brain, waterfalls spill into my throat, I feel, I feel, I feel the entire earth, all people, all animals, snuffling, grunting, panting, crying, death, ecstasy, I feel everyone who dies, now everyone dies and I die with them and spasms convulse my flesh and pain, I feel pain, I feel, I feel doubt, I feel abandoned beings, oppressed beings, I feel calm as well, I feel solitary moments of joy and bliss, specks fall and shimmer in the window light, they look like golden dots, dancing in the morning air, while from the street outside waft in sounds of birds and wind only, and very rarely of an automobile, a child’s body in a swing tied between the pear and the birch, the shadows of the branches are outlined onto the sheet stretched above the swing, so that the sun will not hurt the child’s skin, seas, seas splash and give out a salty scent, I vaporize with the water splashes towards the sky, I keep going up, up through the clouds, through the fragile edifices of the clouds, through their domes and layers and arches, up, up through the atmosphere, up to the open space, so that I can burst inside its pitch-dark immensity, so that I can dissipate all around its vast void, my atomic distance is as large as that between Earth and Venus, then as that between the Sun and Pluto, I am cosmos, as I am made of the same stuff as everything else, of fermions, quarks, leptons, bosons, I am the Sun and the rings of Saturn and the moon seas and the earth volcanoes and the Amazon and the rubber plantations and the thousands of people who die there every day, beaten, mutilated, raped, I am the rubber balls that children play with, the children in the streets of Bombay, New York, Aleppo, I am the bombs that shred the human flesh to pieces, I am the human flesh, shredded and pulsating, I am the fist that smashes the jaw and the jaw that cracks under the smash, I am everything, I am you. I am Nicole.

INTRO

– This will be one long performance.

– There will be yelling.

– There will be no dramatis personae.

– Probably there will be no conflict either.

– There will be no story, no moral.

– Aaaaaah.

– An angel of silence will not fly by.  

– Oh, it just flew by.

– This performance was supposed to be about Hoffmann.

– About the writer Ernst Theodor Hoffmann.

– As we contemplated the project I invited eleven actors.

– Why are you speaking in the first person singular? You invited no one.

– Then it seemed to me that there is no way this Hoffmann show should require so many people, that it had to be a performance with only one or two persons on stage and a lot of text.

– So it seemed to you?

– And the actors had already been invited.

– Besides, for some time now the idea of a play for us, about what we do, has been taking shape.

– For us?

– Not only because we are vain and self-obsessed and very conceited, but also because it’s time to specify certain matters.

– Like this one, for example: you cannot be in a theater, watching a performance and fiddling with your phone at the same time. Even if you don’t like what you are seeing, you owe respect to the work of those who made the performance. Respect and liking are not necessarily related. The light of your phone distracts the viewers around you and the actors that at this very moment wish you the very worst. Yourself personally.

He is taken away.

– But this is petty! The play for us should not begin with mentions of mobile phones!

– It should begin with what, then?

– Alright, let’s start from the beginning.

– In 2010 we performed A Dying Play.

– You were ten years old back then. 

– Now, is this a Play For Us – about those who are now on the stage – or is it about ‘Metheor’?

– Shhhhhh.

– But I don’t understand!

– In 2010 we performed  A Dying Play.

-It was performed by the actors Vyara Kolarova, Leonid Yovchev and Petar Genkov.

– You didn’t even see this performance.

– Neither did you.

– This was a performance about dying – about the feeling that living equals dying, since with every passing minute of life we draw near to death.

– And this is not a bad thing.

– There was euphoria, there was rage, there was joy and pleasure in this performance.

– You’re about to drive me crazy already.

– Are they talking about ‘Metheor’ again?

– There was despair as well.

– But not the type of despair that came about afterwards, which transpires in our latest performances – the despair, in which nothing could happen anymore, the despair, in which life does not pass away, but accumulates and sometimes you only want it gone.

– What our latest performances!

– (whispering) the ‘Metheor’ ones!

– This is probably why we want to play this performance now – to fancy ourselves experiencing the same happiness.

– Of course, people glorify the past.

– Previously, we wanted to be gone as well.

– It’s no accident that A Dying Play is a dying play.

– The performance Total Damage was devoted to the permanent revolution and mediocrity, to ‘everything’ vs ‘something’, to ‘totally’ vs mnyaaa

– To the feeling we are always seeking the Apocalypse, striving for the spectacular explosion of the world, but envisaging it as something constant.

– And these two things are mutually exclusive. You can either have a total blast and complete annihilation, or you can have constancy, compromises, adaptation. You cannot live in a constant state of explosion. It’s not possible to enjoy a constant pleasure, you have to pay the penalty as well.

– Why isn’t it possible? I want a never-ending Apocalypse, always to the end, always everything and nothing, not just a something.

– In the beginning of Total Damage the actors Leonid Yovchev and Galya Kostadinova cry for more than a minute, facing the audience.

– One of the tricks of this effect is the suspension of emotion – you see the trick, yet it has an effect on you.

– This is the principle, on which the whole performance is built.

– And we’ll try to make it even more obvious.

– Now these actors here will cry before you, you will know they’re going to do it and yet, and yet…

– We have agreed to say what we do while doing it.

– When does the theatre cease to be theatre at all?

– Who can really say what theatre is and what isn’t? Is this written anywhere?

– We would like to see if the theatre still remains a theatre in the absence of all ‘conditionality’ (in big quotes).

– Our presupposition is, of course, that this is so – is this schizophrenia not part of every performance – that it does takes place for real, yet we know these are actors, performing preassigned tasks.

– There’s something wrong with you!

 Actors crying.

– Is this now for real or is it make-believe? Are these people crying or pretending? Why are they crying? Why are you crying?

– I cannot cry.

– I am Leonid and I come from Pleven.

– I am Stefan and I am a certified veterinary technician.

– I am Emona and I grew old.

– I am Georgi and I have not yet made it up.

– I am Gretta and I have squeezed the teats of a little sheep to milk it in a little copper.

– I am Martin and I will not have another gin.

– I am Luchezara and I am Martin’s nightmare.

– I am Gordan and I struggle with gravity.

– I am Kalin and I am more asleep than awake.

– I am Nicole and I am lost today.

– I am Trayan and my heart skips a beat.

Actress laughing. 

– This is manipulation. I have made those people, the actors, say these things in a certain situation, after which I have employed them in the performance. The manipulation is even stronger. For when I say ‘I’, that’s not me who is saying it, it’s the directress who has made these actors say these things. In principle, this is clear enough – it’s a director’s job to sit in the back and make other people do stuff. But the present case is pure mystification. A few people on the stage say they are who they are and speak on their behalf, saying true things in quotes, while really this is part of the scheme. And should one appear on a stage and speak, one is already a personage, a character.

It’s very amusing, look, I’m playing this trick – I’m saying ‘I think green is a nice color’, but it’s not really me who is saying it, it’s in the script. I’m color-blind. If it wasn’t written for me in the script, I wouldn’t say it. I’m color-blind. I’m color-blind. I’m color-blind. I’m not color-blind. I’m color-blind. And I’m not quite color-blind. I just can’t make a difference between grey and violet and between blue and green. The director takes advantage of her knowledge of my disagreement with this statement, that I in fact think it’s a matter of interpretation and that I can simply see more nuances and more complex color schemes, and she makes me say I’m color-blind. And even what I just said was not me saying it, it’s in the script. I have said it, but in a different situation. When I say ‘I’, I mean the director. No, I have said it, me, Leonid, but each and every ‘I’ is not written by me, it’s she who’s writing it, yet when I say ‘I’, it’s me. This practically means my words have been stolen from me and I have been employed. Life is something disgusting. You cannot even be an ‘I’. Those words aren’t even mine. Again, it’s she who’s speaking. She’s saying that too. That too. Shut up! It’s her again. Ughhhh.

Actress laughing.

– We’re all going to die. One day, every one of us will die.

– I’m not going to die.

– Every one of you as well.

– I’m going to die too.

– Say, how can you call yourself Emona!

– For some time now, I’ve been having the feeling that my life has ended and everything I live through is only stuffing – filling up the time until I die. The annoying thing is that it doesn’t stop me from getting angry about things that, given the fact that life is over, are utterly unimportant.

– I cannot believe that I, who am now looking at my hand through my eyes, will ever die.

– This is an illusion, this is an illusion.

– Happiness overwhelms everything when it’s over-intensive, when it equals madness, when it’s unreasonable. A moment of peace and beauty may last for only a short time, since after a while your mind begins to produce obscenities. The clouds, the light on the sloping ceiling, pushed back and forth by the sea waves, the smell of salt, the morning tea in the lounge – all this is capable of filling in the horrifying void for a very short time.

– Things end.

– How many times a year, a month, a week, a day do we find ourselves seized by the shattering sensation that ‘I am a horrible, a truly horrible human being’?

– We become our mothers and fathers.

– A performance of despair. Of despair and unwillingness.

– Of survival. After all, it matters little whether you do something out of desire or despair. Either way, you still do something, and what is inevitable will always remain inevitable.

– The rain the rain falls and washes away and washes away nothing

– We play a play for us. About what we want.

– I’m waiting for time to end.

– Stupor.

– To whom do I tell I want to die?

– To me.

– I want to die.

– All plays and performances we’re interested in are either about the horror of living, or about the horror of dying. Or both.

– All plays and performances we’re interested in are either about the horror of living, or about the horror of dying. Or both.

– All plays and performances we’re interested in are either about the horror of living, or about the horror of dying. Or both.

– All plays and performances we’re interested in are either about the horror of living, or about the horror of dying. Or both.

– Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. Ich sterbe!

He dies.

– There, I will now perform an ingenious impersonation of Hamlet: ‘To be or not to be…’

– It doesn’t happen to you. It must happen to you. No, you’re not doing anything. Look at me. Look at me. Have you found the kernel of the role? Well? I’m asking you! Where’s the kernel of your role? Where is your horizon? Where did you study at all? So, here’s what you have – desire, obstacle, overcoming of obstacle. Don’t you get it? This is BASIC. This is very complex stuff. You need talent for it. A vocation. Come on, feel it, feel it! No, no, you really are worthless. You have changed. You were a different person. You have become technical. And you’ve put on weight. And what are you looking at me! It’s you who is not doing their job well, not me. Listen, boy. I have read so much, have learnt so much, am so prepared that I know everything, I know everything! I’m a director, I’m a director! I know nothing, nothing, nothing. I don’t know what I do! The actors frighten me. The audience frightens me as well. I’m a great director, I’m an author! Please, help me, help me, please!

– There, I will now perform an ingenious impersonation of Hamlet: ‘To be or not to be…’

– There is no way you can perform ingeniously a monologue – the monologue is part of the whole. Value is only available in progress. Taken by itself, it loses gravity. There might be some virtuosity, it might even bring tears to someone’s eyes and so what. The monologue is a monologue and is part of a whole play. And it’s you who said that.

– To be or – that is not the question!

– I love Dostoevsky, I love Dostoevsky!

– Oh well, why do you love Dostoevsky?

– Oh come on, now.

– What do you like about him?

– He’s a genius! You shall not lay a finger on the genius!

– Where?

– I shall not lay a finger on him, alright, but you tell me what you like about him.

– He writes about the soul! And beauty will save the world!

– There are many ugly things in Dostoevsky’s work. There is violence, meanness, pettiness. What is beautiful, anyway? Are you beautiful?

– You shall not lay a finger on the genius, I will not permit it, leave Dostoevsky’s corpse in peace, do not mock the dead writer, this is blasphemy!

She is taken away.

– You just want to relieve yourselves of all your frustration with the audience and the theatre. You’re bitter because you’re unable to make a normal performance.

She is taken away.

– And you’re using the actors, you’re making them part of a problem that concerns you and you only!

She is taken away.

– There is no normal theatre anymore. No normal performances. Just one or two, from time to time. A true, normal theater, for a normal audience. I’m normal! I want normal stuff! Fruitcakes! This is perverted! I cannot, I cannot bear it! I don’t want to go to the theater, I don’t want to!

He is taken away. He comes back.

– This is not normal, really.

He is taken away. He comes back.

– So, here’s what normal is – me getting married, buying a car.

He is taken away. He comes back.

– So, I want a car, a house…

He is taken away. He comes back.

– I want a wife, children, a dog, a house with garden. We are twenty-four years old already! It’s time we settled down and procreated. I have a driver’s license. I can drive. I can make children. I can procreate. I can be a truly accomplished member of society. Not some… gender confused monstrosity! That’s what you are. A sect! Fruitcakes of all sorts will drive us away, the ordinary, normal people who want the most ordinary things, nothing special, as ever – I make money, you give birth to children, the dregs get wiped out, the streets cleaned, keep the children safe, do not mess with the future, right, right, right? We all want this, don’t we? Don’t we want a bright future? Without dirty, odious… the streets are full of people that stink. They reek! Why don’t they take showers? I take showers! We must cleanse them. I’m right, right? Any normal person will second me. And why should money be spent on the elderly and the sick and the odious and the crippled and the abnormal. They have one foot in the grave anyway. Sometimes both feet. Ha-ha-ha. The law of the jungle, Darwin said it. I can smash your mug. Therefore you’re out. Heyyy, you’re getting on my nerves. Oh boy, are you getting on my nerves! I’m very nervous! I have pains in my liver, my liver suffers because of you. I’m going to puke. I’m feeling sick. No, really, I’m feeling very sick. This one, when I see him and I nearly… you’re cancer. In a healthy body. In the healthy body of our community you are a stinking puss hole. Your skin is flabby. Your meat is bitten all over. You’re punctured. And what are you running riot for? Why are you whining at all? What do you want? What do you want from me? Why are you looking at me? I’m fine! I’m normal. I’m the very norm. What are you even talking about? Theatre is about telling a story. There must be a conflict! There must be a sequence of actions, obstacles to be overcome, intentions, while you, you… you only squirm! I cannot bear it! I’m ready to jump out of my skin. I feel like my skin is coated in embers from the inside and scorches the organs, the muscles, my bones. I jump out, I jump out of myself, I cannot bear it, all of you, I cannot stand you. Fruitcakes! I don’t want to, I don’t want to go to the theatre!

– As an official representative of ‘Metheor’ I would like to state I do not identify with this. ‘Metheor’ is concerned with much more important matters and we do not need cheap confrontations. We deal with the extraordinary. With the exceptional. With the feeling you are living a hundred lives at the same time. With the excessive. With childhood. Not with trite oppositions. People are complex. Having a liking for classical art does not mean you are homophobic or racist. We have a liking for classical art. We have a liking for everything, as long as we like it. Wonders are everywhere. We believe the stream of thought, the excitement and the inspiration are not prerogatives of the old or the new, or the Moscow Art Theatre, or the Schaubühne Theatre, or Beethoven, or Lydia Lunch. We favor the impossible. We favor what is more. We want everything.

He is taken away.

– Why did I take up stage acting? I don’t quite recall when, how and why. Whenever someone asked me this question I would always answer like that, and of course I would add that it had always been in me. I’ve wanted to be an actress for as long as I can remember. I would tell people I loved singing and dancing, and since I didn’t know which one I should engage in professionally I at once figured that the theatre gives me the possibility of combining music and dance, and even cinema and what not. A little bit of all, only with a much more ravenous hunger for glory, alas… This is what I recently used to think I was thinking.

I cannot keep deceiving myself. It’s curious how people fabricate a parcel of stories and justifications only to glaze over the truth or, to be more precise, to invent it for themselves, since it very often turns out even they cannot explain to themselves WHY ALL THIS IS NECESSARY.

Only now I understand why I took up stage acting. I’m afraid that I’m good for nothing else. You can do anything on the stage, I guess. You can be any one. Am I myself?… Is there a ‘self’ at all? Throughout your whole lifetime you play games, just as I used to play as a kid, only now it’s on stage… and yes, it’s a little more complicated, having to do with genres, styles, schools and all sorts of made-up nonsense. All in all, I only wanted to play haha… and I’m only nineteen, there are even people who play in their forties and fifties too. I’m afraid all this is just a game, an illusion. Everything is so giddy. So, today you have a rehearsal, tomorrow – a premiere ‘oh, ah’… the day after tomorrow, however, you sit over a book at home and wait. You wait and wait, and wait, and wait… and hope – a quote from The Count of Monte Cristo. Nothing is certain. Yet, I’m an over-sensitive sissy who after all needs certainty. I don’t know what to do, nor do I know what I want. Should I take up something else, seek certainty or, despite my disappointment, never stop believing?… To believe in a director who doesn’t know what they are doing and how much I want to help this person, so that we can do something together, and I just want to cry so much, and cry I will, and tomorrow I will be smiling, and SO WHAT?

To conclude: the theatre saved me from my fear of failure in life, but what will save me from failure in the theatre once the theatre becomes my one and only life…

– In my previous life I mowed ryegrass, tended tomatoes, pricked out peppers, castrated pigs. On the whole, I mutilated plants and animals. I decided to become an actor, so that I can mutilate people as well.

– Why, what is this!?

– It’s theatre.

– That’s not theatre, it can’t be theatre.

– What is it then?

– It’s nothing.

– Who says what theatre is? Is it written anywhere?

– What does this have to do with the rest of the performance? I don’t understand.

– I don’t believe in a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ performance (because how do you define the criteria, how do you compare different works of art, how?), I believe in a performance that is true to its intent. Not a performance that states it has to do, for example, with ‘sex and violence’ or the ‘the poor little man against the big bad system’, or ‘the soul vs materiality’, or ‘misery vs luxury’, but in fact the directors couldn’t care less. The directors just think it’s going to be a super-cool performance and they will become super-cool directors, and sign super-cool contracts, and stage their performances in Berlin, and go to vacations in the Maldives. It’s the same with actors, isn’t it? A ‘role of one’s career’, they say. You get the role of your career and from then on everything comes right by itself. And you can hang out with the cool guys. You can explain how matters stand. You can choose among the coolest stuff. But then again, my friend, when I look at you on the stage, there’s no way I could believe what you’re doing excites you or holds any value to you. If your choices lack ethical value, if you just adapt to the overall situation and scrounge around, how could I allow myself to think and feel along with you when you’re on the stage professing justice or seemingly taking pleasure in acting? How?

– I take pleasure in acting.

– You can see everything on the stage.

– No one can lie to anyone.

– Intents become clear immediately.

– But sometimes the audience likes to be deceived.

– We all like to be deceived sometimes.

– Oh, drop the frills. Besides, there are much more important things.

– Your frills are frillier than mine.

– There are no prescriptions.

– Stop preaching.

– This sounds so arrogant, as much as you try to explain what theatre is and what isn’t.

– If there are no prescriptions, how can you say what is allowed and what isn’t?

– It turns out we’re the good guys, while the rest just don’t get their heads around us, huh?

– I’m not in the least interested.

– So the theatre is supposed to tell stories.

– What if there is no story, what then?

They murder him.

– And be meaningful too.

– What?

– And spiritual.

– But when will I die?

– And where is the spirit located?

– Ah, well.

– No, please, tell me, where is this spirit, I want to know. Here, here, here? Around? No?

– You mean the body.

– I am my body! The head is part of the body! Thought is of the body! What you call ‘spirit’ is a mystification, an elementary explanation of all complex thought processes, sensations, wonders! Superstition!

– That’s base materialism. Leve some room for the inexplicable.

– Well, how can it be inexplicable if everything is explained through it? This is an explanation, but it’s the simplest one available: ‘Dostoevsky is about the spirit’, which in your language means ‘we see only what we want to see’. But when it comes to children and violence, and the worldly injustice that cannot be explained, excused or balanced, you keep silent.

– Quiet, already.

– It must be clear enough what a performance is about. For example, sex and violence. Or how to overcome a particular desire or fear. Or how someone wants to depart, but can’t or they’re in love, thus ruining themselves. Things like that.

– No, I don’t understand any of this. It’s just not my kind of stuff.

Where are all the sunrises of the world, the sunrises of endless opportunities, merged with the sunsets of the reverse side of the world. There gather all the things that are not. Dogs, fountains, empty spaces, hairs, fingers, backs, holes, flabby bits, swellings, lacks, mussels, chestnuts, trousers, dog collars, locations, screens, skins, windows, profiles, we as completely different people, in different shapes and different places, their future and our past and it isn’t the same at all, and it isn’t funny at all, nothing of this is funny at all, that those places are now gone, does it mean they have practically never existed, does it? That those rain-sprinkled windows and thunder-clouds over the mountain, that the socks tossed onto the floor and exactly this shoe on the curb, that the naked leg over the chair and the eyeglasses rim, that all of this and all of everything else is just a mirage, that it is part of the world conspiracy of a memory that is there only to tease is. Does it? And the past joy and despair don’t exist, since their objects are now only marks on a sheet of paper or photo paper, or digital memory. Does our past exist, does it exist, or the joy is impossible because it is always part of what not only doesn’t exist anymore, but also never existed? The sunsets have hidden inside the cave of the misshaped pancakes, the nail clippings, the dog hairs, along with all the needless things and no one is there to let them out, what remains is only dense cozy darkness where everything fades to nothing and there is nothing past and nothing whatsoever.

The fear. This is about the fear. The fear of everything impending. The fear of breathing. The fear that the worst is always yet to come, that everything is already past. This is probably why we are playing a performance about us, about our previous performances, because of the fear that much more is buried within them than we think, while the future will only bring bones, hairs and nails, only remnants of things that will never come to exist, that our future is the past of a very miserable person. The fear that any moment of happiness can be the last, that perhaps from now on the only thing awaiting us is the swamp of despair. I fear living. I fear dying. There is no time for this, no time. Life is so short. You barely have the time to turn around and you are already dead. I will not exist much more than I will ever exist, on Earth there will be billion billion billion times more time without me than with me. Chop-chop and it passes away. Chop-chop and it passes away. Chop-chop and it passes away. There is no time, no time, it runs out, time runs out, everything runs out, flows away, you cannot even touch it. When you sink into it you get stuck, bound by thick mud, you get stuck in its quicksand, wet grains of sand wrap the feet, the shins, the knees, the thighs, the pelvis, the waist, the water flows away and the sand grows solid as concrete, and as you’ve had the feeling that time slips through your fingers without in the least sensing it slipping away through them, like a breath, like a breeze, like a thought, you are now stuck in time and it will not flow and you understand, you know that an awful lot is yet to come for you and you have to live through all of it with all its nastiness and bullshit and it will be getting worse and worse and even if there should be any solitary moments of happiness they could not counterpoise the pain, the disappointment, the loneliness, the lack of meaning. But this is all we have, this single moment of all the monstrously infinite time, this blink. We have no other time, no other chance. Only this one. Only in this life will I be able to cross this street, to open this window, to look at this hand, to touch this wall, to dream this dream, only now and nevermore, nevermore, the nevermore is so much more than the evermore, I want this evermore, I want every part of it, I do not want to lose, I do not want to lose!

ACTORS CHOIR N1

We, the actors

We are empty funnels

Through us run texts

They mount

We resound.

Within us the texts smolder as embers

Entangled in a formless trunk

We are empty funnels

We resound

Our infernal maw is a tube.

The trunk

The trunk

Settles inside us

Presses our organs

Pushes

Sometimes smashes them

Smashes them

Smashes them

Smashes them

We puke bile.

We are the actors

We are the deserters of life

We are the amateurs of the stage

We are the voyeurs of the extreme states.

 It’s curious how a performance gradually takes shape. Separate parts interconnected by a common course, by a sensation and by a multitude of radiating thoughts that gradually merge, overspill into one another, affect one another, and from a certain point on you can no longer touch anything anymore. You cannot touch the performance because every displacement would disrupt the balance of the already created whole. A performance has a life of its own. My favorite is the beginning, when everything is possible, when the show may take any possible direction, when it’s still nothing, but is about to become something, when it’s still in the wasteland of Arizona or Utah and the wind slams the solitary dry trees, scattered among sand and rocks, whence you can set out on a journey to jungles, rivers, seas, the sky, the cosmos, volcanoes, glaciers, fabulous unknown lands. And you’re still in the beginning of the road, having no clue where it might lead you, but if you look at the reverse side of chronology, if you look from the future to the past, the performance is already there, the path is already traced and it leads from the coral reef, through the shore, the sands, the deserts, the steppes, the red mountains, on to the wasteland, reaching my feet as I stand on the road. Or the road starts from Earth’s core, goes through layers of magma, iron, rocks, silicon, through granite and basalt, through dirt, through minerals and metals, through skeletons and fossils, through remnants of past lives, through corpses and roots, through germs, worms and moles, so that I can burst through the dirt and find myself in the beginning, where the performance had not yet started and had already been progressing towards its end, like us when we were born, we were a mass of pink flesh and liquids and didn’t know, probably didn’t have quite the thing to know with, to know what knowledge is, we didn’t know what was coming… all steps that brought us to this day, when we’re sitting in this theatre hall, watching this stage, seeing these actors, the steps that brought us to the theatre hall, where we started from, how we woke up in the morning, how we slept during the night, what we dreamed of, how we fell asleep, next to someone or alone, what things came into contact with our bodies – sheets, clothes, hair, our own skins, what we did during the day, whom we talked to, whose voices we heard, whose faces we saw, and still way back to how we began the week, what spaces we inhabited, what smells, what touches we sensed, and still way back, to the summer, what places we visited, what streets we walked along, where our feet treaded, and still way back, to how we began the year, with whom, where, whose skin we touched, whose breath we felt, and still, still way back, back, through months, years, to the time when we were young students, how we felt our bodies back then, how we moved, how we saw and heard ourselves, and still way back, back to our childhood, what sounds we heard then, what smells we sensed, and still way back when we were babies, what we saw then, what we felt, and still way back, when we were in our mother’s bellies, what we were then, how we felt and still way back, when we were only genetic material in our mothers and fathers, throughout their whole lifetime and still way back, back, when they were genetic material in their own mothers and fathers and still way back back back along the chain, through all grand grand grand grand grand grand grandparents, to the moment when they were already not humans, but other kinds of beings, back, back, to amphibians, back, back, to the primal swamp, back, back, before planet Earth ever existed, when we were all just cosmic dust, just passive matter, in the very beginning, before all this came into being, but once the line between us and this moment is drawn, it starts to pull, pulling us out of the cosmic peace of life’s antechamber and hurling us into a giddy flight in the reverse direction, through all these amphibians, primates, primeval beings, grandparents, parents, childhood, adolescence, life, along with all the genetic material, with all the collected information, with all this immensity, reaching this moment, now, in this theatre hall, where we sit and watch, and watch ourselves.

– Well, it’s the same with performances.

– And I, as an actor, have to be able to feel and experience all this. The trick is everyone can be an actor if they wanted to. And everyone acts. And everyone feels. And it’s what brings us together, here, now, isn’t it? The shared feeling. And maybe, possibly, some necessity. Something we lack. What do we need?

– There is no present. The moment passes away in a blink of an eye, while the next moment is already coming. As I’m saying this, it’s already past and the future is yet to come. I reside in darkness. I’m not present.

– Why aren’t there any real dialogues in this performance, these are only monologues or just cues clipped and jumbled together?

– Because interaction is basically impossible. You say something with some intention, some thought, some images, but you’re hearing something completely different on account of the experience, the mood, the associative chains in your mind.

– Well, yes, isn’t that what’s interesting about staging a dialogue, taking these discrepancies into account, the dynamics of who is leading and who is following, what unexpected twists could determine the course of events?

– Naaaah, all this is mystification.

– You mean to say a great deal of the theatre worldwide is just bla-bla-bla, is that it? This is quite stupid and arrogant. You not only want to evade judgement and misunderstanding, and be allowed to do your theatre as you please, but you proceed to explain what is possible and what isn’t.

– No, I only meant this particular case, not generally…

– Tarkovsky is a very good director, but his films are far too difficult to watch.

– What’s so difficult about it?

– I don’t know, I haven’t seen them.

– What, what? The man tells about his childhood, about the past and the future, that’s what his films are about. The rest is just some retrograde narrative about the spirit and some obvious metaphors. The memories, the memories are the good stuff!

– You shall not lay a finger on the genius!

They are taken away.

– You will understand me.

– I will not understand you.

– I don’t know how to watch your theatre! I don’t understand it! What do you want to say?

– Well, just watch it, man.

– Is it that simple?

– It’s that simple.

– Oh, hallelujah, I have been awakened!

– Heyyyyyy.

– You just reinvented the wheel.

Why am I without a monologue? No lines either. Because I’m asleep? But I’m not asleep! /takes out a gun/ Everyone on the ground! Me lying all day, doing nothing, as if I have no other business to do. I’m sick of you. I have a speech defect, they say. So what? I will not be given lines. Me lying in the corner of the stage! Spending eight hours a day with you. As if I have no other things to do. And what are you up to, anyway, you’re up to nothing. Stop crying! The entire performance, you do nothing but cry! You’re driving me crazy. Five books is all they’ve read and they’re all big shots. I can’t stand it! I’m going to snuff somebody! I’m sick of you! Scumbags! I cannot go on like this. 

ACTORS CHOIR N2

We, the actors

We are not the maldorors

We crawl on the barn doors.

We know the artistic conventions

We know there is no art without pretensions

We know every technique demands a counter-technique

That every public demands a rubric

That every media demands an even larger media

Monstrous tragoedia, monstrous comoedia

That is why we are so principled

That is why we are so diligent

That is why we aren’t sleepy during rehearsals

That is why we bruise our knees on concrete floors

Shivering in frosty theatre halls

Taking a piss in the yard because we’re not granted a license to use the toilet

Paying to work

Bleeding in our beds

Getting beaten at home

Yelling

Crying

Abandoning us

Taking away the children and the washing machines

And telling us to go to hell

Without even washing our undies

Since our energy is sapped like a lemon squeezed dry

Since we just lie anchored on the bed and stare blankly

And not a pinch is left for them

There is no flesh

There is no spirit

Just inert matter

Scraped off the form

And discarded wherever

We are nothing but ballast

We are still-born martyrs

We are mechanic angels

Angles of technique

We, the actors

We are not the maldorors

We crawl on the barn doors.

We have no will to do evil

We are the actors

We are the deserters of life

We are the amateurs of the stage

We are the voyeurs of the extreme states

A memory is a strange thing. It makes you be here and elsewhere at the same time. You’re leaning on the staircase railing, watching the spider-web spun above the flaking yellow oil-paint in the corner and at the same time you’re sitting on a bed in Vienna, the cotton fabric of the dress with white and grey vertical stripes keeping both warm and cool in the unbearable swelter, the shadows of the leaves on the tree branches are scattered all over your feet and this one afternoon some ten years ago.

DIALOGUE OF BUFFALO BILL AND THE SUPERMARKET CHAIN BILLA

BILLA: Bill, your body is the body of a man. This is not some sleek metrosexual body with epilated chest and armpits and sexy body-built plastic body from the shop-window of a fancy shop or from the back cover of a lifestyle magazine. Your body is a mass, it has relief and this relief is the imprint of a dramatic, even monstrous story. Your body is disproportionate, it is a trunk, partly alive, partly dead. Where it is alive, its blood is like fire. Where it is dead, it corrodes like plutonium. Hairy inarticulate trunk, swarming with organs and tattooed with scars, covered with wounds – lethal wounds from arrows and gunshots, from a treacherous ambush, from a wet job, lethal wounds from the tusks of the boar and the hooves of the buffalo that stamped you down together with its enraged herd, stamped you down along with your favorite Bucephalus, your horse, who was your soul, you two, centaur of the prairies, covered with historical wounds, lethal historical wounds from Viking axes and poisoned arrows of savages, from crotch bites by colonial rebels, whose uprisings you ruthlessly quelled with napalm, from the cold steel you used to civilize the submissive canaille of the ghettos, lethal historical wounds from the incinerators where the corpses were industrially burnt, you, field marshal of death, a sovereign of life, who splits the meat into two piles, here the dead meat, here the living meat. You, Creator of life, you, monstrous brute, you, freakish fiend, you, formless organ, you, Bill, my husband, my lord, my God.

BILL: My precious, my inspiration, you devour me as a fairy oven, as a candy house, as the vulva of a Luna Park, in which lights swirl, comets draw arcs in the sky, and the counters spin like a carousel accompanied by a frenzied barrel organ. You pour a waterfall of lights over me, lights that infiltrate into my leather armor and spill on my body like the electrified fingers of a Chinese masseuse.

I penetrate deeper and deeper into you, hurdle after hurdle, adventure after adventure, hall after hall, here the ball begins. Formed in rows for a minuet, ladies and gentlemen with aluminum baskets in hand producing magic objects from them and spinning around the axis of the automated belts, taking bows before their wallets. The cashier lady plays vehement accords, wrings the instrument’s soul through the cash-desk keyboard, the dancers, strained by the breath-taking speed, collapse in utter exhaustion, swoon for bliss, wallowing in limitless enjoyment, a pile of perfumed and stinky bodies of all ages, sexes and races, denominations, social and residential strata, parties and fractions and football clubs, everybody, the entire nation enraptured, a huge body in the temple, inspired, inseparable, powerful like an army and free as a band of children.

Billa, my Billa, Muse of the new century, my inspiration, your yellow aluminum gown brings shivers to the deepest of my guts, the pulsating neon heart of your name, your spinning little basket spins my head around its axis, you are vertigo. My Billa, you are the dream of a better world, you are a memory from the future, the neo-platonic hierarchies of your counters construct a perfect harmony, before which even the sternest statesmen would freeze with reverential rapture. You are a microcosm reflecting the motions of the planet, the movements of the stars, in which the elemental forces take shelter and merge in archetypal concord. You are a better world. You are not a storehouse for products, but a vessel of pure spirit, every package on your counters breaths life, its soul grows on the skin in miraculous inorganic shapes, untouchable by decay, unreachable by the worm, protected by strict oversight, with controlled humidity and temperature maintained by snow-white refrigeration equipment, by synthetic antibiotics, by antiseptic detergents and preservatives, inorganic idyll, synthetic heaven, produced here on earth without violence, but with singing and rejoicing of fairies with white aprons and magicians with white collars and golden rim glasses…

My Billa, the deeper I penetrate into you, the more enthralling the inspiration, the more total the ecstasy, the more absolute the absolute emotion, the more stunning the thrill. Your shining synthetic surface, body without organs, flat luminous body with fairy reliefs fills me up to the darkest recesses of my panting limbs, to the blood blackened with suffering, to the bottom of the wrinkles that left on my face an imprint of the elemental forces of the wide world, the salt of the seas, the iodine of the oceans, the evil wind of the prairies, the semen of the buffalos, the coldblooded ultraviolet sun of the waterless desert.

BILLA: Bill, Bill, when you penetrate into me, deeper and deeper, I feel you with all the aluminum cells of my luminous body, every product on my shelves absorbs your smell, reflects your heat, my metal construction whets into vibration, starts shimmering like translucent air, your masculine steps resound on my tiling like impending doom, they space out the disco rhythms of my sound systems, I lose my breath, the engines of my refrigeration installations hiccup with refrigerants. Your overcoat smells of ozone, of storm, of danger, you are soaked with the smell of dead leaves, of autumn forest, of gunpowder, stuffed into the black cracked fingers, of dead animals’ fur and still pulsating bloody meat, of spoiled whiskey on the ginger moustache and congealed semen sprayed on the whores, you smell like a man, like a body, like life, like wild unbridled nature, like a meat supplier, like a truck that carries out the stinking waste from my hidden back storehouses, your reek fills me up as you penetrate me, my synthetics feels the thrill of life, my leader, leader of my loyal benign people, you, animator of consumption, you, immaculate producer, you, irreplaceable, my one and only shagger!

Stick into me, stick those frozen beef rounds in, the scurfy frosty bloody cut of the round, stick into me those huge still living meats along with the crystallized stink of butchery, its humane electricity, with your rough, bloody, fair hands.

BILL: You are driving me crazy. You are making me hot. I will do anything for you. I will give you all the dead meat. I will kill all the meat for you. I will bring you a millions trucks of buffalos. I will provide you with all the meat.

BILLA: Give me the meat, give me the meat! I will wash away the blood, smear it with ointments and antibiotics, inject it with preservatives, cut and shape it, make it presentable, wrap it in synthetic packages, store it in vacuum and cans, render it foolproof, freeze it and massage its tissues, revive it for new life, the wonderful meat, the juicy meat, beautifully packed, sterilized in vacuum, diligently arranged or esthetically balanced on my refrigerator stalls, my plastic shelves and aluminum counters, the audience will crowd with enraptured eyes in front of the meat, in front of the pyramids of sausages and the salami pretzels, in front of the frankfurter garlands and the ham skyscrapers.

BILL: I will jump into your meaty paradise, wallow along with your sausage angels inside your coolers until my mustache grows stiff with frost.

BILLA: I will clutch you with my aluminum organs, so as to feel your bloody life. There is no difference between life and death in the synthetic paradise of Bill and Billa. No death and no life, just deepfreeze, just perfect products in a frozen synthetic paradise.

YOUNG MAN: I love black. I always wear black. Not because I am in mourning for my life. It’s because I anticipate death. She is my mistress. My mother, my sister. I have grown long hair and died it raven black. My bed is black, my sheets are black, my pillow is black, my floor is black, my window is black. My teeth are black. I even invented a black poem.

BLACK POEM

Black black black

Is the sky

And inside my soul is black

And inside my head is black

And inside my bowels is black

…

And inside my calves is black

I messed it up

I am starting all over again.

BLACK POEM

Black black black

Is the sky

Black is inside my soul

Black is inside my head

Black is inside my bowels

And inside my knees is black

And inside my calves is black

And inside my heels is black

My lungs are black

My liver is also black.

My heart is black

My brain is black

My blood is black.

And in your hair

A black rose shall I lay.

I’m not sure if ‘lay’ isn’t too bourgeois. Maybe I’ll change it. We’ll see. Change it to ‘stick’, for example.

I also love graveyards. My favorite is to fall asleep on the cool gravestone of a drowned harlot. In the morning I have back pains, but I do not show it. Besides, I love pain. It reminds me of death. Oh, death, death.

In death I will find my beloved, oh, death.

It is time to apply the breaks to my inspiration and to pause for a while on the wayside, as when one looks upon the vagina of a woman. It is good to look over the course already traveled, and then, the limbs rested, to rush on again with an impetuous bound. I propose to proclaim in a loud voice and without emotion the cold and grave chant that you are about to hear. Consider carefully what it contains and guard yourself against the painful impression it cannot fail to leave like a blight upon your troubled imaginings. Do not believe that I am on the point of death for I am not yet a skeleton and old age does not rest upon my brow. Look at me, standing before you, just like at a monster whose face you can see. Yet my face is not as horrifying as my soul.

Not long ago I saw the sea once again and trod upon the bridges of ships; my memories of it are as lively as if it had all happened yesterday. O octopus of the silky glance! You whose soul is inseparable from mine; you, the most beautiful creature upon the terrestrial globe; you, chieftain of a seraglio of four hundred sucking-cups; you, in whom are nobly enthroned as though in their natural habitat, by a common agreement and with an indestructible bond, the divine graces and the sweet virtue of communication: why are you not with me, your belly of quicksilver pressed to my breast of aluminum, the two of us sitting here together upon a rock by the shore as we contemplate the spectacle I adore!

You will not see me at my last hour surrounded with priests. I wish to die cradled upon the waves of the stormy sea or standing upon a mountain, with my eyes upwards. Let the wind carry me off over the world on the bones of his wings, some moments before my last agony, eager for my death. The eagle, the crow, the immortal pelican, the wild duck, the wandering crane, awakened shuddering with cold, will see me pass in the glare of lightning, a horrible and happy apparition. They will not understand what it means. On the ground, the snake, the great eye of the toad, the tiger, the elephant; in the sea, the whale, the shark, the hammer-fish, the shapeless ray, the tusked sea-lion, all will ask themselves what is this contradiction of the laws of nature? “Yes, I surpass you all in my inherent cruelty, cruelty the suppression of which does not depend upon myself. Is it for this reason that you prostrate yourselves before me thus? Or rather is it because you see me flying like a frightful comet – novel phenomenon – through blood-streaked space?” A rain of blood is falling from my mighty body like the ebon cloud that heralds the hurricane. Listen to me, and do not blush, inexhaustible caricatures of the beautiful who take the laughable braying of your superlatively contemptible souls so seriously, and who do not understand why the Omnipotent, in a rare moment of excellent buffoonery which certainly does not violate the great general laws of the grotesque, took one day the wonderful pleasure to inhabit a planet with singular microscopic beings known as humans, made of stuff resembling ruddy corral: indeed you have good reason to blush, bones and fat. Human laws still pursued me with their vengeance, although I did not attack the race that I had abandoned so calmly. But my conscience made me no reproaches. During the day I fought with my new fellow creatures, and the earth was saturated with countless layers of clotted blood. I was the strongest and I bore away all the victories. Agonizing wounds covered my whole body but I pretended not to notice them. Earthly animals avoided me, and I remained alone in my resplendent grandeur.

He is taken away.

 These are all snippets, why are you giving me snippets? Bits and pieces of old performances. And all this mystification. That we’re actors on a stage and we’re present as ourselves. I’m not present as myself. The most relevant thing about me is not being Martin’s nightmare. And it’s not me who wrote this text. And that keeps repeating itself. I’m stuck. Stuck within this phony text. This is violence! I’m made to endure words I don’t like or believe in. I work with people I don’t like or believe in. Now, is this me saying this, huh? Ha! It can’t be, it can’t be just this. Dialogues, monologues, you build a fantasy world, you engage in illusory relations, you have props, scenery, costumes, characters, whatever – fragmented, integral, clever, stupid, modern, classic, whatever, here and now only, but I want it always and everywhere! I want more, I want the whole world. What is this? I’m asking, what! This is violence. Did you see what they did to Martin just now, did you? He didn’t want to. Not that I care for Martin. I’m an actress. No, I didn’t mean that. I’m not a seagull either. I feel my brain disintegrating under the pressure of all this. All sorts of desires, everywhere around you. How do you respond to them, how do you satisfy them? And the impossible. The top limit of the impossible, hanging above me. You are capable, but only to a certain point. To where they leave you. From this point on follows the impossible. Not because I’m not capable, but because they don’t leave me. As they once said to an actress: ‘You are a space-rocket to be exploited for ploughing the fields’. I know I can tear the space asunder! But I want to plough the fields as well. I want, I want, I want. I will become the best actress. Because I can feel, I can feel life coursing through my veins. I can feel I’m for real and there’s no difference between make-believe and the real. This theatrical ‘make-believe’ is for real. I’m really standing here, on this stage, I’m speaking, I’m seeing, the spotlights are casting their light into my eyes, I’m feeling hot. Do you know how hard this is? Do you know the interesting female roles in the entire dramaturgy up to the twentieth century are but a few? Do you know most female roles in classical dramaturgy are those of beloved ones or mothers, that with only a few exceptions like Phaedra, Medea and Juliette there are no lead female roles, and the ones just mentioned only speak of love. Hamlet! The most significant role in the most significant play! Crap! Three Sisters too – it’s a play about the sisters, yet the cues of more than three lines are granted to men only! Only the men speak! Who writes those texts? What am I to play! Do you know how hard it is to know you can do anything, but you’re constricted by other people’s desires? I can do anything! I’m going to burst! I’m going insane, it’s giving me the fidgets. Not only Georgi can stay put for more than two minutes. I can’t endure this slow tempo. Nothing happens. I have at least two more years to study. Maybe more. I want everything! I want it this instant. You’re asleep. Asleep. Good morning! I’m afraid. Not only Stefan is afraid. I’m afraid too. I’m afraid of bad luck. I’m afraid events will somehow come right without me and I will not be standing on these stages like I want to, will not be saying the words I want to, will not be feeling around me the theatre I want to. Yet, I dare to. I dare stand before you. I am here. Now. And I am going to play. And no one can stop me. Now! Even the smallest role. Even the twig of the shrub. I will be breathing the same air as you, but I will always have one extra breath, my alveoli will expand with two millimeters more than yours, as I will be breathing this here air, which is thicker, heavier, more resilient than the one down there. I am a transmitter of desires. Desires flow through me. Mine, alien, reflected, written, uttered, seen. I feel them tickling my skin from the inside, ruffling my hair, embracing my shoulders, I am a network and the whole world flows through me for I am the best actress! Now!

ACTORS CHOIR N3

We are the actors

Ours is the underground kingdom

Ours is the overground kingdom

We have no kingdom

We have no place

We are actors

We take shadows out of the graves

We chase ghosts through empty tunnels

We are skewered together on the broach of destiny

Every night the spotlight strips our bodies

Flays the skin

In the unbearable light of the footlights

The masks melt 

Here we are

Out in the light

Immortal skeletons

Lead jaws

Stone legends

Conquistadors of the afterworld

We cough blood

We spit lungs

We breathe up all of your air

We graft feeling organs on you

We bathe you in our exhaustion

We relieve you by our capitulation

We capitulate suddenly

We collapse 

We are taken out on stretchers

Amidst endless applause.

We, immortal flexible skin

We, urns of bones ground to dust.

We, the actors

New people are made of us

New bodies

New life

New death

We are formed

We are crushed like dough

Like Easter cakes

Like shapeless boobs

Like doughnuts

We are kneaded, and kneaded

We are well kneaded

Our tops get squashed

Or butts get slapped

We are shaped

We are given a shape

We are inspired with new spirit

A new wick to melt the wax

To burn the wax

We are formed

Like firewood

Like coal

Like fuel

We burn on stage

Indestructible flesh

Pure energy

Pure life

Pure flame

In the locomotive furnace chamber.

We, the actors, are still-born

We are born to be dead

We are right out cut in halves

We are totally zombified

We are influences

We are baited

We are put in extreme situations

We are transformed

We are formed

We are then dumped at the dumping ground

We are matter

We are tabula rasa

We are nothing because we could be anything.

The wind will awaken the dead

Get up, dead

Get up in need:

The need is so great

It will elevate you

It will crack the earth

Until you crawl out from the cesspools of the underground depots

Depots for the dead

Corpse factories

Tabula rasa

The need is resurrection

We need to reform the bodies

To repair them one by one

To redesign them completely

Remake them anew

Because they are no good

Not even for a crowd

Not even for faceless background characters

Not even for a freak of nature

Or inert mass

To fill in the void

Horror vacui.

The wind will awaken the dead

Grated in the fields

Scattered like concrete all over the slope

The dead bodies

Embittered cuddled measured

Without beginning and without end

Smothered by life

Totally pummeled

Sprouted like grass

Like giant blue fungi

Soaked

Cut into two

Into three

Into five

Into three hundred

Dead parts

Creep through the fields

Creep through the woods

Creep through the squares.

Where does it end

Where does it end

Is the dead meat endless.

I bit the tide in darkness

Tide of flesh

The flooding flesh choked the nostrils

The throat

Amidst the nocturnal conspiracy.

Awaken, dead

Get up

Before we kick you

Before we unearth you

Enough hide-and-seek

Enough freeloading

The relentless eye of the wind does not sleep –

It sees everything

It sees through the dirt

It sees through the worm tunnels

It sees through the corroded eyeball –

It hollows you out

It perforates you like eardrum

No place

No place to hide

No secure shelter

No last refuge

No eternal peace

Get up now!

Go out in a row

You are the dead

You are the actors

You are the bodies

We will create you.

SCENE: COSMOS

THE END

The post A PLAY ABOUT US first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

Lecture-performance about Howard Phillips Lovecraft

The post LOVECRAFT first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

Metheor, Sofia, 31 October 2020

ISBN: 978-619-7291-17-9

Book of Hours and Wonders is a series of four books corresponding to the four seasons.

Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn include poetic and philosophical fragments in which time bends through the images of the four seasons: a fantastic measure of irreversibility and the cycle of time.

The first book Book of Hours and Wonders includes

Book of Hours and Wonders, 1 –– Autumn: Witches, Messengers

and

Book of Hours and Wonders, 2 –– Winter: Witches, Comets.

*

Who are they? These evil, unblinking, desirable, fiery women? They are witches.

Yellow clouds swirl around them, crawl, rise, smoke like a lava stream.

The witches are desiring us.

*

My witches, indifferent witches, evil beauties, trunks of gloomy joy, turn here in the corner of time, bend more and more the space here, tighten it. No, don’t be sensible, don’t be submissive to the magician’s art. Just like you, I am a restless soul, just like you, radiant flesh and darkness, nothing to do with man.

(Excerpts from “Witches of Time”, October 31 – November 1, 2014)

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graphic design: Metheor

Metheor, Sofia, 2019

ISBN:978-619-7291-14-8

The New Athanor is in the strict sense volume one of Boyan Manchev’s book series ‘Philosophical Fantastic’, yet it also provides the figure of its unity: Athanor, the philosophical furnace, synthesising new concepts and ontological techniques.

The stake of The New Athanor is a prolegomenary one. It deals with imagining the horizon of a forthcoming philosophy of nature. To face up to this challenge, The New Athanor opens with the question of the principles, thus drawing on the elementary power of philosophical concepts. It aims at mobilising conceptual counter-techniques as an alter-ontological force, in order to imagine differently the philosophical becoming-world of the world.

The New Athanor includes the Prologue ‘Principles of the Philosophical Fantastic’, followed by the first five books of the ‘Philosophical Fantastic’: ‘The Perils of Philosophy’, ‘Apeiron, the Boundless’, ‘Fire’, ‘Chaos’ and ‘Chaos Unbound’. The dynamic trajectory of the five books draws the outlines of challenging conceptions about time and causality, readjusting the compass of the subject in the high seas of the world. Will the helmsman of the incoming ship be the one who first embarked on the quest? Is this the same ship? Is this the same world?

The New Athanor is a methodological experiment where the philosophical quest engages in a shared adventure of concepts, theories and hypotheses from the domain of modern science, while at the same time mobilizes the latent potential of mythological and fantastic figures. Anaximander, Heraclitus and Aristotle encounter Chaos, Kronos and Aphrodite, and all of them join with Boltzmann, Prigogine and Atlan.

The New Athanor is a laboratory of the Philosophical Fantastic. The Philosophical Fantastic is not a hybrid genre, it is no mixture of philosophy and the fantastic. It is an experiment with the very form of philosophy: an experiment with new possibilities of articulating the philosophical form. The Philosophical Fantastic is an act of philosophy in the mode of desire. It yearns the invention of the New Athanor.

* Athanor, a fragment from the book by Heinrich Khunrath Truthful Report Concerning the Philosophical Athanor, Its Use and Effectiveness (Warhafftiger Bericht Von Philosophischen Athanor, Und Dessen Gebrauch Und Nutzen [Magdeburg: Johan Botcher, 1597]). Engraved frontispiece (signed Hein. Muller) on the title page of the Leipzig edition (1783).

Athanor – the philosophical furnace (from Arabic at-tannūr [التنور], ‘furnace’, ‘kiln’, ‘tandoor’, ‘a baker’s oven’, ‘hot spring’), is an alchemical device for maintaining a constant temperature required for the process of alchemical transformation of substance, its crystallization as lapis philosophorum, a philosopher’s stone.

The New Athanor is the philosophical furnace of images, which must synthesize pure concepts, the matter of the philosopher’s stone, of the philosophical crystal. Alchemy of the philosophical image, nuclear acceleration of philosophy.

Nowadays, when thinking and imagination are being constrained no less than bodies, the Philosophical Fantastic sets the goal of inflaming imagination and thinking, of imagining new possible worlds. It restores to philosophy the task of being an active force in the world, and to the world – of discovering its fantastic pith.

Boyan Manchev has been working single-mindedly on the project of a Philosophical Fantastic during the past ten years. The trajectory of this experimental methodology includes the books Miracolo, [Miracle] (2011) and Clouds (2017); the method was already outlined in The Unimaginable (2003) and L’altération du monde, [The Alteration of the World] (2009).

The post “THE NEW ATHANOR. PRINCIPLES OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL FANTASTIC” BY BOYAN MANCHEV first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

Metheor. Selected Theatre Texts presents Ani Vaseva and Boyan Manchev’s theatre texts, related to their joint theatrical work within Metheor – a group of artistic accomplices who work with theatrical, visual and experimental theoretical forms, developing their radical poetics. Together with the actor Leonid Yovchev, who participated in most of the stagings of the texts included in the book, the authors are the driving force of Metheor.

The book collects all the texts of Metheor’s performances written by Vaseva and Manchev, among which A Dying Play, Sick, Frankenstein, Phaeton: Miscreants, A Play for You, Lovеcraft, Roadtrip to Hell. The book also includes two not staged texts, The Stone and Bacchae, as well as Miscreants: A Manifesto for a Non-human Theatre. The three thematic nuclei – The New Body, Miscreants and The Irreparable, around which the texts are organised, correspond to the passions in which Metheor persists over the last decade: imagining of new, unimaginable (artistic, political, existential) techniques; from there – the metamorphosis of the body and the subject, the formless figure of the monster – a disturbing but exciting form of life with inhuman sex-appeal, the (ir)reversibility of time.

graphic design: Teodora Venedikova

paperback with dust jacket, 408 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2018

ISBN:978-619-7291-05-6

The post METHEOR. SELECTED THEATRE TEXTS first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

graphic design: Teodora Venedikova

published by „Metheor“, Sofia, 2018

ISBN: 978-619-7291-06-3

“Amarila does not like tequila” is a crossing point of three stories. A brave crossing of the elusive boundaries between one’s own coziness and the outside spaces, a wandering among the worlds of sleep, of sleeplessness, of daylight, of books… In her insomnia Amarila is driven from adventure to adventure, and those dreams are the life of Yossi in his personal cosmos. The past is the place where the Old Man usually comes back to, obsessed with the sense of the passing time, but there is still something that keeps him here and now.

What binds them together, what are they running from and where do they arrive? How does life mark us and how do we mark it? What’s the point of all this? Life is incredible.

**

Prof. Anna Topaldzhikova is a lecturer in History of the Bulgarian Theater at the National Academy of Theater and Film Arts “Kr. Sarafov”. She is the author of the novels – “The Flies” and “The Flying Time – a beam of light through the lens. The Photographic Family of Karastoyanovi”, of books on the history and the theory of theater: “Breaks and New Directions. Bulgarian theater from the mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s “,”The theatre game”,”Phobias and utopias”, etc., as well as play books: “Floating viewpoints”,” Theater X 3 ” .

Among her plays are “The Reflection”, “Ivan Vazov” National Theater, directed by Elena Tsikova, 2000, “Robin” at the Vazrazhdane Theater, directed by Teya Sugareva, 2013, etc.

The post “AMARILA DOES NОT LIKE TEQUILA” BY ANNA TOPALDZHIKOVA first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

Translated from the Bulgarian by Philip Stoilov

graphic design: Boyan Manchev, Boryana Pandova and Metheor

36 pages, including 14 black and white photos by Boryana Pandova

Metheor, 2019

Boyan Manchev’s theatrical-philosophical poem is organically related to photographs by Boryana Pandova. Dark Poem extends Boyan Manchev’s philosophy of body by experimental means, juxtaposing text, image and movement.

The book is the result of experimental work on staged actions and situations with the participation of the actor Leonid Yovchev and Boyan Manchev, related to Metheor ’s performance Hijikata and His Double (2019). Dark Poem is dedicated to Tatsumi Hijikata, the legendary founder of Butoh – a radical Japanese dance form, which played a crucial part in the history of contemporary performing arts. It was inspired by Butoh-fu [舞踏譜], an experimental form of notation invented by Hijikata, as well as by Eikoh Hosoe’s photographic series Kamaitachi, with the participation of Tatsumi Hijikata (1969).

Half a century after Hijikata’s scandalous performance Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese people (1969), Dark Poem puts forward the question on the possibility of the (artistic) revolution.

“Together with Tatsumi Hijikata, we raise the question of the rebellion of the body. What does body rebellion of the body mean? We are interested in the way the body always exceeds itself. Life always stands out. The body always stands out: in ecstasy and pain, in birth and in death.”

Boyan Manchev

*

New Bodies

I, Hijikata Tatsumi, address the people today.
I release my infant warriors. I will not perfrom seppuku, but I will cut off one hundred thousand heads.

No, I will not cut off one hundred thousand heads, but I will assemble one hundred thousand new bodies. An army of excess. New bodies, a new raw titanic race, a race of football players unmarked by an X-spot, a new anatomy, new organs,
a new gender, a new star.

My infant football players, my mud-spattered criminals, we will glue together new bodies with mud and slime and loose veins. We will use the loose tongues of the veins to connect the knee joints, while the heels will pass through the ear canals, we will flow into our own veins in reverse, and the violent wind of the North will ventilate the brain folds in our lungs. This is how bodies dance upside down. This is how the small suns of the atom scatter like new constellations, galaxies, universes in our placenta, in our protein soup, in our boneless cosmos.

The post “DARK POEM” BY BOYAN MANCHEV AND BORYANA PANDOVA first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

graphic design: Georgi Sharov

16/60/90, paperback with dust jacket, 208 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2016

ISBN: 978-619-7291-00-1

The book investogates the role of scholars for the development of Korean culture historically, with a special emphasis on the first half of the Choson dynasty (1392-1910), the dynasty that perceives Confucianism as a leading state ideology. The first century of its rule is defined as a “golden age” for Korea because of the flourishing state of science and culture, especially associated with King Sejong (1418-1450), honoured to this day as one of the most prominent rulers of Korea.

Who are these Korean scholars? What qualities and knowledge should a person obtain in order to be accepted as a scholar? What was the notion of “education”? Korea, which has been experiencing China’s and Chinese culture’s strong influence since ancient times, is developing under the influence of Confucianism, and knowledge in this area is one of the main factors when it comes to defining how “scholarly” one is.

The post “THE ROLE OF SCHOLARS IN TRADITIONAL KOREA” BY YANA MANCHEVA first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

graphic design: Teodora Venedikova

composition and editing: Alexandra Mancheva and Boyan Manchev

Metheor, Sofia, 2018

ISBN: 978-619-7291-07-0

The book presents for the first time entirely in Bulgarian language the work of the Bulgarian linguist Krassimir Mantchev (1938-1997) who worked mainly in French. The book includes three studies, representative of Manchev’s theory in the field of general linguistics – “The Foundations of Ideogenesis” (1970, co-authored by Hristo Todorov (1938-1983), an associate and close friend of Mantchev), “Principles of Operative Linguistics” (1976) and “Principles of typological study of languages” (1976). Common to these studies from the early period of Mantchev is the theoretical orientation which allows them to be conceived as a conceptually coherent corpus and as a kind of introduction to Mantchev’s model of “operative” or “processual” linguistics, close to the philosophical ontologies of potentiality.

The publication includes biographical and bibliographical information and introduction of Mantchev’s theory inspired by the French linguist Gustave Guillaume (1883-1960), as well as, more generally, of the orientation of the so-called “Bulgarian Guillaumean school”.

Krassimir Mantchev’s first book in his native language would make possible his original theory to reach a wider audience in Bulgaria as well. The book was published in connection with the conference “Complexity of Linguistic Systems and Structures: A Perspective on the Romance Languages” of the Department of Romanistic at the Sofia University, dedicated to Professor Krassimir Mantchev, on the occasion of the eighty anniversary of his birth, including the round table “The True Literature is to Come” (Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, 24-25 November 2018).

The post “PRINCIPLES OF OPERATIVE LINGUISTICS” BY KRASSIMIR MANTCHEV first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

What is dance? What is classical dance? What is modern dance? What is contemporary dance? This question sequence looks increasingly hard. Like if in the first part the answers are clear and the closer we get to the end, the more disputable the definitions become. This is not true though.

Generations of choreographers and theoreticians have undertaken the inspiring but hard task of revealing the complexity, hiding behind any of those questions. Thanks to them today we can (re)discover that the possibilities are almost endless. In the light of this complexity the book proposes its own theses on the problematics of contemporary dance and its context. The work explores the reasons that give us the opportunity to rethink the dance theory and practice not as standing on stabile basis, but as using a fragile, flexible dynamic structure of processes, principles, cravings, discoveries and pleasures as a lever.

The first part of the book is dedicated on the different approaches to the paradoxical behavior of the concept “contemporary dance” in the context of the relations between the concepts “modern” and “contemporary” art, in parallel with phenomena like “postmodern dance” and in dialogue with the theses of researchers as Ramsay Burt, Peggy Phellan, Andre Lepecky, Boyan Manchev.

The second part of the book is focused on the symptomatic and specific case of the “theatre life” of contemporary dance in Bulgaria from 1989 to 2010.

The edition includes systematic information about the Bulgarian choreographers from that period, about the media and critical reception both of “contemporary dance” in general and of specific phenomena. In the appendices one can find interviews and conversations with the artists, chronological list of their works and detailed description of many performances.

The book is in Bulgarian language.

graphic design: Georgi Sharov

proof-reader: Maria Stoilova

16/60/90, paperback with dust jacket, 536 pages.

Metheor, Sofia, 2017

ISBN: 978-619-7291-01-8

The post WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY DANCE first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

graphic design: Svoboda Tzekova

16/60/84, paperback, 136 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2017

ISBN:978-619-7291-03-2

Clouds. Philosophy of Free Body poses the question of freedom and the metamorphosis of body-subject, trying to ignite the imagination beyond the constraints of the sclerotic discursive forms. It is an attempt to create a philosophical text in a fragmentary and loose form. The book introduces a new radical method, defined by Manchev as philosophical fantastics.

The Cloudy Book

The book about clouds is also a cloudy book. It is a book of clouds and a book on clouds. A book in clouds. A book veiled in clouds and a book woven of clouds. It is a condensation and expansion of the cloud. It is a book that swirls, thickens and thins, solidifies and expands, that spreads out and speeds up, that is woven through forms, passes through forms, diaphanous and dense matter.

The book about clouds is also a book of clouds. A book-cloud.

The book about clouds is a book – a persistent, metamorphosing cloudy mass, a mass of potentiality and intensity. The cloudy mass of the book.

The book about clouds is a book that experiments, that is, examines the potentiality of a particular concept/figure: in a multitude of genres, aspects, forms of thought.

Besides being a difficult, if not paradoxical, object of science or figure of representation, or a privileged poetic image, could the cloud also be a philosophical concept? Yes, is the answer of philosophical fantastics. Yes – the latter reiterates – because every concept is a cloud.

*

We need a new form of fiction. We also need a new form of philosophical fiction: philosophical fantastics.

We need a new form of fiction, and this need is fuelled by our meteorically-cutting certainty: true literature is yet to come.

True literature is literature where truth is mobilized in the form of fiction, with the electric intensity of a cloud.

​

*

The cloudy book begins with an excess; it must end with an excess.

Excess is lightness itself.

The post “CLOUDS. PHILOSOPHY OF FREE BODY” BY BOYAN MANCHEV (BG) first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

translated in English by Ani Vaseva

editor: Boyan Manchev

graphic design: Teodora Venedikova

proof-reader: Maria Stoilova

paperback with dust jacket, 230 pages.

Metheor, Sofia, 2018

ISBN:978-619-7291-04-9

On choreography: “Choreography is a negotiation with the patterns your body is thinking”

On rules: “Try breaking the rules on a need to break the rules basis”

A Choreographer’s Handbook invites the reader to investigate how and why to make a dance performance. In an inspiring and unusually empowering sequence of stories, ideas and paradoxes, internationally renowned dancer, choreographer and teacher Jonathan Burrows explains how it’s possible to navigate a course through this complex process. It is a stunning reflection on a personal practice and professional journey, and draws upon five years’ of workshop discussions, led by Burrows. Burrows’ open and honest prose gives the reader access to a range of exercises, meditations, principles and ideas on choreography that allow artists and dance-makers to find their own aesthetic process.

Jonathan Burrows has toured and worked internationally as a dancer and choreographer. In 2002 he was commended by the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts in New York for his contribution to contemporary dance, and in 2004 he received a New York Dance and Performance ‘Bessie’ for his work ‘Both Sitting Duet’. He has made commissioned work for many companies, including William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt, Sylvie Guillem and The Royal Ballet. He has been Visiting Professor at the Royal Holloway University of London and the University of Hamburg.

The post “CHOREOGRAPHER’S HANDBOOK” BY JONATHAN BURROWS first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

CHOREOGRAPHER’S HANDBOOK

CLOUDS. PHILOSOPHY OF FREE BODY

METEOR. SELECTED TEXTS FOR THEATRE

The post BOOKS first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

author and director: Ani Vaseva
dramaturge: Boyan Manchev
design: Georgi Sharov
music: Konstantin Markov
photography: Georgi Dimitrov

with: Leonid Yovchev and Galya Kostadinova

Premiere – March 2016, DNK, Sofia

The post TOTAL DAMAGE first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

– – –

Maldoror was created with the support of Institut Français de Bulgarie and ETUD Gallery.

The post MALDOROR first appeared on Ani Vaseva.

text: Georgi Tenev
director: Ani Vaseva
set and graphic design: Georgi Sharov
music and sound design: Konstantin Markov (SoundReaktor)
photography: Boryana Pandova

with: Yuliana Sayska, Leonid Yovchev, Galya Kostadinova, Denitsa Darinova

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A PLAY FOR YOU

A PLAY ABOUT US

THE ALLEATER

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TRAILERS
FRAGMENTS
A DYING PLAY, 2010
FRANKENSTEIN, 2012
A PLAY FOR YOU, 2014
ROADTRIP TO HELLl, 2017
A PLAY ABOUT US, 2019

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CRITIQUE

EVENTS

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UPCOMING

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installation and comic-strip
idea and performance: Ani Vaseva, Ivana Nencheva, Natalia Todorova
photography: Ivan Donchev
comic strip: Yassen Zgurovski
comic strip text: Ani Vaseva

The installation was presented at Tanzquartier Wien in the frame of SCORES No3: uneasy going and in Sofiaundergound Festival, 2011.

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LITTLE GIRLS PART I – A WINTER DAY

concept: Ani Vaseva
photography: Ivan Donchev
theory: Boyan Manchev
with: Ani Vaseva and Iva Sveshtarova

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director: Ani Vaseva

– – –

A Play for You was created with the support of Institut Français de Bulgarie.

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text: Boyan Manchev, based on Metamorphoses by Ovid
director: Ani Vaseva
graphic design and photography: Georgi Sharov

with: Leonid Yovchev, Petar Genkov, Galya Kostadinova

Premiere – November 2013, LIPA, Sofia

Performance about the limitless desire on the brink of the world. Attempt for inhuman theatre, or for reversing the tragic. Theatre of the miscreants who come after us.

Inhuman theatre is theatre of limitless desire – desire that surpasses the human. In the limitless desire there is no hope for exit. Desire is Monster. The theatre that chants its desire slits: it doesn’t step beyond the limit, but opens it. It deepens the border, from which desire derives its power. That is why theatre must not gather, but divide. There is no creation and freedom without breach. Desire is fire that will ravage the world. “A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause.” Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I
Boyan Manchev (from the lecture Desire, Monster: Manifesto For Inhuman Theatre, Volksbühne, Berlin, 2013)

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– – –

The Alleater was created with the support of the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture, Plus Association and the fridge.

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author: David Hare
director: Ani Vaseva
dramatourge: Antoinette Simeonova
set designer: Stanimir Genov
costume designer: Maitia Tziboulka

with: Boyka Velkova and Stefan Spassov

Premiere – Vazrazhdane Theatre, Sofia, October 2011.

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THE NEW PANDORA:
DESIRE, MONSTER, THEATRE

Boyan Manchev

Who is the new Pandora talking about?

What does the new Pandora want?

When panic grips you in the noon of life’s journey, don’t ask what Pandora wants: Pandora wants you.

Inhuman Theatre

Frankenstein is a creature of summer, a creature of the frenzy of life.

The Sahara of Humans, that’s you, Frankenstein, i.e., not their devastation, but their enormity, their frenzy. Humans’ inhumanity does not precede them, nor does it come after them. It surpasses them –in every organ, in every cell.

What would a theatre be without humans? A scene of the inhuman? Theatre has its origins in this very question, which opened up a space for the monster called human to become itself, to unfold the hell of its forms.

Theatre of Desire

Inhuman theatre is a theatre of boundless desire – the desire that exceeds the human being. In boundless desire there is no hope for an exit, for an exodus. Desire is a Monster.

A theatre of desire, not a theatre of frustrated desire. End of the family romance. The sub-ject as pro-ject: pro-metheus, pan-dora, methe-or.

We begin anew, there where desire has no limits – it is this space that theatre ravishes, the scene opened in it becomes obscene, an obscene placenta in which grow new organs for experimenting the human.

Mary Shelley’s mistake was that she mixed the frenetic excess of desire with the workings of conflict. Having created a monster, she used the toolkit of banal conflict to lock it in the cage of Enlightenment didactic rhetoric. But the images of the inhuman haunted her and broke through the bars: ice, a frozen world, darkness, limit.

The desire to create a new body is driven by the unlimited economy of desire. A theatre of desire is a theatre without conflict. A theatre without conflict is a theatre of splitting, a theatre of rupture. How is theatre possible without conflict? How is desire possible without conflict?

Frankenstein’s logic is Pygmalionian. Frankenstein created his creature as his double, as his extension. An auto-erotic act triggered not so much by narcissism as by the impossibility of restraining one’sdesire within oneself, the inevitable outlet of desire that “gifts” an object to itself in an attempt to return to itself, i.e., to confront the real; but this object is always elusive. The only antagonist of desire is its impossible object.

Frankenstein’s tragedy is a tragedy of desire, the double bind it is caught in: on the one hand, the impossibility of not creating the paradoxical object of desire, on the other the impossibility of possessing this object. On the one hand, the impossibility of retaining the object, of exceeding the body; on the other hand, the impossibility of appropriating the object. In order to attain the object, one must eliminate desire as a mediator, but it is desire that produces the object. Hence desire must burn itself out, hide itself as a mediator so that the object can be absolutely attained, but then it is no longer an object, it is no longer other, it is the same.

That is why the splitting in two, the cutting axis of the limit, is the divided centre of this theatre. Subject and object appear as doubles – Frank and Stein, Pan and Dora – doubles yearning to fill all their holes. But the more holes desire opens up in its object, the more monstrous the object’s body becomes; the more perfect, complete and completed it becomes, the greater the impossibility of seducing it; it cannot be mastered because the desire that creates a monstrous object, that creates a new body, cannot satisfy that body. That body, as the body of Mary Shelley’s Monster shows, defieslaw and order because it is a body of desire that exceeds this law and this order: it strives towards the boundary, towards the limit. It is a body at the limit.

If the logic of conflict is a logic of openness, the logic of desire is a logic without an exit, without an opening at the end, without catharsis. There is no possibility of a final turn, no possibility of returning to oneself: an endless progression which, being endless, is absolute closedness.

That is why the monster will continue its journey towards the limit of the end.

A monster is what carries the limit. It will not reach itself, therefore the limit will always be pushed further away. The movement towards the pole, towards the polar cap frozen in ice, the movement of the pursuit of the monster, is analogous to the endless movement of a perversion that seeks ever-greater sensual pleasure, but the more complex its dispositive is, the more complex the technique it invents is, the more the possibility of an end, of attainment of the object, of a climax, is pushed further away; any logic of orgasm, of catharsis and sublimation, of purification or elevation, is pushed away. There is no dialectic in the logic of desire. Despite or precisely because it is a logic of radical negativity. The work of desire is the incessant work of subverting any possibility of a shore or haven. Bodies driven by desire devise monstrous techniques in which they recreate themselves as unattainable new bodies, exceeding themselves to attain this impossible pushing away.

“‘My work is nearly complete. (…) I shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been. (…)’ He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.”

(Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus)

The logic of desire is not a logic of death; Eros and Thanatos no longer play their dramatic game. The logic of desire is a logic of immortality: immortality as closedness, as the impossibility of an exit, as the impossibility of a breakthrough, the breakthrough of death. The frenetic puncturing, the panic of puncturing the body is the panic of the impossibility of collapsing, of crashing down to the bottom, of ever reaching the bottom as the bottom is knocked off: this is an endless fall further and further down, there is no cone, there is no point at which the cone breaks, there is no exit on the other side. When you slide down the hairs on the thighs of the frozen Lucifer, you will find yourself in another hole. Hell is like a black hole, a puncture in another surface.

It doesn’t lead to the grave, it doesn’t lead to the stone. The stone comes out of there all the time. Stones don’t enter, they aren’t the immanence that swallows the wolf and is sewn into its belly, remaining there; they come out all the time. They don’t knock the bottom off, they come out of the bottom, those stones. Desire is the very bottom that springs forth: it is the river of negativity. That is why Mary Shelley was hit by the stone. She wanted to resurrect the dead, to bring the dead back to life, to bring back the child as a cavity. But in reality there is no cavity, there is no dead, desire is a persistent life that constantly propels itself forward, trans-gressing, thrashing about, pro-metheus, in this endless perversion of creation.

If Frankenstein is a tragedy, it is an inverted tragedy. The drama of desire can also be called poetry (or oratorio: not a theatre that recites, but a theatre that chants), because poetry is the excess of language driven by desire, the excess that doesn’t reach the limit, that returns to itself without hitting itself.

That is why the desire-chanting theatre splits: it doesn’t go beyond the limit, but discovers the limit within the limit. It deepens the boundary in-between, the boundary from which desire draws its power.

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause.”

(Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or)

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text: Ani Vaseva, Boyan Manchev (including fragments by Lautréamont)
director: Ani Vaseva
dramaturge: Boyan Manchev
stage design: Aglika Terzieva
photography and graphic design: Ivan Donchev
music: Yana Mancheva
sound engineer: Dobromir Hristoskov

with: Viara Kolarova (then Ekaterina Stoyanova/Galya Kostadinova), Leonid Yovchev, Petar Genkov
and the voices of Valentin Ganev and Ekaterina Stoyanova

Premiere – November 2010, the fridge, Sofia

A DYING PLAY operates in the space between macabre romantic metaphysics, black comedy and political satire, while parodying the conventional theatre forms in a spectacle that oscillates between the impossibility of death and its apocalyptic excess.

A DYING PLAY is also a play about the actors: a play about the masquerade of the theatre hell; a play about the limits of the stage. Where the play dies and only the panopticon of the synthetic monsters remains.

“We, who wanted justice, we know today: our desire have devastated us. Our body is out of joints, our organs are off the rails, we know in every cell of our body: we are dead”.

– – –

A Dying Play was created with the support of the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture and the fridge.

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exhibition with the collection of Sofia City Gallery, part of The Other Eye, a curatorial project of Maria Vassileva
curators: Ani Vaseva, Boryana Rossa, Monika Vakarelova
photographs from the exhibition: Georgi Sharov

Sofia City Gallery, April – June 2013.

“The Other Eye” is a series of exhibitions by the idea of Maria Vassileva, where non-art historians and non-curators are invited to work with the Sofia City Art Gallery museum collection. The project aims to look beyond traditional interpretations of history and, possibly, “unearth” somewhat forgotten works, and also trace new links connecting the latter.
The Other Eye project is designed to fight precisely the inertia in viewing and interpreting. It includes in the dialogue with museum exhibits people who exercise their imaginations in other cultural fields or who are not burdened with narrow specialized knowledge. We rely on their fresh gaze to offer us surprising discoveries and to build new contexts for familiar works.
Ani Vaseva, Boryana Rossa and Monika Vakarelova juxtapose different views and perceptions about the collection which, albeit conflicting at first sight, find multiple points of intersection. Their gaze moves between the drama of the bleak reality and the timelessness of the reality that-may-have-been, between expectation and action, between the existent and the non-existent; it explores the storage rooms and tries to discover works with a “dual foundation” (as Ani Vaseva puts it). The world of art is made up of many worlds – as, in fact, is life itself. Ani, Boryana and Monika mark a territory of their own over the decades and offer it to us as one of the many possible routes through time and space.
The exhibition features approximately one hundred works by artists from different eras and trends from the late 19th century to the present day, performed in various techniques – painting, graphics, sculpture, photography, video, object. Among the authors are Georgi Danchov, Ivan Mrkvicka, Andrey Nikolov, Tsanko Lavrenov, Pencho Balkanski, Veselin Staikov, Binka Vazova, Stefan Gatsev, Georgi Baev, Lika Yanko, Vassil Simittchiev, Stanislav Pamukchiev, Margarita Pueva, Edmond Demirdjian, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Ivan Moudov, Stefaniia Batoeva and others.

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– – –

S was created with the support of Sofia Municipality and Biveda Association.

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…

…

Ani Vaseva

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based on Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment
text: Ani Vaseva, in collaboration with Boyan Manchev
dramatourge: Boyan Manchev
director: Ani Vasevva
stage designer: Venelin Shurelov
costume designer: Nelli Miteva
photographer: Ivan Donchev

with: Hristo Petkov, Iva Sveshtarova, Elena Dimitrova, Borche Gjakovski, Petar Genkov

That was the graduating performance of Ani Vaseva. Premiere – TL Sfumato, November 2008.

The tragedy is the genre of the inevitable: of destiny. Svidrigaylov speaks about the inevitability of the image: about the violence of its presence we cannot escape.

The image crushes us, nails us, kills us. It is the only air we are breathing, the air that suffocates us.

The Gothic visions are too soft for Dostoevsky; he is the forerunner of the inorganic fetishes hard-core that blinds us at the end of the world. In this apocalyptic world, world at the end of the world, world of harrowing intensivity, world of unlimited reversibility, i.e. perversion, the turn, the reverse is impossible.

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director: Ana Vaseva
video: Ana Vaseva, Ivan Ikonomov, Valeria Ciao, Mia Momichlova

with: Margarita Petrova, Milena Stanojevich, Mia Momchilova, Stella Krusteva.

Premiere – AiRspace, Sofia, February 2008.

Praesentiae explores the way other, extrinsic bodies co-exist in a person’s body. The performance is an exploration that goes through the body and the image – experience of the body as a container of the presence of other people, emerging on its surface.

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ANI VASEVA

BOYAN MANCHEV

LEONID YOVCHEV

PARTNERS

CONTACT

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Phone:
+359 877 791790

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