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”.
“Throughout life, we constantly delude ourselves that things are this or that way, that they are “as they are”. Yet space flows just as much as time does. The earth is not stable, the earth rotates at one thousand five hundred kilometers per hour, the earth flies around the sun at one hundred thousand kilometers per hour. The earth, the symbol of stability, hurtles through space at a speed we cannot even imagine, one thousand five hundred by one hundred thousand. The earth’s core is growing, its interior and surface are restless. Everything is in perpetual motion. Whence, then, the illusion of stability? Everything around us is falling, flying, tumbling, flowing, scattering. Nothing ever stands still.
The atom is much more nothing than something. Protons, electrons and neutrons, though very different in size from each other, are all very tiny, infinitesimal, the rest of the volume of the atom being empty space. The atom is a void with particles darting about in it. We are made of atoms, therefore we are more empty than full. But then how are we substantial? How do we live as solid bodies in a solid world, how do we push, hit, hurt, tear each other apart? How can you exist at all? How can you have shape and substance if atoms are more empty than full? You close your eyes and feel how the structure of your building blocks becomes porous, how you merge first with the objects around you, then with larger objects, buildings, streets, highways, road networks, cities, mountains, fields, continents, oceans… Some whim, a quirk in the physical laws of some here-and-now that is entirely questionable and random, and that may disappear at any moment or its laws may change, has determined that these atoms connect in this particular way and not in any other. That you can differentiate yourself from your environment and not freely blend into it, that you are constrained within your skin, that your hair cannot grow into the wall or the pillow.
It is a fiction that things are the same, that our body is one and unchanging. We are the sort of things that do not stretch but break. Yet we are changeable, fluid, unstable. We just need to be caught at the right moment. And in the right place. The theatre is the right place, and it brings together within itself a series of right moments. There the fissures of matter and its illusions can open up. Theatre itself is constantly changing its form, it is metamorphic. Form is an illusion. “The cloud is not a changing form; the cloud is a persisting change,”[1] writes Boyan Manchev (on his critique of the transformation of change, metamorphosis and process into a flexible ideology and its connection to neoliberal discourses, practices and economies, see The End of Contemporary Art? [in Bulgarian], Sofia: Metheor, 2023). Theatre is cloudy. Theatre is capable of changing and persisting at the same time. Theatre as the reproduction of established forms is as much a fiction as is the stationary earth.On stage, there is both space and time for change to unfold, enabling us to see and feel the earth fly at a hundred thousand kilometers an hour, to visualize and illuminate the fact that our idea of possible and impossible, of usual and strange, of cause and effect, of luck and chance, of predestination and destiny, is old and weak. We need strong ideas to think the world.
The fixed body with its unchanging functions, reproduction and procreation, gender, are weak, feeble ideas. We are beyond gender and beyond form, we are where miraculous organs thrive, where sexual organs don’t serve, don’t serve for reproduction, aren’t subject to violence and rupture, don’t turn subjects into objects, aren’t divided into stupid and helpless pairs of opposites. Our understanding of gender, our expectation that our organs should be permanent is obsolete, the constructs in which we clothe our scattered, sensitive, multi-organ, multiple bodies are ineffective.
Our idea of form is weak. Our idea of metamorphosis is stronger, it can make up for the deficiency of form. Metamorphosis is where form is lost and found as new. There, where form is outside itself.”
Ani Vaseva
[1] Boyan Manchev, Clouds. Philosophy of the Free Body, Sofia: Metheor, transl. by Katerina Popova, 2020, p. 19.
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A Dying Play was created with the support of the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture and the fridge.