August Strindberg: THE DANCE OF DEATH

The Theater Laboratory Sfumato was founded in 1989 by the estimable Bulgarian director and theatrical pedagogues, Margareta Mladenova and Ivan Dobchev. Their aim was to be resistant to the conventional and deadly theater whose mission ends at the very moment when the show appears before an audience. The performances on their repertoire are products of a long-term workshop process of activity, which through inquiry into concrete texts or themes endeavor to revive the enactment of creative activity, release the suppressed energetic and spiritual potentials, and take the theater back to the sphere of the ritual as an intermediary between chaotic experiences and cosmic principles. Through his performance Sfumato often attempts to articulate the inarticulate, hence his credo is to describe by means of plainly formulated sentences: Sfumato is a technique of painting air. With his projects, in which he regularly engages artists and performers of younger generations, Sfumato has appeared at numerous festivals throughout the entire world, and the audience of Rijeka remembers him in particular from the performance entitled Black Fleece, the dramatic work that was winner of the 8th Small Stage Festival. Today the Sfumato Theater has the status of a state theaterlaboratory, whereas his permanent home in the broader center of Sofia has grown into an international center for research, creativeness and presentation. The repertoire segment covered by the works of Mladenova and Dobchev is recognizable by their insistency on cycles of connected performances that allow a more thorough contemplation of a certain theme, opus or artistic iography. The Dance of Death performance is a component part of a three-part project called To Damascus, connected to the life and work of Swedish author August Strindberg. Written in 1901, the drama Dance of Death is a bizarre portrayal of the relationship between old military officer and his wife, into whose islander loneliness, full of hatred, a third person gets involved. With three splendid actors, Margarita Mladenova has transformed this drama into a poetical onstage fresco, interweaving elements of naturalistic theater, hallucinatory phantasmagoria and theater of the absurd in a most enchanting way.

General characteristics of Miss Julia and Dance of Death: An unromantic and shameless view of Man between Eros and Thanatos. Miss Julia: Boiling the erotic down to something disgusting and humiliating. Death as an outlet. ut still "tell me that you love me" subsists! ears after the Dance of Death. - Can you love the ugly face of your fellow man? (Dostoyevsky) - I can't; that surpasses my strength. (Strindberg) Love is disguised in hate. Hate as passion, as a form of life, as a means of injuring. Death is not getting closer; she has arrived long ago; and has been here for a long time. Death as life. A living death. She dances with us. And we dance with her. As if all lives had been done away with, all lives, all lives... (Chekov), and only the three of them stayed on Earth: Edgar, Alice and Kurt. Infected with the same contagious disease that a stay in quarantine could not forestall. Infected with hatred... From there to the absurdly ridiculous and tragic, to the Endgame (Beckett), is just a step away...
Margarita Mladenova