THE STAGE SPEAKS: STEFANI HANDJIYSKA

She thinks of her biography as a series of totally unrelated short books. She has a degree in Theater of Movement from the National Academy of Theater and Film Arts and holds a master's degree in contemporary dance from the London School of Contemporary Dance. She has choreographed projects in England, Bulgaria, Egypt, Vietnam. In 2020 she was selected for the program of the Vienna International Dance Festival ImPulsTanz.

Beloved movement

When I was a child, I promised myself that I would become an astronaut or a dancer. It seemed to me that the two were somehow equal – as an astronaut you see the beauty and infinity of space, and as a dancer you create a small version of outer space on stage. Becoming an astronaut proved a little more difficult so I became a dancer.

Contemporary dance...

... allows the artist to be a creator and author compared to the more traditional forms, where you're replicating already existing messages, meanings and movements. A contemporary dance artist needs a community of strong colleagues and funding.

Photographer: Christophe Flemin

Here...

The Bulgarian dance scene needs serious recognition and investment. Artists and collectives in Bulgaria are extremely strong and resilient to be able to create work in this context. There is a lack of spaces and a serious funding shortfall. Festivals in Bulgaria make heroic efforts and create quality programming in an extremely difficult context. The state has made it so the development of dance falls mainly on the shoulders of artists, and I admire them very much for the work that they do, but at some point everything starts to resemble a dark satirical novel.

Projects with a capital P

My favorite project is 84 Conversations, which we did this year at DNA with Kosta Karakashyan, Yasen Vassilev, Georgi Atanasov and Ralitsa Toneva. In it we look for the "market value" of dance. This is an impossible task, because dance is not a commodity, but it grows within a system of exchange of goods. Viewers have a "currency" and must invest and buy the "raw material" of dance. It is absurd. Opinions about the show were extremely polarized, the negative ones confirmed the things we wanted to achieve in this study, and I am very pleased with the whole process.

In the future