The Hollins University innovative M.F.A. dance program provides students with a wide range of experiences and opportunities, mentorships, and exposure to others in the international dance field. The director of M.F.A. Dance, Professor and Chair, is Jeffery N. Bullock.

Beginning summer 2025, the program’s three weeks of international study and immersion took place in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, curated by the European Summer Semester co-directors Boyan Manchev and Ani Vaseva, in collaboration with Jeffery Bullock.

The space for learning, reflecting and dancing was created by the directors, co-curators and professors Jeffery N. Bullock, Boyan Manchev and Ani Vaseva, the renowned international team of professors Adrian Heathfield, Kae Ishimoto, Sigal Zouk, Sergiu Matis, Laurie Young and the wonderful, engaged star-students Terese Cardamon, Destiney Daniels, Francesca Harman, Abby Owens, Quentin Sledge, Daintry TenNapel, Keith Wilson, Clarricia Golden, William Isaac, Hamilton Nieh, Shane Ohmer, Kayla Brown, Ashley Taylor Cesiro, Fabiola Sanchez Huidobro, Caley Vancil, Devin Baker, BreAnna Bellamy, Jalisa Johnson, Natasha Keckley, Laquangela Littleton, Katherine Nettles, Brianna Wilson, Catri Barba, Antonia Dougherty, Shadidja Parker and Noelani Schraedel.

Hollins M.F.A. Dance Summer Study Plovdiv 2025 was organized by Metheor, with the engaged assistance of the support team: Gina Kafedzhian, Katrin Metodieva, Leonid Yovchev, Stefan Donchev and Iva Zaharieva.

Photo and video: Ivan Nikolov

The post HOLLINS DANCE PLOVDIV 2025 first appeared on Мetheor.

cast: Leonid Yovchev and Katrin Metodiev

premiere: TAM, Veliko Tarnovo, 24 November, 2025

Yokai is produced with the financial support of the National Culture Fund, in partnership with TAM, Veliko Tarnovo.

The post YOKAI first appeared on Мetheor.

Based on Homer's Iliad

Director: Ani Vaseva
Actor: Leonid Yovchev
Consultant: Boyan Manchev
Graphic design: Katrin Metodiev

A poem of force, according to Simone Weil, for centuries the Iliad has continued to fascinate readers, scholars, and artists with its strange, disturbing intertwining of seemingly life-affirming, yet bloodthirsty energy, the heroism of despicable characters and the indiscriminate malice of merciless gods, boundless violence and cruelty, and the incongruous irresponsibility and childishness of the world of heroes. Succumbing to the charm of the archetype of superhero stories, we are ready to draw into the dizzying whirlpool of the Iliad all those tempted by the borderlands between air, earth and underworld.

What is the Iliad? An epic of the unforgettable ones, a satire of pettiness, a landscape of cruelty with no horizon of escape? Once unleashed, violence refuses to end. It will not stop until it has swept everything away, until it has burned everything to the ground, until it has gnawed everything down to its roots and foundations. The theater of war is not (only) a stage for heroism and self-sacrifice; it is also a stage for pettiness, meanness, and cowardice, which are incompatible with the tragedy. Incompatible and yet coexisting with it. But since the Iliad is not just a military epic, but also a poetic territory of fantasy, a space where everyone encountered may be a monster or a god, metamorphoses and miracles persist amid the battles.

The Iliad is a fundamental work of world literature. It is an epic poem about the forces that govern the fate of humanity, an encyclopedia of the mythological world, but also an anthology of human passions. For millennia, the Iliad has remained a text that resonates in the present world. The work represents historical and cultural value not only with its enduring contemporaneity, but also with its poetic techniques, subject of unrelenting and dramatically intense research interest.

The Iliad is part of Metheor's long-term project Proteids. In our creative interpretation, proteids are metamorphic forces, similar to Proteus, the ancient Greek deity intrinsically linked to metamorphosis. The name synthesises our theatrical and literary experience of working with that which has no form and is in constant change. This is, first and foremost, theatre itself – always changing, never the same even in repetition. This is also our approach to the selected literary texts. We transform them into theater not (only) by translating them from one language to another (from written to spoken, from literary to theatrical), but by transforming them on stage, taking advantage of their potential, incorporating parallel texts and metatexts, analyses and later versions, as well as our own understanding of the world of the work. The result is a text-in-change, a text-theater, a protean text, a theatrical performance that comments on theater itself as what it essentially is—action, change.

The beginning of what was then called Let's Play Literature, before we renamed the series to Proteids,  was laid in 2021, with Gogol's The Nose and The Overcoat. The driving force behind the series was the desire to overcome the barrier between the great works of classical literature and their new readers, due mainly to the obsolescence of language and the difficulty for younger readers to penetrate the world of the work. But during those five years—years in which we created performances in the same series based on Ovid's Metamorphoses, Goethe's Faust, and Homer's Iliad—the result far exceeded our intentions. In the process of researching and creating the performances, we discovered that we were no longer working to facilitate access, but to follow our desire for a new kind of encounter with literature and theater, to reveal the hidden, to play with imagination and matter, to share our excitement about this miraculous encounter between literature and theater, in which everything is as much turned towards eternity as it is fleeting.

The Iliad is funded by the Sofia Municipality's "Culture" program and is produced by Metheor in partnership with Goethe-Institut Bulgaria.

The post THE ILIAD – PROTEIDS first appeared on Мetheor.

director: Ani Vaseva
actor: Leonid Yovchev

The series Proteids experiments on classical literature with theatrical methods.

The post FAUST – PROTEIDS first appeared on Мetheor.

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.

The post THEATER MANAGER’S HANDBOOK first appeared on Мetheor.

Trailer

Part I. - Hoffman 

 

Part II. - Der Sandmann

 

Part III. - Heimlich/ Uncheimlich 

 

Part IV. - Automata

 

Part V. - Anselmus 

 

Part VI. - Atlantis

 

Part VII. - Kosmos 

The post ATLANTIS VIDEO SERIES first appeared on Мetheor.

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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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 starring: 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, 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.

The post THE ENCHANTED FOREST first appeared on Мetheor.

For a second year in a row The European Summer Study Program of Hollins Dance MFA (Virginia, USA) is taking place in Plovdiv, Bulgaria between 8th and 26th July 2024, in collaboration with Metheor. Boyan Manchev and Ani Vaseva are co-curating the program, together with the MFA Hollins Dance director Jeffery Bullock. The program includes broad spectrum of highly professional tutors, among whom leading contemporary choreographers, theorists, critics and dramaturges such as Jonathan Burrows, Jeffery Bullock, Adrian Heathfield, Kae Ishimoto, Sigal Zouk, Laurie Young, Sergiu Matis, Thomas Greil, Nikolay Korchev, Boyan Manchev and Ani Vaseva. The visual artist Boryana Rossa participates in the program with a guest lecture, and Angel Simitchiev – with a music workshop.

"At Hollins, dance majors learn to think of dance as a dynamic form, full of possibilities for growth and innovation. Members of the dance community are encouraged to discover, refine, and celebrate who they are as artists. The program offers outstanding technique classes and an eclectic visiting-artist roster. Opportunities to perform and craft are abundant."

“We will be in great hands with Boyan and Ani. They are both amazing artists and radical thinkers.” Jeffery Bullock

WWW.HOLLINS.EDU

The post HOLLINS DANCE PLOVDIV 2024 first appeared on Мetheor.

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

Trailer

Full movie

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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.

The post KAZE first appeared on Мetheor.

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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 

The post ATLANTIS first appeared on Мetheor.

The post A DAY THAT HAS EVERYTHING first appeared on Мetheor.

A visual poem by BOYAN MANCHEV

in collaboration with 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.

The post TERRA ULTIMA first appeared on Мetheor.

Maelstrom. Introduction to the Spiral Panic

audiovisual immersive installation

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

The post MAELSTROM first appeared on Мetheor.

The post UPCOMING first appeared on Мetheor.

FEBRUARY 2026
05.02 - FAUST, Goethe-Institut, Sofia, 19:00

DECEMBER 2025
01.12 - ILIAD, Goethe-Institut, Sofia, 19:00

NOVEMBER 2025
11.11 - METAMORPHOSES, Goethe-Institut, Sofia, 19:00
20.11 - FAUST, Goethe-Institut, Sofia, 19:00
24.11 - YOKAI - TAM, Veliko Tarnovo

OCTOBER 2025
09.10- ILIAD, Goethe-Institut, Sofia, 19:00
10.10 - ILIAD, Goethe-Institut, Sofia, 19:00

AUGUST 2025
15.08 - METAMORPHOSES, Varusha South, Veliko Tarnovo

JUNE 2025
16.06 - FAUST, Goethe-Institut, Sofia

APRIL 2025
03.04 - METAMORPHOSES, Ancient theatre, Plovdiv
11.04 - METAMORPHOSES, Goethe-Institut, Sofia

DECEMBER 2024
05.12 – Boyan Manchev, lecture, Eros Unbound. Modal Ontology and the Alteration of the World, Tokyo University
17.12 – Metheor and Ratio, Lovecraft - The Unexplicable - Stroeja, Sofia

NOVEMBER 2024
01.11 - KAZE, ТАМ, Veliko Tarnovo
03.11 - KAZE, ReBonkers, Varna
09.11 - METAMORPHOSES, ТАМ, Veliko Tarnovo
10.11 - METAMORPHOSES, ТАМ, Veliko Tarnovo
25.11 - THE ENCHANTED FOREST - premiere - Goethe-Institut, Sofia

MARCH 2024
08.03 - METAMORPHOSES, Goethe-Institut, Sofia

NOVEMBER 2022
15.11 - ATLANTIS, Goethe Institut, Sofia

NOVEMBER 2023
14.11 - METAMORPHOSES, Swimming Pool, Sofia
15.11 - METAMORPHOSES, Swimming Pool, Sofia
15.11 - premiere of THEATRE OF MIRACLES by Ani Vaseva, Swimming Pool, Sofia
23.11 - KAZE - premiere - Goethe-Institut, Sofia

NOVEMBER 2022
15.11 - ATLANTIS, Goethe Institut, Sofia

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

The post PAST first appeared on Мetheor.

The post EX CORPORE first appeared on Мetheor.

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

The post THEATRE OF MIRACLES BY ANI VASEVA first appeared on Мetheor.

printing: Simolini-94

Meteor, Sofia, May 2023

Boyan Manchev: WHAT IS ONTOLOGY?
Dimitar Vatsov: SHORT METAPHYSICS

The book "What is Ontology? Counter-Definitions" presents and elaborates experimentally central philosophical categories while outlining the horizon of an original ontological program. The peculiar experience is based on the long-standing exchange between Dimitar Vatsov and Boyan Manchev, two philosophers united by the effort to restore the positivity of philosophical thinking: its power to affirm and persist in the world. To this end, they offer "counter" definitions of key metaphysical and/or ontological concepts - existence, being, world, energy, matter, form, time and space, modality, subject - critically reworking their essentialist rudiments so that they can continue to operate in a dynamic mode. The result of the dual effort is a complex "binuclear" theory - a complex unity of two converging in a number of dimensions, yet nonetheless non-identical concepts. The convergences and divergences between them contribute to the multidimensional, "relief", dialogical and experimental unfolding of the fundamental object of study.

The book is aimed at philosophers, specialists in the humanitarian field and students, as well as at the general public interested in philosophical issues. Its innovative nature allows the high theory and individual theses of the two authors to be reworked into an accessible and engaging read. For these reasons, the book is not only an original contribution to Bulgarian philosophy and the humanities, but it is also well-timed reading at a time of crisis of values and concepts, when rethinking the basic categories of our culture and our world is more urgent than ever.

"This book is a kind of manifesto of modal ontology. An ontology of transformation.
In the first place, it is not only about redefining ontology, but about redefining being. Being is interpreted energetically as a modal interaction of forces. Second, this new ontology requires a rethinking of the subject in a way that ontologizes the subject and subjectivates the existent.

There is a courage that can only be expressed and thought as philosophy. There is a philosophy that requires courage. Having overcome both metaphysics and postmetaphysical thinking, Boyan Manchev and Dimitar Vatsov set out on a journey into an unknown ocean that no one has the right to ignore anymore."

-Darin Tenev

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

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scientific editing and foreword: Ani Vaseva

graphic design: Teodora Venedikova

font: Spectral by Jean-Baptiste Levee (Production Type) © 2017
by The Spectral Project Authors

format: 16 / 60 / 84 Printer: Simolini-94

Meteor, Sofia, 2022

ISBN: 978-619-7291-32-2

Constant Coquelin is one of the most famous actors of the late nineteenth century. No less famous is his lecture "Art and the Actor", which he gave in various theatres in France and abroad. In 1880 his book Art and the Actor was published. After its appearance, The Art and the Actor became one of the most widely read and quoted books on acting. The book has played a key role in the debate about the position of the actor in the theatre, and in the controversy over which is the 'true' way of acting - a controversy in which figures such as Diderot and Stanislavsky have taken part, a controversy that has carried through the centuries from Antoine to Craig, from Artaud to Grotowski.

The book is published with the financial support of the National Culture Fund.

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font: Spectral by Jean-Baptiste Levée

format: 145 / 180 mm

printing: Simolini-94

"Meteor, Sofia, 2022

ISBN: 978-619-7291-33-9

On June 8, 1614. Pietro della Valle, a young Roman nobleman, sets out for the East as a pilgrim to the Holy Land. But the voyage of the future discoverer of the cultures of the East is irrepressibly transformed into a horizontal descent into Hell - each further passage to the East opens up a new circle of hell.

After twelve years, the circle of De Vale's odyssey closes: on March 28, 1626, a ghostly Eurydice returns to the Eternal City of Shadows.

Boyan Manchev's philosophical poem can be read as an allegorical account of the fate of the body; of what is to come; of music. But there is also an echo of music beyond any narrative - music that transcends time, breath:

The Sibyl sings.

The book is published with the financial support of the National Culture Fund.

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16/70/100, paperback, 354 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2022

ISBN 978-619-7291-31-5

The post ELEMENT AND ORDER. KOREAN TRADITIONAL MUSIC CULTURE IN THE 15TH-16TH CENTURIES BY YANA MANCHEVA first appeared on Мetheor.

translation: Ani Vaseva

graphic concept and layout: Teodora Venedikova/Meteor

cover: strx (A fragment of a photograph of endothelial cells from a human umbilical cord was used for the cover.)

photo on the cover: Ashwin Inala and Eileen Shiuan

font: Spectral by Jean-Baptiste Levée (Production Type) © 2017 by The Spectral Project Authors

format: 32 / 70 / 100

printing: Simolini-94

"Meteor, Sofia, 2022

ISBN: 978-619-7291-34-6

The first volume of the selected works of H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) presents not only the work of one of the most bizarre authors of the last century, but also his biography, his eccentric philosophical ideas, the artistic and scientific context of his work, and last but not least, his monstrous pantheon.

Herald of extra-cosmic worlds invading the "real" world, Lovecraft also invented their artistic form. He himself insists on his unique place in modern literature as the creator of the method of absolute realism or infinite cosmism.

In addition to a new translation of one of Lovecraft's most significant late works, the novella Dreams in the Lizard House (1933), presented in the context of its origins, this edition includes Lovecraft's letters, a study by Boyan Manchev, and valuable material for both loyal fans and anyone about to discover the vast world of the Providence oddity for the first time.

"How do we know if this form of atomic and molecular motion called "life" is the highest of all forms? Perhaps the dominant being-the most intelligent and godlike of all creatures-is an invisible gas! Or perhaps it is a flaming and luminous mass of molten stardust. Who can say that men have souls while rocks have none?"
H. P. Lovecraft

The time has come for H. P. Lovecraft to shine with all its dark brilliance.

The book is published with the financial support of the National Culture Fund.

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painting on the cover: Boris Delchev

16/60/90, paperback, 504 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2022

ISBN: 978-619-7291-27-8

language: Bulgarian

The book is dedicated to the theater of desire and pleasure. "On stage, anything is possible. That's why we choose the impossible" The edition contains conceptual, ideological and methodological texts about the productions of Metheor in the period 2010 - 2019. The book includes photographs from all the performances, as well as texts by Boyan Manchev, Leonid Yovchev, Monika Vakarelova and Georgi Tenev.

Second, expanded and revised edition of "Meteor 2010-2019", published in
2021 with the financial support of the National Culture Fund.

The post METHEOR. THEATER OF THE IMPOSSIBLE BY ANI VASEVA first appeared on Мetheor.

graphic design: Metheor

105/165, paperback, 120 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2022

ISBN: 978-619-7291-29-2

Language: Bulgarian

The post THE STILLBORN BY MICHEL SURYA first appeared on Мetheor.

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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font: minion; font of titles: Fira Sans

printing: Simolini-94

Meteor, Sofia, 2021

ISBN: 978-619-7291-26-1

Is the end of contemporary art in the near future? If what we define as "contemporary art" is a historical category, it has limited historical validity. Are we witnessing the exhaustion of that validity? What is the historical horizon of contemporary art - and therefore its limit?

The book "The End of Contemporary Art?" attempts to confront these ultimate questions. It introduces both a historical perspective (i.e., it would also be useful as an introduction to the problematics of contemporary art) and a critical, original analytical vision; it foregrounds processes that can also be seen as symptomatic of contemporary social and political dynamics. In this perspective, the thesis of a radical transformation, if not a gradual but irreversible exhaustion, of the driving forces and forms of aesthetic practice defined as "contemporary art" in the last half-century is presented and argued.

The critical analysis is based on a number of representative examples from the field of contemporary art, as well as influential theories and attitudes in contemporary philosophy, political and economic theory and art history. The book is thus aimed at both a specialist audience of those involved in contemporary art and a wider public with an interest in contemporary culture.

Boyan Manchev is a philosopher and art theorist, lecturer at the NBU (Sofia) and the University of the Arts (Berlin), author of twenty books published in seven languages. Manchev has participated in numerous artistic projects and forums in the field of contemporary art - both in alternative contexts and in some of the leading institutions in Europe, Asia and America.

The book is published with the financial support of the National Culture Fund.

The post THE END OF CONTEMPORARY ART (OR THE FUTURE OF ART) BY BOYAN MANCHEV first appeared on Мetheor.

60x90/16, paperback with dust jacket, 604 pages

Metheor, Sofia, 2020

ISBN: 978-619-7291-19-3

Do things in theatre happen for real? Are events in theatre real? Does theatre lie? What’s the difference between “for real”/“truly” and “truth” in theatre? Questions whose answers we supposedly know – in theatre, things aren’t “as in life”. And yet, theatre is life. Theatre is a place of miracles. Theatre is a place where we have the chance to experience life as another. Theatre and Truth sets out to explore the possibilities these questions open up to us. To discover how theatre both is and isn’t for real, and how this isn’t a lie.

In this book, lovers and scholars of acting, directing, theatre theory and history will also find analyses of 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 Coquelin, and why the actor can do anything. 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”.

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

The post THEATRE AND TRUTH BY ANI VASEVA first appeared on Мetheor.

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.

The post FREEDOM IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING BY BOYAN MANCHEV first appeared on Мetheor.

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.

The post THE VIRTUOSO OF LIFE BY BOYAN MANCHEV first appeared on Мetheor.

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

The post AXIOM AND GRIEF BY STANIMIR PANAYOTOV first appeared on Мetheor.

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)

The post WINTER: WITCHES, COMETS BY BOYAN MANCHEV first appeared on Мetheor.

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 Мetheor.

director: Ani Vaseva

actor: Leonid Yovchev

The Overcoat

The Nose

The director Ani Vaseva about the project

The post LET’S PLAY LITERATURE – GOGOL first appeared on Мetheor.

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 

The post FRÉDÉRIC NEYRAT: STAYING UNHUMAN: ON MARVEL AND HORROR first appeared on Мetheor.

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?

The post CLOUDS. PHILOSOPHY OF THE FREE BODY BY BOYAN MANCHEV (EN) first appeared on Мetheor.

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). 

The post THE NEW ATHANOR. PRINCIPLES OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL FANTASTIC BY BOYAN MANCHEV  first appeared on Мetheor.

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. 

The post DARK POEM BY BOYAN MANCHEV AND BORYANA PANDOVA first appeared on Мetheor.

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, 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.

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The Name

The group’s name – Metheor – has a triple dimension, three layers of meaning.

First, the obvious, direct, explicit dimension of the name: the meteor phenomenon. The Ancient Greek μετέωρος (from μετά, “amidst, between, among”, and ἀείρω, aeirô, “to raise, lift up”) means “high up, in the air”, “raising” or “rising”, “lofty”, as well as “to be exalted, excited, aroused”. Μετέωρος describes any celestial phenomenon, including the celestial bodies.

Of course, the brilliant, ephemeral body of the meteor – of the shooting star – was the leading metaphorical dimension of the name for us. In our early days as a group, we thought it accurately described our task – to illuminate the darkness around us, leaving a momentary trail – or even to burn up without a trail:

As the group’s name suggests, Metheor’s harbinger is the brilliant, ephemeral body of the meteor: unforeseen, unforeseeable, perhaps obscure and even ominous, but a miraculous body nonetheless. A body that may strike the earth, but that will most likely burn up in the sky, leaving behind nothing but a beautiful trail.

The second dimension of the name Metheor was and remains hidden. It has a somewhat playful dimension, but it is linked to Metheor’s idea of a strong theatre, a theatre that stands up for its thousands-year-old idea and mission – not in its rigid forms but in its polymorphous multiplicity and potentiality, instead of blurring and diluting it into formlessness and irrelevance.

The third dimension of the name Metheor is “esoteric” – it contains a hidden meaning which explains the enigmatic “h” added in the group’s name in the Latin script: Metheor. This apparent misspelling actually suggests an alternative reading of the Greek word μετέωρος, introducing the word θεωρός, theorós, “spectator” (related to θεωρίᾶ, theoria, “viewing, pleasure of viewing, spectacle, performance; contemplation”), but also meaning an envoy sent to consult an oracle – one who goes to receive a sign.

Ethos

Metheor’s experience was a response to and expression of the desire to create and exist “out in the open” – to experiment with forms of creativity and forms of existence. By “to experiment” I don’t mean “experimenting” in the sense of “experimental art”, now rendered banal by conventional usage (as if the attribute “experimental” in itself could valorize the object it refers to), but in its strong etymological dimension – an etymological dimension that makes the word “experiment” cognate with the word “experience” as well as with the word “existence”. And last but not least, with the word “pirate”. And so, the Metheor–experience was and is an experimental experience. A desire to experience, to test, to experiment, to embark on adventures, to roam the limits of the known and beyond them.

Firstly – experimenting with creative forms and ideology.

Metheor opened up and named a space for free experimentation, unrestricted by institutional frameworks and conventions, with forms of creative work – forms that are discussed below. But also with forms of knowledge production and processing, of seeking alternative forms of knowledge and transforming knowledge into creative practice; ultimately, of transmitting/teaching knowledge and models of knowledge.

Secondly – experimenting with another type of community.

What was at stake for Metheor was not just “cultivating an audience” but opening up the possibility of community: not a passive community of followers or fans, but an active community of like-minded people. The nature and modalities of our work, the questions, the aesthetic forms we were offering to share, had to be able to offer a basis for like-mindedness, for creative and friendly sharing, and ultimately for momentary sharing of images of world and life. Perhaps a like-mindedness with unknown friends, far away from us, in another time and space; “a people to come”, in Deleuze’s words; but also a possible future community here, among us, with us.

Forms of Life

The problem of community was key in this era. Of course, it had a hidden, probably utopian (micro-)political horizon. Community beyond the boundaries of institutions, community beyond institutions, but also an attempt to create alternative institutions. An attempt to challenge the established dominant structures as well as the pseudo-alternative ones. We were joined in this attempt by close friends and kindred spirits, university colleagues, students, artists, musicians, but also by complete strangers from different generations. Thus, this period saw the gradual creation of Metheor’s community of friends which, we are happy to say, exists to this day and is continuing to grow – a community of known and unknown like-minded people with whom we share more than the usual.

This experiment, this form of research and creativity, was also linked to a particular ethos of work, of research discipline: shared and wholehearted labour has always been the starting point of this sharing. This labour was based on an economy of friendship and generosity.

Questions, Problems, Tasks

Our shared work was also work on a certain range of questions that may be called philosophical, but which were immanent to the creative matter and form we were obsessed with; questions that obsessed us.

In the first place, this was and remains the question of desire. If desire – freedom – is at the heart of the creative experience, why does theatre always include it into the machinery of conflict that inevitably reworks it into impossibility, or tames it? What does it mean to desire without limit – to desire freedom without limit? Isn’t this utopian experiment, the experiment at a “general economy”, as Bataille puts it, an economy without accumulation of goods, the reason for the truly tragic experience – that is, for reaching the point of absolute catastrophe, absolute in the sense that it is not the result of counteraction and conflict, but of a force (striving, desire, technique, virtuosity, passion, love, life) taken to extremes? This is the question of Phaeton and Total Damage; it is also, in a sense, the problem of A Play for You and Maldoror, of Frankenstein and The Virtuoso of Life, of Lovecraft and Hijikata.

These questions – we may call them philosophical, or simply questions of existence – the questions of desire, necessity, freedom – were expanded and explored from various perspectives inspired by the obsessions shared with Ani and Leo. Hence the different experimental responses to this initial question – working with the idea of infantile pleasure that knows no limit (S, Total Damage), developing the idea and practice of counter-techniques that progressively took shape from Metheor’s very first performance onwards, especially after Leo’s inclusion and the formation of the Leo-Petar tandem (angels of technique from A Dying Play), expanded once again with Galya’s inclusion (the third version of A Dying Play), and culminating in the Leo-Galya tandem in Total Damage and the large casts of the later productions, Roadtrip to Hell and A Play About Us, as well as in the solo performances of Leo (A Play for You, with an appearance by Alexander Uzunov, Maldoror, Hijikata, the Samurai of the North) and Galya (The Alleater, with an appearance by Nino).

Theory and Practice

What theory are we talking about? First of all, about the investigation of the relevant materials, problem field, questions that we face, that are posed, that are not necessarily formulated explicitly in the text but that work through the text with the creative matter. Then, of course, about the work of selecting, reworking, developing, transforming the initial material.

The attitude described above towards Metheor’s creative and research process also informed our belief that theory is but a kind of practice that is equal in standing to “artistic practice”. It is no coincidence that the conceptual turn in the arts half a century ago identified theory as a practice that is equipollent to material artistic practice, erasing, as it were, the Kantian opposition between intuition and concept. We were not trying to create a contrived, artificially conceptual theatre, but to presuppose the equality of ideas and material plastic form. This preliminary work morphed naturally into experimentation with staging, whose phases and dimensions are described by Ani in her texts for the individual performances.

Working with Text

Every single project of Metheor – be it theatrical, visual or theoretical – has always involved long and thorough investigation of texts, archives, visual materials.

The critique of the dramatic conflict that is invariably accompanied by the desire to work with images and text has necessarily led Ani and all of us to work with “prose” texts, be they narrative or not: Dostoevsky, Lautréamont, Lovecraft, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, our own specially written texts, or early texts by Ani and fragments from my youth archives.

Techniques and Counter-Techniques. Theatre Oratorio and Musical Rhythm

Our work with form, involving a physicalization of language and vice versa, a transformation of the body that almost turns it into a linguistic structure, was a radicalization of Artaud’s line, an attempt to complicate it and to create a truly new theatrical language, and hence, a new theatrical form. At the same time, our work with the voice, with music beyond language, with rhythmic structures, was driven by our interest in a “strong” idea of theatre and its relationship to music.

Working with musical form as a form combining necessity and freedom, the extremely structured, composed nature of each work provided exceptional possibilities for realizing Ani’s visions.

The line of the theatre oratorio, as I called it, emerged in Metheor’s very first performances, in the chorus in The Eye, then in Sick, where Ani worked purposefully on the musical structure in collaboration with composer Asen Avramov, and was developed in the choruses of A Dying Play, Frankenstein and Phaeton, reaching its culmination in the polyphonic choruses of A Play About Us.

Theatrical Work

Each project of Metheor sought to invent a unique form based on experimental work with text and productive critical investigation of theatrical techniques. Metheor’s projects were defined by us and by the few insightful interpreters of our work as “theatre of disorganization”, “inhuman theatre” and “theatre oratorio”, and were based on a strong idea of theatre. This was also the reason for Ani’s resistance to defining our theatre as performance art, a concept she has subjected to an extensive genealogical analysis in her two voluminous monographs.

Metheor’s theatre projects are works of art. They are not theatre productions in the conventional sense – an application of material, an interpretation of a play – a pre-existing theatrical text; nor are they performance art in the sense of a one-off and ephemeral artistic action. Metheor’s theatre is undoubtedly connected to the line of thinking, developed by Antonin Artaud and his followers, of the theatrical spectacle as an autonomous work of art – a work that has all the characteristics of a work of the arts that are not defined as “performing” arts: it forms a singular art form, producing both its raison d’être and its elements; it is not founded on the idea of applying, of staging, but of becoming, of creating.

For this reason, the directorial work on Metheor’s theatre projects is creative work: the director is the author of the project, the creator of a new, autonomous work, including of its textual basis if there is one; for the same reason, the entire team of Metheor becomes the co-author, along with the director, of the theatrical work – as a collective authorial or creative body, as a collective creative subject.

That Is Why

We believe that the power of thought needs courage and defiance as well as a will to form: a will to experiment with forms unconstrained by dominant symbolic orders; a will to make the world a miraculous place, an adventurous quest for freedom. As the group’s name suggests, Metheor’s harbinger is the brilliant, ephemeral body of the meteor: unforeseen, unforeseeable, perhaps obscure and even ominous, but a miraculous body nonetheless. A body that may strike the earth, but that will most likely burn up in the sky, leaving behind nothing but a beautiful trail. We are beyond the sublime apocalyptic imagination; we do not aim at the global shock value of the ultimate catastrophe. Yet we do imagine colours from outer space, unseen territories and unimaginable forms that may burst forth from its sudden blaze.

Boyan Manchev

METHEOR

Whenever we’ve had to define Metheor in some way, we’ve found ourselves in a quandary. Metheor isn’t a theatre company, group, circle, or organization. Metheor is an association, but that word indicates solely Metheor’s legal status as an organization; Metheor’s essence is not determined by its ability to perform particular administrative activities, but by the thought and desire that drive it. The difficulty of defining Metheor’s structure is symptomatic, as Metheor doesn’t exist to serve a particular function. Metheor was born out of our excitement and desire. Both what Metheor does and how it does it can vary greatly, but its motivation is one and it is clear: to work with pleasure and inspiration.

Metheor’s beginnings were laid in 2008, when Boyan Manchev and I met creatively in a conceptual, dramaturgical and philosophical collaboration on the performances The Eye and A Dying Play. In 2010, during the rehearsal process of A Dying Play, we also met Leonid Yovchev, who became the third core member of Metheor. In addition to the three of us, over the years a number of authors, actors, artists, musicians, and thinkers have been a significant part of Metheor’s working process.

The name Metheor itself appeared years after the beginning of our collaboration. In addition to being an anecdotal anagram, it contains two semantic cores that are fundamental to our conceptual and ideological fellowship. One is ta meteora – the celestial phenomena, the things that are not on earth. The second is evident in the Latin spelling, the added h in meteoros – metheoros – the Greek thea – the common root of “theatre” and “theory” that is related to sight and contemplation.

One of the main motives for the creation of Metheor was to open up a space for creativity aligned solely to the requirements of the work, be it theatre, text, publication, video, or something else. And Metheor has absolutely achieved this goal.

Metheor has its own audience. Not in the sense that it has a particular kind of audience, but in the sense that Metheor’s audience is growing. One of the reasons why our audience is growing rather than shrinking is that we don’t believe either in “popular”, “commercial” theatre or in “elitist” theatre. We believe that life is full of miracles, that it is complicated and requires a lot of thought and desire as well as that such in-depth work is not the preserve of any elite – social, economic, “intellectual” or whatever. Big and important issues can be talked about, including in theatre, in a way that is accessible to and impactful for anyone who desires it. And this belief – that the audience should not be underestimated, that it should be an equal partner in the game of theatre – is key to all our theatrical work. Our theatre cultivates an audience of its own without any specific professional, age, or other profile. Our audience includes artists, writers, teachers, but also people whose occupations have nothing to do with the arts, university students, pensioners, people with and without higher education. We believe that this diversity is also due to our desire – we do theatre not for a certain “type” of people, but for people who are passionate about the same things as us. And there are such people everywhere.

Theatre isn’t the only thing Metheor does, but Metheor’s theatre is the only one of its kind. Our theatre is a theatre of miracles. A theatre of inexhaustible possibilities. A theatre of conscious choice – we choose the impossible. And we do it. We discover possibility in its purest and most exciting form, where form refuses to be fixed, to die. This is a theatre of the miracle, of the cloud, of metamorphosis. A theatre where the impossible is possible.

Metheor’s theatre takes place where the heavenly bodies meet the gaze, where inhuman theatre begins, for, as Artaud says, theatre is “the Double not of this immediate, everyday reality which has been slowly truncated to a mere lifeless copy, as empty as it is saccharined, but another, deadlier archetypal reality in which Origins, like dolphins, quickly dive back into the gloom of the deep once they have shown their heads. For this reality is not human but inhuman” (Antonin Artaud, “Alchemist Theatre”, in The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti, Richmond: Alma Classics Ltd, 2013, p. 34). The possibilities in this deadly archetypal reality are endless, as they have never reached their exhaustion point. Origins, beginnings, possibilities remain possibilities, they “show their heads” and dissolve again into the void, into the dark, into the invisible, without reaching the banality of realization. The possibility that remains a possibility is absolute possibility, possibility in pure form. Possibilities are inexhaustible because they forever remain unexhausted.

We believe in theatre and in Artaud. We believe that theatre is an art of potential beginnings with an unclear end, with a constantly active possibility of change whose main action is metamorphosis. The ability to capture mutability, to rely not on stability but on the metamorphic power of things links theatre to alchemy: “alchemy and theatre are virtual arts, so to speak, and do not contain [1] their object within them any more than they contain their reality. … [A]lchemy, through its signs, is like the mental Double of an act effective on the level of real matter alone” (ibid.). Theatre is Alchemy because it can produce the extraordinary from the ordinary, it is the furnace, the athanor in which the potential for transformation of matter – but also for transcending the existent – is extracted. In the athanor, origins, beginnings, possibilities rear their heads above the surface and the keen eye can see the whole miraculous body below the surface. Keeping the process in a state of constant change means keeping things in a constant state of incompletion, at the moment of their becoming.

We know that the theatre is a place of inexhaustible possibilities. In theatre, not only can many different things happen at the same time; different versions of the same act – including the impossible ones – can also take place. “Theater is the art of enacting only one of a range of virtual alternatives. It is a luxury unaffordable in ordinary life,” Richard Schechner claims. Theatre has and gives us the freedom to experience life not only as what it is but also as what it could be. The banal and oppressive laws of the everyday that follow us for most of our lives – that when you fall it hurts, that when you are stabbed in the heart with a sharp object you die, that excitement, ecstasy and happiness are rare phenomena, that actions must be guided by a productive and economic logic in order not to be disastrous – are suspended. We have the chance to experience life as fantastic and miraculous, as capable of anything.

“In life” the plasticity of reality can be nightmarish and the tension it generates is maddening. The constant awareness that just as you may be inspired, feel happy, immerse yourself in extraordinary moments, so too you may find yourself overwhelmed by the most frightening events, and your experience of reality may be reduced to fear and suffering, binds you to an unhappy, doomed picture of the world – you are rejoicing now but tomorrow you will be grieving, you are alive now but tomorrow you will be dead. In “real life” the fear of the unpredictable turn of events, of the tragedies lurking in the folds of time, can paralyze us – by some whim of chance, tomorrow we may lose a loved one or a limb, fall victim to brutal events, lose everything, security, peace of mind, happiness, and nothing can be done against this danger because life is unpredictable. We can only suppress and postpone the fear of the future.

In theatre, however, we can play out options, we can experience death without dying and loss that is not permanent. As well as happiness that is permanent. Theatre offers another version of reality and risk – theatre’s “make-believe” allows life to be fantasized in more audacious and exciting forms, in a danger that isn’t mired in the muddy skirts of the mundane, but that furrows the flesh of being with its waves, between which beginnings rear their heads like dolphins. Theatre enables us to swim freely in life and reality without falling victim to them. Theatre provides complete freedom so long as the possibility for it is recognized and desired. In theatre, possibilities have the chance to remain possibilities, to keep their potential, their horizon of expectation, their ability to take our breath away instead of dying in their realization and exhaustion. Theatre is a possibility of a world. Theatrical creativity does not only create things that didn’t exist before (like all creativity), it also creates entire closed, self-sufficient, fantastic ecosystems, as Schechner also notes: “By turning possibilities into action, into performances, whole worlds otherwise not lived are born.” Theatre is the art of actualized potentiality in the present tense. What’s more, of a potentiality that preserves its potential instead of expending it.

Theatre’s potential not only doesn’t die upon its realization, it also doesn’t ever rest upon a solid foundation. It is always in action, always leaping from one mode of existence to another. In theatre, another life is lived in real time and it proceeds at great speed, with great complexity and great ease at the same time. Playing with the different modes of reality, leaping from a high level of abstract thought to a specific materiality contains a potential for miracles. Theatre is founded upon the metamorphosis of the unreal into the real and vice versa, of the imagined into the material, of the actual into another actual.

The stage is a place where objects, images, sounds, words, people can undergo miraculous metamorphoses. Some things turn into other things. People become other people – at once “themselves”, someone else altogether, and a combination of the two. The space of the stage is plastic, unstable, changeable yet constant. “The cloud isn’t a changing form; the cloud is a persistent change,” Boyan Manchev writes in The New Athanor. Principles of Philosophical Fantastic. Such is also the matter of theatre – cloudy, at once changeable and persistent. What sustains it in its theatrical form is its ability to be in constant flux, to maintain metamorphosis not as a single event but as a flow – constancy in change.

On the stage, anything is possible. That is why we choose the impossible.

Ani Vaseva

*

Metheor’s performances since 2008 have featured the actors Vyara Kolarova, Petar Genkov, Elena Dimitrova, Iva Sveshtarova, Ekaterina Stoyanova, Galya Kostadinova, Nino Tiberio Gomes, Denitsa Darinova, Alexander Uzunov, Yuliana Sayska, Valeri Georgiev, Emona Ilieva, Maria Panayotova, Martina Apostolova, Stefan Milkov, Georgi Dimitrov, Valentin Ganev, Svetlana Yancheva, Veselin Mezekliev, Greta Gicheva, Katrin Metodieva and Marcus Reinhardt; the students of acting Gordan Koev, Kalin Nikolaev, Lachezara Vasileva, Martin Dimov, Nikol Vasileva and Trayan Hristov; the voices, in the radio play Sick, of Valentin Ganev, Veselin Mezekliev, Zhoreta Nikolova, Ekaterina Stoyanova, Alexandra Vasileva, Asen Avramov, Daniela Manolova, Elena Dimitrova, Petar Genkov, Leonid Yovchev, Yavor Borisov, Delyan Iliev, Stiliyan Zhelyazkov, Srebrina Georgieva, Galya Kostadinova, Katerina Keremichieva and Maria Petkova, and in the performances A Dying Play, Lovecraft, Total Damage, Roadtrip to Hell and Hoffmann, of Valentin Ganev, Ekaterina Stoyanova, Leonid Yovchev, Galya Kostadinova, Boyan Manchev, Tsvetan Tsvetanov, Karin Müller-Stefanov, Annett Hardegen, Dirk Cieslak, Ventzislava Dikova and Kristian Alexiev; the artists, set designers and apparatus makers Desislava Bankova, Aglika Terzieva, Georgi Sharov and Stefan Donchev; the composers and musicians Christophe Petchanatz / Klimperei, Angel Simitchiev, Asen Avramov, Yana Mancheva, Konstantin Markov, Kristian Alexiev, Data Transporter (Nino Tiberio Gomes), Lyubomir Brashnenkov and Georgi Sharov (Cats Under Cars).

The post METHEOR first appeared on Мetheor.

Theatre

Hijikata in Hijikata and his Double by Ani Vaseva, Boyan Manchev and Leonid Yovchev, Work in progress by Metheor, Plovdiv 2019; (Metheor)

Lovecraft in Lovecraft by Ani Vaseva, director Ani Vaseva, , Home of cinema, Sofia; (Metheor)

Maldoror/Lautreamont in Maldoror, based on Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont, French Institute in Bulgaria; (Metheor)

Geo Milev in Geo, based on the Christo Karastoyanov’s novel “At the Same Night”, director Ivan Dobchev, Ivan Vazov National Theatre

Ortze Popyordanov in Tessalonian Plotter by Georgi Danailov, director Stoyan Radev, Ivan Vazov National Theatre

The Actor in Everything is Fine by Dorota Maslovska, director Desislava Shpatova, Ivan Vazov National Theatre

The Doctor in Portrait of a Madonna by Tennessee Williams, director Dimiter Sardjev, Sfumato, Sofia

The Actor in Robin by Anna Topaldjikova, director Teya Sugareva, Vazrazhdane Theatre, Sofia

Hamlet in Hamlet by William Shakespeare, director Yavor Gurdev, Ivan Vazov National Theatre

Frank/Stein in Frankenstein by Ani Vaseva and Boyan Manchev, based on Mary Shelle’s Frankenstein director Ani Vaseva, Sfumato, Sofia; (Metheor)

Touchstone in As You Like It by William Shakespeare, director Krassimir Spasov, Theatre Bulgarian Army

Mervin in A Behanding in Spokane by Martin Mcdonagh, director Yavor Gardev, Ivan Vazov National Theatre

Bobchinski in The Government Inspector by Nikolay Gogol, director Marius Kurkinski, Ivan Vazov National Theatre

The Courier in After the Rain by Sergi Belbel, director Nikolay Lambrev-Mihaylovski, Theater Bulgarian Army

Todor Belopitov in To Open a Wound by Boyan Papazov, director Ivan Dobchev, Theatre Bulgarian Army

The Monk in The Will of Don Juan by Anatoliy Krim, director Ivaylo Christov, Theatre Bulgarian Army

The Storyteller in First Love by Samuel Beckett, director Nina Boyanova, Centre for Culture and Debate The Red House;

The Boy in She Without Love and Death by Edvard Radzinsky, director Nikolay Lambrev-Mihaylovski, Theatre Bulgarian Army

Mario in The Game of Love and Chance by Pierre de Marivaux, director Krassimir Spasov, Theatre Bulgarian Army

Actor in Hamletmachine by Heiner Muller, director Bernhard Oistershulte, Theatre Bulgarian Army, Theatre “Rampe” Stuttgard, National Theatre Luxemburg;

Cinema

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ANI VASEVA

Ani Vaseva (Sofia, 1982) is theatre director, researcher in the field of performing arts, writer and translator. Co-founder of Metheor. 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 (co-author with Boyan Manchev) 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, and in 2022 - Metheor. Theatre of the impossible. She has translated in Bulgarian Joseph Campbell’s Eastern Mythologies (2004) and Jonathan Burrows’ Choreographer’s Handbook (2017).

Between 2015 and 2018 she has been teaching history and theory of theatre and literature in New Bulgarian University and Theatre College “Lyuben Groys”, where she was also an acting professor, leading the acting class 2017-2018, together with Leonid Yovchev (until the both of them leave the college, due to ideological and aesthetic reasons, in 2018). In the last decade Vaseva has been writing articles and giving public lectures in major cultural institutions in Sofia, Vienna, London, Berlin, Zagreb etc.

Her performances and her work in the visual arts has been presented in TanzQuartier Wien, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, < rotor > Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst (Graz), Steirische Herbst (Graz), Whitechapel gallery (London), Sofia City Gallery, Vaska Emanouilova Gallery, Rayko Alexiev Gallery, the fridge, 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.

The post ANI VASEVA SHORT CV first appeared on Мetheor.

THE KILLER AND THE WHORE

GORGONS IN THE STORAGE ROOM, OR, APOCALYPSE NOW

THE BLUE ROOM

POWER FRIDGE POINTS

SVIDRIGAYLOV

PRAESENTIAE

The post WORKS OUT OF METHEOR ANI VASEVA first appeared on Мetheor.