At the end of June 2024 in Pleven “Ivan Radoev” Drama and Puppet Theater will present the pilot edition of “Class – International Theater Festival” project.The idea of the festival is to introduce the audience of the town to contemporary theatrical forms from different countries and at the same time to give young Bulgarian artists an opportunity to build up their knowledge and acquire new skills.This will be one of the few educational theater festivals with an international status, where different professionals will be able to meet.The special educational program will, on the one hand, acquaint the audience with the current trends in the various performing arts and, on the other hand, give young artists the opportunity to enhance their practical skills by meeting and receiving lessons from well-known professionals in the field of theater art. Theater always means encounter: the encounter of spectators with each other, of the audience with art and of professionals with the exchange of experience.The festival “Class” implies a free dialog which gives the opportunity to expand the space that right now is necessary to be visible, meaningful and filled with more meaning.As the organizers of the festival, we offer a very different approach for the inclusion of young artists from the Bulgarian theater scene in the international cultural context, namely trough the introduction and interaction with current phenomena and emblematic trends in the world theater and performing arts. Participants in the festival will have the opportunity to see some of the most interesting theatrical performances, to participate in master classes of significant figures of world culture, such as Ingeborga Dapkunaite, Ivan Estegneev. Datta Tavadze and Yuri Butusov. Bulgarian representatives in this palette of theater educators will be Yuliyan Vergov, an actor from the National Theater “Ivan Vazov” and Desislava Stoicheva, PhD, a lecturer in Art Management at National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts.
That will be a Festival-Academy aimed at young professionals who are not indifferent to experience, but curious and searching, for those who are ready for any creative discoveries and unexpected impressions, for those who have the confidence and ability to move beyond the familiar to discover their own stage language.The festival will provide an opportunity for a dialogue between different generations of artists for whom art is not a space of museum tranquility, but a process of searching for new forms, themes and meanings.Viewers will have the opportunity to touch European examples of contemporary theatre art, and in open meetings and conversations with directors, choreographers and artists will enrich the way they perceive art. Every year the performances of the festival will be dedicated to a certain theme.
“WOMEN’S DESTINY” is the subject of our first issue.
THE FEMALE FACE OF THE FESTIVAL
As is well known, there are far more male leads than female leads in world drama. No, we are not going to change the proportion built up over centuries – it is just not in our power. But focusing our attention specifically on the female characters seemed interesting and important to us. So, the main role in the festival program will definitely be the female one. This applies both to the actresses themselves and to the heroine played by them, which in modern theater are often inseparable from the personality. Even christomatian female roles will be presented at our festival in a modern up-to-date twist – such as Miss Julia from August Strindberg’s play where we find features of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, but who is nevertheless possessed by modern passions. The heroine of the Belgian-Brazilian performance “’Chaika” is an elderly actress who is about to part with the stage, but who is still in the grip of the exciting artistic images of her past. The famous Lithuanian actress Ingeborga Dapkunaite still remembers – not her roles, but the history of her own family and her native Vilnius against the background of the many historical upheavals of the last century. Of course, women are not only keepers of memory. They create contemporary history and they are not afraid to fight for the
truth as Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya who paid with her life for her own principles. The new performance “Anna-Incorrigible” is dedicated to her destiny. But they, women, are trusting and vulnerable, sometimes living in a world of grotesque and illusion, like the heroine of the lonely fantasy “Ignorance”. You might ask, what is “Tartuffe”, named after the male lead of this play, doing in this program. But let’s remember that the engines of intrigue in the Moliere’ s play, it turns out, are women after all. Without them, there is neither life nor theater.
