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Street Ballads Bulgaria

A live-soundscape with contemporary voices from Bulgaria and Switzerland

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Street Ballads

Street Ballads is designed to evolve over several stages. The live soundscape is comprised of musical improvisations, sounds and spoken passages. It is the second stage of a project that started in 2019 with a first soundscape entitled I am not alone. This performance depicting the ancient Via Egnatia route was a collaborative project with 16 museums in Switzerland (www.viaegnatia.ch). Having focused on the Western Balkans and Switzerland in 2020 and 2021, the second stage of the project will move to Bulgaria in 2022. Here, three musicians from the Swiss ensemble meet three performance artists from Bulgaria. They will collaborate to create a two-hour performance in various exhibition spaces in Sofia, Plovdiv, Veliko Tarnovo, Burgas and Gorna Bela Rechka. Ten renowned Bulgarian authors provide the voice of a historical, mythological or legendary figure of their choice to comment on the present.

Street Ballads brings together a variety of artistic voices from all over Europe to reflect on the present and create a powerful interdisciplinary network. Our goal is to use artistic and musical means to establish creative experiential spaces and thought-provoking perspectives.

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Soundscape

Street Ballads is a live-soundscape. It is not a classical performance, but rather a performative-vocal intervention in a museum or festival context. The acoustic landscape will be presented via narrative fragments, voice improvisations, sounds and musical quotations. The sound picture unfolds in waves over the duration of the performance and can range from a discrete acoustic sound, building up to an energetic jam session - the precise substance depends on the venue and the reactions of the audience. Soundscapes form a conceptual pivot in the debate around spatial atmospheres in the areas of architecture, theatre and public spaces. Different listening experiences can be designed in which heterogeneous elements are united in common moods, narratives or effects. Our soundscape Street Ballads is to be understood as an exemplary project, presenting a topic in different contexts and attracting a varied audience.

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Tour


4 October 2022 / 17:00 - 19:00	Plovdiv	Permanent Exhibition of Encho Pironkov
5 October 2022 / 18:00 - 20:00	Burgas	Regional Library
6 October 2022 / 18:00 - 20:00	Veliko Tarnovo	TAM
8 October 2022 / 18:00 - 20:00	Gorna Bela Rechka	Chitalishte
9 October 2022 / 18:00 - 20:00	Sofia	Toplocentrala

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Artists

Regina Hui (voice / violin) has been exploring a wide variety of music since she was a teenager. Her interests range from baroque to rock, from samba to klezmer, and from new music to free improvisation. Her work includes directing the children's and youth choirs at the Basel Music Academy and voice workshops for adults. As a singer and violinist, her preference is for projects that move between folk music, free improvisation, jazz, and theatre.

REGINA HUI

Nikol Otashliyska (voice) is an actress and graduated from the National Academy of Theatre and Film Bulgaria (NAFTA). She was a member of Prof. Ivailo Hristov's class. As a freelance actress, she has appeared in numerous productions. These include performances by institutions such as the Youth Theatre in Sofia, the Drama Theatre Turgovishte, the Natfiz Theatre and the Yalta art room. She has also been hired to act in documentary films.

NIKOL OTASHLIYSKA

Reto Senn (voice / clarinet) studied various musical languages, including flamenco, tango, klezmer, and Arabic music. He also studied oriental scales as well as Turkish, Kurdish, South American, and Balkan music. Reto Senn has a great fascination for jazz and for contemporary, classical bass clarinet compositions, which he studied in Amsterdam with Harry Sparnaay. Improvised music and composing are taking an important place in his artistic work.

RETO SENN

Beat Vögele (voice / reed organ) is a composer, musician, teacher, and co-director of the children's and youth choirs of the Basel Music School. He was director of the vocal ensemble hark!, which developed new concert forms from 2003 to 2011. As a solo singer, he performs folk song programs. He has received commissions from numerous ensembles for compositions and arrangements of operas, choral and instrumental works.

BEAT VÖGELE

Biliana Voutchkova (voice/violin) is a dynamic and thoroughly engaged interdisciplinary artist, composer-performer, violinist and curator with a truly personal, unconventional artistic language. Based between Berlin and her rural residency on the black sea coast of Bulgaria, Biliana works as a soloist and with renowned ensembles such as the Splitter Orchestra, United Berlin, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, Voutchkova/ Thieke duo and Jane in Ether.

www.bilianavoutchkova.net Photo: Bernd Ott

BILIANA VOUTCHKOVA

ivan dimitrov_photographer Tsvetelina Belutova_webseite

Ivan Dimitrov is the author of six books of prose, poetry and plays. In 2012, his play "The Eyes of Others" was selected among more than 400 plays for the New York Playwrights Festival "HotInk at the LARK". In September of the same year, it was performed at the New Ohio Theatre (NYC) by director Samuel Boughlin. In 2013, it won the Sofia Poetics festival. He has won numerous competitions with his poetry, short stories and plays. With his short story "The Power of Words" from the short story collection of the same name, he first won the Yana Yazova Prize and then the Chudomir Prize.

Photo: Tsvetelina Belutova

IVAN DIMITROV

Kristin Dimitrova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1963. She is a writer, poet and translator. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, among which A Visit to the Clockmaker (2005, Ireland), My Life in Squares (2010, UK), Poetry by Kristin Dimitrova(2022, India) and The Cardplayer’s Morning (2008, Czech Republic 2013). Dimitrova is a winner of seven awards for poetry (among which Ivan Nikolov, Ivan Peychev, The Association of Bulgarian Writers Award, etc.) and four for fiction (Hristo G. Danov, Peroto, etc.) She was also twice awarded The Union of Bulgarian Translators Special Achievement Award (for her translations of poetry by John Donne and Lewis Carroll).

KRISTIN DIMITROVA

Zdravka Evtimova is a Bulgarian writer born in 1959. Her short story collections have been published in 32 countries. Her novel Thursday was published in the USA, UK, Serbia, and China, and was selected as one of the 100 novels written by a Slavic author after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her novel In the Town of Joy and Peace was published in the USA, Italy, and North Macedonia. Her novel The Same River was published in the USA and in Italy. In Bulgaria, Zdravka Evtimova has won a number of literary wards, inlaying H. G. Danov 2021 Award for overall contribution to Bulgarian culture.

ZDRAVKA EVTIMOVA

Georgi Gospodinov_ c_Svetla Stoyanova_Website

Georgi Gospodinov is a Bulgarian poet, writer and playwright. Gospodinov’s debut novel, Natural Novel (1999), is published in 23 languages. His second novel, The Physics of Sorrow (2012), won several national awards for best fiction. The book was the winner of the Central European Angelus Award (2019) and the Jan Michalski Prize (2016) and a finalist for four international prizes in Italy and Germany. His latest book is the novel Time Shelter. Published in April 2020 amidst the quarantine and the peak of the pandemic, it topped the bestselling-books charts in Bulgaria.

Photo: Svetla Stoyanova

GEORGI GOSPODINOV

Angel Igov is the author of three novels, “Particulate Matter“ (2017), “The Meek“ (2015) and “A Short Tale of Shame“ (2011), two collections of short stories, “Encounters on the Road“ (2002) and “K.“ (2006), and the academic study “Flags and Keys: Poetics of the Epigraph“ (2022). He was awarded the Krustan Dyankov Grand Prize for Translation in 2016 for his translation of “The Collector of Lost Things“ by Jeremy Page. In 2018, he won the Special Prize from the same competition for his translation of “The Underground Railroad“ by Colson Whitehead.

ANGEL IGOV

stefan ivanov_fotograf yana lozeva_sb website

Stefan Ivanov, born in 1986 in Sofia, is a Bulgarian poet, playwright, writer, dramaturg and journalist. He has four published poetry books. In 2017 his play The Same Day was staged at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, New York by director John Michael Di Resta. In 2018 he was a playwright in residence in the National Theatre of Luxembourg. In 2019 the animated short film Tasks of the day based on his poem of the same name qualified for the “Oscar” awards. He has been nominated and awarded for many national poetry and theatre awards.

Photo: Yana Lozeva

STEFAN IVANOV

Delyana Maneva is a lecturer at The National Academy of Theatre and Film „Krastjo Sarafow“ in Sofia. Her novel "The Sixth Finger" was nominated in 2021 for the Novel of the Year. Her book "The Challenged Body: The Actor's Psychophysical Training" was nominated for the Critical Text Award in 2014. She wrote the screenplays for several film productions. These include Escape (2022), Mission London (2020), and TV series. She has published poems, short stories, and articles. In addition, her literary contribution is part of the anthology "Stories from the 90s" published by ICU in 2019.

DELYANA MANEVA

Ivanka Mogilska has five published books: the story collection "This land, that land"; the novels "Hideaways" and "Sudden Streets"; and two poetry collections "Otherwise" and "DNA", each one with a national award – for “poetry debut” and for “poetry book of the year” from a young author. Some of her works are translated into English, French, Hungarian, Russian, Farsi and Bangla. She lives in Sofia, works as a copywriter freelancer and takes part as a writer and performer in art actions and performances of Bulgarian digital artist Albena Baeva.

IVANKA MOGILSKA

Claudio Mascolo studied Journalism & Communications and worked as a PR and communications consultant for companies such as Siemens, Orange, and Carrefour. After graduating in Filmmaking from the London Met Film School, he ran the film production and consultancy Aria Films in London and collaborated as a story and script editor with international writing and directing talent. He is the director of the consultancy All Might Change in London.

CLAUDIO MASCOLO