Today, October 28, FIRE THEATRE Mime Company, Sofia starts the 6fest Street Art Festival with Metamorphoses reviewing the world classics with fiery elements. With this post, I introduce readers of Cultural Insights to one of the outstanding Bulgarian art companies FIRE THEATER, one of the pioneers of independent contemporary Bulgarian theatres with over a 25-year history. I asked Plamen Radev, one of the directors and creators of FIRE THEATRE, to shed more light on their performance. The following text is his comments with my slight editing: On Metamorphoses: ‘The theatrical […]

The Balis and Eyrene by Fireter will be the biggest premiere at 6fest Street Art Festival. It will be performed on the iconic place – Plovdiv Roman Stadium, built the 2d century AD. The team have been working on the show for one year. The preparation for the festival overlaps with the 6 fest crowdfunding campaign and the salary of artists depend on the support of the spectacles. In the very last days before the festival, we discussed uneasy topics on the balance in creativity, finances and nature in the […]

The show Megale Tea by six Bulgarian actresses from Skrin is going to wow the visitors of 6fest Street Art Festival in Plovdiv. Their pagan dance extends the limits of the creative. Partly due to thorough ethnographical research and professional choreography, partly owing to the great effort of the dancers and creative director of Skrin Daniana Koeva (in the main photo during a rehearsal) who is going to dance being 8-month pregnant. Several weeks ago another dancer was performing Mega Tea being also 8-month pregnant. Six faces of femininity The […]

The last rehearsal before 6fest Street Art Festival: for Firestep (Plovdiv), even mundane rehearsals are akin to a premiere presented to demanding spectators. And sometimes they need to negotiate the right to work in certain places with little kids. As it was yesterday during an amusing discussion with 8-year old Plovdivians who weren’t keen on neither sharing their territory nor staying quite. Firestep consists of six young enthusiasts: Biser Georgiev (the leader), Angel Valchev (the manager, spoke person and designer when a need arises), Hristian Stoyanov, Melina Atanasova, Donka Kyoseva […]

Of the seven art-groups of 6fest, the fire group Fenix from Kozloduy is in the remotest area of Bulgaria, over 320 km from Plovdiv. We couldn’t meet because of COVID restrictions. But we had a great online chat with three participants of Fenix: Ileyn Manasieva, Zvezdelina Todorova and Aleksandra Cvetkova. Changes in the scenario, the creative identity of Kozloduy, crowdfunding for Bulgarian creative projects… Phoenix in their own words. Enjoy reading, support them in 6fest crowdfunding campaign and come to their show Roots in Plovdiv on 31 October! The magic […]

How much will get the 7 Bulgarian fire formations for their participation in the upcoming 6fest Art Street Festival? It depends on the donations of Bulgarian spectators for the crowdfunding campaign specially launched by the organizer Momchil Tsonev. It’s the first case of application of crowdfunding to a large-scale cultural event in Bulgaria. The festival is the brainchild of Momchil Tsonev who’s been organizing it from 2017. This year he’s asked for public support to co-finance the festival. The Ministry of Culture of Bulgaria has drastically reduced the initial budget […]

I’m witnessing the preparation of the debut. The whole group Black Fire is carefully rehearsing its show for 6fest and honing each dance set devoted to the seasons of the year. Without music, with music by Motionless, again without music but with different moves… No one dares to admit to being tired until a planned break is allowed by strict choreograph Diana Stoynova, a student of karate at the National Sports Academy (Sofia), a keen poet and art activist. ‘Why do you love playing with fire?’ – was my first […]

The process of digitalization of Bulgarian cultural heritage is invisible to most Bulgarians who see just its final results. I asked to shed more light on such projects Georgi Vasilev, 3D graphic designer of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, producer and DJ that creates virtual galleries, adapts 3D National Geographic films to Bulgarian cinemas and develops modern Bulgarian music with his project The Bad Radio (more details about Georgi’s musical projects in this post). Even his own apartment he’s turning into a virtual museum of electronic music)) – Georgi, it […]

Times of crises always raise the same question of How to learn new things quickly? The Bulgarian psychotherapist Georgi Lozanov offered the solution in the 1970s inventing suggestopedia, the method of accelerated learning. It allows learning new things up to 5 times faster compared to traditional tactics. The method was certified by UNESCO in 1978 and was widely applied worldwide. Together with Elena Stoycheva, teacher of English practising suggestopedia and art therapy, founder of TOGETHER studio (Plovdiv), we discussed useful features of the unique learning tool that so much reflects […]

For 35 years, the project European Capital of Culture has developed a professional communication system for communicating cultural topics. I explored it with my master’s thesis at the University of Milan. For this post, I’ve adapted the Facebook strategy of the cultural capitals to the daily communication of ordinary users. Everyone is a media outlet Despite different cultural programmes, all cultural capitals use the same communication framework. For convenience, I’ll only use the example of Pafos 2017 Facebook strategy. I downloaded and analyzed the one-year communication campaign for my master’s […]