Residence duration: 2022-09-28 / 2022-10-12
Performance date: 2022-10-29
Yasen Vasilev works in the field of contemporary dance and performance as a maker, dramaturg and critic. NUTRICULA is the practical research of his master thesis on the politics of dance from Shanghai Theatre Academy, developed and presented in the form of workshops and performances internationally. Since 2018 he's been a contributing author for Springback magazine and a dramaturgical consultant for choreographer Ehsan Hemat (BE/IR). Locally, he works with the artist-run residency space for playwrights and artists at risk Radar Sofia and co-runs Drama Pact, a collective of writers and performance makers who share resources instead of competing for them. He published four poetry collections and four plays and received the audience award at Sofia:Poetics 2010 and the CEI Fellowship at Vilenica festival in 2020.
This is how was look like residency and workshop of Yasen Vasilev in our space Telocvičňa with local dance residents, and students.
IMPOSSIBLE ACTIONS puts the performers through a series of tasks that aim to test and re-imagine the limits and functions of the body and deconstruct (un)conscious habits of movement. The work aims to liberate the body and its movements from meanings imposed on them. The work deals with the dynamic between global and local within the performer's body, with the ways the socio-political reality and the personal biography inform the process, and the possibility of the performer to claim space beyond the concept.
A Score for an Empty Swimming Pool is a movement research practice for a collective body. The session explores the possibility of forming a collective body with a group of participants. They feel each other as an extension of the self, coordinate thoughts, actions, movements, search for new approaches to touch in the post-pandemic situation. The practice is inspired and informed by the many-headed slime (physarum polycephalum) – a complex unicellular organism that doesn't have a brain or central nervous system but is able to coordinate, strategize and remember.