The participants came from the countries along the Black Sea and the North Sea (Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Turkey, Ukraine, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, UK).
The leaders of the two workshops, Margarita Mladenova and Ivan Dobchev work with body language, texts, and gestures. They actively involve imagination and fantasy of the actor as a fundamental skill for modern artists and study the way of appearance of artistic impulse and its nature.
The first workshop took as its subject the legend of Kaliakra. Kaliakra is a small, slender rocky cape penetrating deep into the Black Sea. It is named after a Bulgarian girl, who preferred death, jumping into the sea from the high rock, to accepting the violent invasion of the Ottoman Empire. Mladenova and Dobchev write:
“These sorts of acts seem too dramatic nowadays. Modern man avoids all extremes. The workshop borrowed this event as an example of such extreme living.
“On the beach, on the border between Earth and Sea, on the line earthly-eternal, known-unknown, obvious-mysterious – man turns his back to all boring everyday insignificances and can face big questions – what is the meaning of his/her own life, of existential choice, of stepping beyond…
“Facing his/her Life. How to decide – what to choose, what to do, what to take and what to leave, what is important and what is not, where to go… This is just some hints-giving questions for the future artistic work in the Atelier, main task of which will be – to take out living from everyday routine; to make a poetic trip to a different, more extreme, more authentic, exciting, and meaningful life. That is Theatre for us. We will try to create moments of intense life in which the spiritual energy, intuition for predestined path is stronger than gravity of “must”s and “should”s; moments when something – indeed – depends on man – and he/she can realize it. And the result is act close to ritual, re-approving the human, all too human / after Nietzsche.”
The second workshop explored themes such as action and inaction: using Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy as the basis for ‘to sail or not to sail.’