“Body as an object and a subject, immersed into the desire to enact itself, to recreate itself”

Nomination for the National ICARUS Award 2018 for Contemporary Dance and Performance

In the context of current global and local debates on women’s rights, with the performance Perfectly Pink, Iva Sveshtarova puts the attitudes towards female bodies under a magnifying glass and shares her point of view. As the title suggests, she does it with a sense of humor and a necessary amount of (self) irony. On stage, two female performers (Iva Sveshtarova and Violeta Vitanova) adeptly work with “masculine” gadgets such as saws and grinders, while they “femininely” cry, have fun with soap bubbles and dance seductively. In this way, the performance doesn’t attempt to escape clichés but in fact employs them, mixes them up and zooms in on them, in order to better understand them.

Iva Sveshtarova is a choreographer and performer, based in Sofia. She holds a Master’s degree in Choreography and Performance from the Institute of Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen. She also graduated from the experimental Theatre-Studio 4XC and Synthetic Stage Arts program of The University of Plovdiv. In 2006 she was awarded with a DanceWeb Scholarship, and from 2002 to 2006 she was part of the company Acto – Instituto de Arte Dramatica, Portugal. She has worked with directors and choreographers such as Nikolay Georgiev, Filipe Pereira, Helena Botto, Galina Borissova, deufert&plischke, Thomas Lehmen, Verena Billinger and Sebastian Schulz, Ani Vaseva, Maren Strack, Ana Dankova a.o. Since 2007 she is one of the cofounders of Brain Store Project Foundation. She has authored and co-authored the performances: A Better Life (a collaboration between Willy Prager, the German choreographer Martin Stiefermann and the dramaturg Natalie Baudy), shamebox (with Willy Prager, ICARUS Award 2018), Balkan Dance Reality Show (collective work with Rosa Beermann and Sonja Pregrad), Our Last Pas de Deux by Galina Borissova, Museum of Hygiene, Donna Clara and Cliché. Iva Sveshtarova is also among the cofounders of Nomad Dance Academy and Antistatic International Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance.

This project was realized with the financial support of the Sofia Municipality Program “Culture” for 2018 and with the cooperation of ETUD Gallery, Goethe-Institut Bulgaria and The National Palace of Culture.