SOLO PERFORMANCE “THE FOREST OF HORRORS”

Free registration for the event HERE

Solo performance of literary readings

Featuring Iskra Angelova, with musicians Tsvetelina Naydenova, Yavor Gaidov and Venelin Piperov

October 15, 2022, at 7 p.m. at the Bulgarian Cultural Institute London

The Forest of Horrors is an idea of​​ actress, journalist and philologist Iskra Angelova, which she realized together with the musicians Tzvetelina Naydenova, Yavor Gaidov and Venelin Piperov. This impromptu reading aims to emphasize the parallels between texts written many years ago and our present day, in the context of the horrific war in Ukraine, which hits closer and closer to home and is gradually taking over our whole world amid our petty worries, scandals, betrayals and political infighting.

The parallels are obvious. Misanthropic regimes are alike. The concentration camps, where dictators imprisoned our braver and smarter grandfathers and the bomb shelters, where Bulgarians had to visit as children to be ready for World War III have prepared us eerily for what is happening in our world today.

The performance will be based on some of the most relevant texts of the Bulgarian writer and journalist Georgi Markov, who was murdered in London by the communist Secret Services, and on his letters to his wife, as well as on excerpts from Stefan Bochev’s book Belene: a Tale of Concentration Camp Bulgaria and parts of Georgi Gospodinov’s stories of self-fulfilling prophecies and prescient novels; texts devoted to that inexplicable and shameful trait of the Bulgarian national character which betrays instead of saving; kills instead of caring; envies instead of admiring and destroys instead of building up.

In this daring synthesis, between seemingly incompatible styles, genres, stories and eras, Iskra Angelova will work with the means of a new kind of political performance-reading, which will express the anxiety of today’s dystopian world through the power of words and journalism in a new universe – people at the their tether, increasingly lonely and confused, locked in a basement underground, frightened, betrayed by their own and abandoned to the mercy of artificial intelligence.

Inundated with (fake) news and information, conspiracy theories and outright gossip, present-day Bulgarians have already been denied the opportunity to escape to the “promised land” or homeland, they wander through the electronic signals of the world and remember being humane through the last remaining evidence of it – namely: through books. And through the saved letters.

Just like Kafka’s character (Metamorphoses, The Trial, and The Castle), the contemporary character in the show will read in horror and pronounce together with the audience the prophecies of Bulgarian authors past and present, which sound more and more startling today.

The idea is that these stories, chilling with their documentary nature, happen and are told in an eerie place related to our past and the history of Bulgaria in a previous period, in a place – the very testimony of other times when freedom was only a dream and a muffled cry.

Any parallels with current events will be left to the viewers to consider with a fresh look at history that is being repeated again and again under the pressure of new realities.