31. Sofia, May 2025
Took place in April 2025 as part of the Theatre of Wonder Theatre and Science Festival
Duška Radosavljević reflects:
Dear friends, going on from the last week's post, I must inform you of a brilliant event I have just attended at Toplocentrala in Sofia, Bulgaria this weekend. Theatre of Wonder was a conference/festival representing the culmination of Creative Europe-funded project Please Ask! As part of this project, artists and scientists from Bulgaria, Italy, Czech Republic and Hungary were brought together under the capable leadership of Dimitar Uzunov (a geologist turned theatre-maker) to create three works over two years: a piece of puppetry for children about quantum physics and specifically decoherence, a promenade dance/lecture performance/fairytale about evolutionary biology, and a piece of dramatic theatre about interstellar sex.
The culmination event was also an international conference that expanded the conversation to include some other relevant examples of cross-breeding so we heard for example about a planned 24-hour music event to represent the history of the Earth in which of course the dinosaurs appear only in the last hour of the show (musically of course). There were presentations about SciFi and robotics in theatre, dance and neuroscience, new scientific accessibility solutions, puppeteering with micro-organisms, ecological theatre initiatives, creative activism and artistic science communication - a kind of range that ensured one could never get bored. But interesting conversations also happened in the gaps in between.
I heard heartening stories about how young people in Eastern Europe are devising creative ways to confront and deter the swing to the right in their elders. In one case infiltration of a cult was necessary as part of the research into how brainwashing works. I met some old and new fascinating people, began to think about ageing and colour and listening and participation in some completely new ways. There was Eastern European music and dancing of course, and I can tell you the hangover is still on.
But the most inspiring and unexpected thing was how the event ended with a feedback session in the form of an improvised dance show. This format, invented by the Bulgarian collective Музотанц / Muzotanz Dance Company, involved the festival/conference audience in a kind of cabaret setting where in the centre of the front row there is a comfortable armchair and a rotary dial telephone on a small stand in front of it. As we enter two female dancers are gently gliding around the space while a man at a mixing desk plays a sort of dreamlike score. He also chats to us in a relaxed, semi-hypnotic, mysterious voice, a ruse designed obviously to plunge us deeper into this lyrical aural space. I am not sure exactly how we understood the convention - I do not remember it being very explicitly stated but the game was as simple as this: When the phone rings, an audience member has to come into the armchair and speak their thoughts into the phone. This began with standard 'before I came here I was depressed about the state of the world, but now I am renewed' (my case too incidentally) but quickly evolved into a playful game of how each person wanted to handle the phone conversation in a new fun way - 'here's three things mentioned in the conference I want more of in the world', 'thanks for calling me back, can the end of the conference be postponed?', 'here's something I didn't get to do in the previous workshop ('laugh like an animal') because I didn't really get the point of the invitation, which I want to do now (laughing like a horse)', 'I want agency', 'I want to know', 'I want everything!' - and the magician accompanied by his two nymphs found the way to respond to each prompt, to take away a bit of each burden, to make every wish come true, and to send the whole cohort to a mad party afterwards.
So here is my takeaway, friends: it's all improvisation - art, science, life, everything. I worryingly discovered there was research about how there is now peak age for your creativity in life - they did this by studying bank robbers and discovering they were the most successful between ages 25-45. This apparently translates perfectly to scientists too. But then what the Theatre of Wonder showed us too, you can still be playful and find delight in playfulness no matter what age you are.