Blaubart - Hoffnung der Frauen, by Dea Loher at Vaska Emanuilova Art Gallery

ProText goes on with the next reading performance in its bill. This time the venue is Vaska Emanuilova Art Gallery: a space enabling the unusual perspective of looking from the outside. The actors Hristo Petkov, Elena Dimitrova and Irina Docheva will be positioned outside the gallery’s room as the seats available for the audience, again of limited number, will be inside the gallery.

Directed by Gergana Dimitrova

Assistant Director: Vasilena Radeva

Starring: Elena Dimitrova, Irina Docheva and Hristo Petkov

Scenic Design by Elena Shopova and Nikola Nalbantov

Original Music by Branimir Stoykov – bggz

Animation by Boryana Krusteva

Video & Vision Mix by Lyubomir Draganov

The play Blaubart - Hoffnung der Frauen, [Bluebeard: Hope of Women] by one of the most celebrated young German playwrights, Dea Loher will premiere in Bulgaria as a part of ProText. The text is a matter of great interest due to its rich cultural and literary references dating back to 1695 when Charles Perrault’s fairy tale about Bluebeard was published. Bluebeard was a wealthy aristocrat who killed his wives as a punishment for their curiosity to see what the hidden room in his chateau held. Highly charged with sexism, this narrative about inadmissibility of feminine knowledge, both reduced to a mere “curiosity” and subject to sanctions, is deeply rooted in the Western culture from as early as the Bible story of Adam and Eve.

The other major reference is to the one-act expressionist play by Oskar Kokoschka, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen [Murderer: Hope of Women] which proclaimed, in general, the end of certain rationalist attitudes associated with the male principle in order to re-set and re-arrange the world through the irrational and subjective one that is identified with femininity. And Dea Loher’s play about a shoemaker who kills the girls who fall in love with him despite all his efforts to avoid it explores the present day nature of love that we cling to as a life-saving remedy in order to survive in the world.