Words by Georgia Howlett.
In old Bulgarian and other Slavic languages, surdce is the word for heart. We sat down with Co-Artistic Directors of surdce dance collective, Marchela-Vasilena Merchant and Stephanie Handjiiska to discuss mythology, feminism, and ecology from their viewpoints as contemporary Eastern European dancers and creators.
Q: Can you tell us about surdce dance collective, its values and what you are exploring as a company?
Marchela: We’re exploring myth, feminism. We’re exploring the traditions, the Eastern European heritage, and we are looking at all of this through the female gaze, as two female choreographers, as a collective. We’re both migrant choreographers that live in the UK. We’re both Bulgarian and I think that is quite important to us as to how we look at the values of the collective and how we incorporate them into our work.
Stephanie: Another very important topic for us is ecology, and this, again, I would think is quite entangled with our Eastern European identity. Our part of the world, where we’re coming from, is quite in touch with our Pagan roots. So, although we’ve been Orthodox Christian for centuries, I think people remained in touch. Even today, we have quite well preserved, everyday Pagan rituals; we only became aware of how Pagan they are when we migrated to France and to the UK. Also, a very important part of our identity, of these Pagan identities, is the worshiping of nature and being very close to nature in a very simple way. We found this ancient topic of being one with nature is, of course, extremely relevant for usas contemporary women artists, especially women artists that have children, or are about to have children. So this is, I would say, the third strand.
Q: What are your priorities when considering representation of Eastern European identities through dance?
Stephanie: First of all, for the representation to happen. I think although the Eastern European community is quite large in in the UK, and also it is generally a large migrant community around the world due to 20th century history, I would say it is not a community that culturally is very known, and I’m not only speaking about folklore or heritage, I’m speaking about just examples of dance.
And the second is also to allow the community to have a voice and also for themselves to see themselves represented on the stage. So for an earlier work of hours called Not a Crab, Not a Fish, we actually interviewed members of the community, regardless of their nationality, people that identify as Eastern European, about their experiences. The overall sentiment was that they feel quite marginalised culturally. Because Eastern Europeans are generally Caucasian white, there is a bigger tendency of masking in the UK, of almost imitating white Britishness or Anglo-Saxon whiteness.
So, I think a very big mission of ours is to bring more light to this cultural background again through the viewpoint of us being contemporary people, dancers, and choreographers, and go outside of these cliches of Eastern Europeans. We sometimes think we’ve outlived them and then they come back again as stigmas of labour workers and cheaper workers that do mostly manual work and don’t know good English.
Marchela: We’re really fighting for the positive representation, and a different one, one that is more connected to what is actually important to us as Eastern Europeans, our nature, our rituals, and almost kind of bring that representation not only to other Eastern European communities, but because we’re presenting our work in the west, to show the Western audience as well, what else is interesting about where we come from, apart from all of those little stigmas.
Q: Your recent premiere, Samodiva, explores mythology and folklore in depth. What is your personal relationship to these themes?
Marchela: A lot of my family traditions are quite ritualistic and Pagan, and when I was younger, literally, my aunties would take me out under the moonlight and teach me how to sing to the water and dance with them. I find myth and folklore very personal to me, like a whole other world that we seem to have neglected in in our present, to an extent. But I like coming back to it, because it almost feels like coming back to the home inside me, where things are authentic, and I can draw from that ancestral energy and take all of the power that I need into this world that we live in right now.
Stephanie: I think I had exactly the reverse. I lived in Bulgaria until 26 years old. While I was still resident of Bulgaria and I was a working artist there, I almost had like a rebellion against being Bulgarian and against everything that comes with it because I have certain problems with the way society currently is. I think I was trying to distinguish myself and almost westernise myself as much as possible, and I had this big dream of living in the western world. And actually, when I became a long-term resident of the UK, I think this is when the desire and thirst to connect to something ancestral, something deeper, something prehistoric even, in terms of lineage through dance, and through mythology and ritual,came about. I’ve always had interest towards anthropology and myth and ritual, but the interest with Eastern Europe was definitely awakened away from Eastern Europe.
Although we are not a folklore dance group, and we would never aim to be when we’re looking to create original contemporary choreography, sometimes we do quote a ritual or folklore movement, literally as a quote in a bedding of contemporary dance language that we have created as choreographers. But just the feeling of working with really ancient material that your body hasn’t necessarily generated is extremely powerful and to bring that example to Samodiva, and also we currently have a work in progress called Peperuda, when we bring that ancestral material to dancers from other regions of the world, and we explain to them the lineage, I think we all feel a lot of communal power doing them when everyone else has that context about the movement.
Q: How do Eastern European mythology and folklore lend themselves to feminist analysis and expression?
Marchela: The Eastern European beginning that we look at through the female gaze relates a lot to nature being the mother of everything and of everybody. A lot of the stories in the Slavic folklore have female beginnings. A lot of the heroes and the archetypes have female sides to them as well, in which those questions are already asked. And when we bring them to this contemporary context, as Stephanie was saying just now, with those movements that we find either in a piece of embroidery or one word that we found in the legend, and then we recreate a whole ritual around it, and we bring it into contemporary works that magnify that female beginning, we look at it and we try to see it from all possible perspectives. What feminine power was before and what it is today as well, and how we can keep growing with it and being empowered by it.
Q: What is it like to create and perform work with mythological/folkloric themes in modern times?
Stephanie: It’s very interesting creatively and very powerful. It’s an amazing invitation to the audience to rethink, and even for 60/75 minutes, to put on a different lens. I think we live in a world that’s very grounded in practical things like money and status. The dynamic is quite hierarchal in terms of power, and taking a more natural, mythological, feminine gaze even for one hour is an invitation to flip the script on its head.
Q:You recently premiered an immersive work, Samodiva, at Proposition Studios, a mission based venue that believes in creating biodiverse ecologies and using art to provoke new thought on this. Performing your work here feels like an ethically informed decision, as if the context of a space mattered at least as much as the aesthetics, and it signals a certain approach you are taking as a company. Can you speak more about this?
Marchela: Definitely what was important to me was for it not to be a black box theatre, I really wanted to escape that. But it is also really important who we align ourselves with and Proposition, they just stole my heart. A lot about Samodiva is rewilding the human, and these were also their values, supporting ecology and supporting artists. Yes, it’s a beautiful gallery, but my main decision making point was that they have very similar morals to us, and I knew that what is important to me as a creator and to the rest of my creative team will be important to them and that we can mutually benefit from creating that experience together and enriching our separate audiences. On that same topic, they were quite interested in how we incorporate ecology to what we do, so a lot of our set was entirely taken from a forest. It was dirt and plants, and we recreated a lake inside there as well. Our costume designer used a lot of ecological materials to create the costumes, so we are as eco-friendly as possible.
It’s not always easy for an artist to be able to find a collaboration that aligns with their values in that way, so it’s really lovely that that was able that you were able to make that happen.
Q: Can you tell us more about the immersive workshops surdcedance collective run, and how they incorporate wellness?
Stephanie: It is a big part of our mission and also curiosity to allow the audiences to not only immerse but also to have artistic qualities in their everyday lives and as non-professionals. We have a format called Dancer in the Community, which is really trying to make dance accessible to individuals that don’t necessarily have any prior dance background or have an able-body or have a young body, to really verticalise access to dance. So, I think this continues in our workshops. Around the shows that we create, we run immersive workshops where the audience can sometimesexperience a part of the choreographic text of the work. But we also run wellness workshops, and we’re trying to transcend the space away from simply fitness or body practice.
We always think quite holistically and thoroughly about a theme and as practitioners we have a wide range of tools with which we can serve communities, so we always consider very carefully whether we would apply Reiki or a mindfulness practice, a dance practice and how we would make this accessible, a more fitness practice like Pilates or even a yogic practice. We enjoy taking creativity outside of the strictly artist and viewer space, into a space where people go to take care of their own bodies and minds. But we really believe in them, that they also can be co-creators and artists, so we approach them with artistic content.
Q: Who attends these workshops?
Stephanie: I think we’re generating an audience around us that does follow our work and does come to classes. So, there is definitely a community building element to the to the work. And I think the two things intersect. People that are coming to move with us, to move their bodies or to rest their minds, are people that are open to witness our artistic work as well.
Marchela: Sometimes we come out of that bubble, and we go the extra mile to find a community. For example, around Samodiva, we did a lot of workshops with other migrant groups where we involved different Bulgarian schools and did those workshops specifically with the children of the school, or with the adults, or both. Then they were interested to follow that journey whether that was to start coming to our classes or to start seeing our shows, just to just to find that connection with somebody else that is on a similar journey as they are.
Stephanie: I think I just want to clarify that our commitment is not to only serve Eastern European audiences. We operate in the very large cultural, multicultural, and diverse context of London. So, we’re definitely interested to invite audiences and members to our practices that culturally come from other practices, and in no way are we restrictive. We’re drawing inspiration from Eastern European topics, but it is not only oriented towards migrant communities (although they are special because sometimes we feel they go underserved and we are very well positioned to serve them. But they’re not the only audience we work with.)
We’re really aiming to create work that finds different ways to connect with people and to give to audiences in different ways. We might not always recreate the format of Samodiva in future work, but definitely there’s an intention of, how does the work become accessible? How it influences or meets audience members, is definitely a longer term question for us.
Images by Morrigan Rawson; Tufael Kabiri; Nikola Gyulmezov.