ДРУГА

The price of life in emigration — you always remain the other. Both here and there. You’ve heard it, haven’t you? Even on this continent, where borders have been removed. Removed so we can live, work, love, create between distant points on the map that we call our homes. Homes where cultures mix, blend and confuse, and that’s not so frightening, right? It can be funny, challenging, even charming. This is AnOther, Katерина Radeva’s return performance in Sofia after its world premiere in Plovdiv, created at the initiative of and co-produced by One Dance Festival.

АnOther is a duet that explores the relationship between the present and the past. The performance is a personal and symbolic journey in which our sense of home is shaped by the distance that separates us from it. Katerina merges dance and music from Bulgarian folklore with her contemporary aesthetics, sense of humor, characteristic movements and visual richness. DRUGA is her emotional resonance of life abroad and celebrates the complex identity of migration, in which we simultaneously do not belong to our homeland, yet cannot uproot it from our hearts.

Because what does it mean to leave? And what remains behind you? Family and friends, the language. The way of life and the particularities of living in a place as rich in traditions as Bulgaria. The shared knowledge of corners and the past, of how to make a salad or cook beans. The memories of the rhythm of the seasons. How do you change to adapt, and how much do you want to remain yourself? How do you create a sense of home, a straw to pull you up through the endless nights of nostalgia?
Does hearing a song help? Dancing to it? Dancing a dance that generations before you have danced? And what does it mean to return? To come back after such a long time?

AnOther is a performance of duality — of the contemporary and the folk, of the here and now intertwined with the past and ritual. A performance of visible and invisible belonging. A performance of all the journeys taken just to get back home.

At 16, Katerina left Bulgaria alone to finish college in England. She had no intention of leaving forever, but she has since lived on the Island. She is a migrant: inhabiting places that are not hers, among people whose culture is not hers, and speaking a language that is not her mother tongue. This status is the cornerstone of her artistic work, focused on identity and diversity.
Respected and awarded as a performance maker, her works have been presented in the USA, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, England, Denmark, Germany, France, Switzerland, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, but never in Bulgaria. Now, after 25 years abroad, Katerina Radeva returns to her native city Plovdiv with a performance that explores migration, belonging and cultural heritage.