YOU ARE NOT ALONE Festival: I Love When You’re Watching Me

In I Love When You’re Watching Me, I dance solo in intimate connection with silence, music, dance, myself, and the audience, born out of a desire to open spaces of playful intimacy, where you can dwell and dissolve in ephemerality. I can easily appear and disappear, while at the same time always being here.

In I Love When You’re Watching Me, I celebrate being seen and felt in raw vulnerability. It invites failure and builds connections through sensual and delicate interactions.

In front of your gaze, with each breath, movement, and sound, I change and transition into something else. I become more visible, and sometimes I disappear invisibly.

Before disappearing with this dance, I allow myself to take up space, express myself freely, and create through movement. Shifting through personal experiences and dance archives, I leave and erase traces, touch senses, and invite you into the unknown.
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Credits

Dance: Zhana Pencheva
Music: Tsvetan Momchilov
Light Design & Stage: Ralitsa Toneva
Photo & Video Documentation: Gergely Ofner 
Co-Production by Garage Collective, ICC and Zhana Pencheva.
With the partnership of Toplocentrala, Sofia 

The proces of creating the worked was supported with dramaturgical, dance, and conceptual advice from Hana Erdman, Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Dario Barreto Damas, and Aleksandar Georgiev.

This performance is part of my ongoing project Bodies in Pleasure, Bodies That Care, Dancing Bodies, initiated and danced in the frame of my study in the Stockholm University of The Arts. It explores sensuality, performative identities that the dancer carries within, and the erotic presence of the dancing body. The work examines relational dynamics with the environment, music, gazes, bodies, emotions, feelings, and the uncertainty of the unknown.
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The project is financially supported by Stockholm University of the Arts, Mobility Program of the Sofia Culture Program, Bulgaria, and ETUD Foundation.
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About the author

Zhana is a freelance dancer working between Burgas, Sofia, Stockholm, and other international contexts. I hold BA and MA degrees in dance and choreography from New Bulgarian University and currently graduated from the New Performance Practices MA program at Stockholm University of the Arts.

She creates dance works that often explore themes of sensuality, erotics, love, and the kinetic and relational spaces inhabited by the body. My dance projects are developed in close collaboration with music, sound, light, space and other bodies. Some of my works include the choreographic concerts Six Love Songs (2019), Dance baby, dance (2021), as well as other pieces such as Glass of love and Garden. My latest dance solo work is “I Love When You’re Watching Me”.

In 2018, together with Aleksandar Georgiev and Dario Barreto Damas, they co-founded the international artistic team STEAM ROOM, working with collective authorship practices. They have presented works across numerous European cities. Since 2020, they have been developing a long-term initiative — Imaginative Choreographic Center (ICC) — which explores collective processes within the framework of an imaginative institution, fostering shared responsibility and critical engagement in dance and choreography.

In recent years, she has performed in both Bulgarian and international productions, including The Body as Reference for Revolution (United Cowboys), In C (Sasha Waltz & Guests), The Power of S (Aleksandar Georgiev), Hommage à Merce Cunningham (Paula Rosolen), Impossible Actions (2021, Yasen Vasilev), among others.