Varna Dance Theater – VDT’ Foundation

reMOVE borders

In this series, we ask i-Portunus Houses participants to tell us their stories and experiences. At the end of each story, we invite you to reflect with us on important themes about mobility in the arts and civil society. 

The project aimed to put together three artists from three different countries and enable them to cocreate a dance piece in an alternative space. The invited artists were Etienne Bechard (choreographer), Mihaela Griveva (choreographer), and Benjamin Shultz (sound designer). Their collaboration resulted in the dance piece ‘ReMOVE Boundaries’).

Due to COVID-19, we had to reschedule the project. As a result, the three artists could not be in Varna at the same time as initially planned, but they were still able to collaborate and communicate online and do their work in Varna independently in the best way possible. The project was called ‘ReMOVE Borders’, but right before it started, the war in Ukraine began. We had already created the poster of the performance. The design included dancing silhouettes on the map of Europe and the colors we had chosen were blue and yellow to fit the i-Portunus logo. Ironically, when the war started, we felt that our project ‘Remove Borders’ and the design on the map of Europe in blue and yellow had suddenly become much more in line with the current events than we had initially planned. In order to avoid diverse misinterpretations (and to emphasize that we have nothing against the current political borders in Europe), we decided to call the performance ‘ReMOVE Boundaries’ and to choose another design.

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