Self interview 2005 Galina Borissova

Text by Galina Borissova

Self interview 2005

Published at www.cult.bg

Translation in English from Bulgarian - Katerina Popova

I entered ballet school by pure chance. The first time I applied I was turned down for the ridiculous reason that I had a face scar (from a burn when I was three). The second time I was admitted for the just as ridiculous reason that I’d had plastic surgery to remove the scar. I also hid the fact that in parallel position my legs weren’t exactly straight, as required of ballet dancer. As a result of all this I developed, perhaps unconsciously, a sense of individuality and a pointless ambition to prove myself even while I was a child. Later on these two things – lies and chance – taught me to recognize reality which, at the time I was old enough to finish school (1985), didn’t look promising at all.

The subsequent “intentional” specializations in the US and Western Europe fine-tuned my sense of discernment and orientation in the vast [boundless] field of techniques and styles, methods and dance tastes. I realized that if I followed fashion I’d lose individuality and if I followed myself I’d lose the chance to take the easy path.

After 1989 I had the luck to start teaching at the age of 21 without knowing exactly how to do it, and since I was working with a group of actors I could experiment with them. That is how I started looking for my own way of effective movement, at times comfortable and at times uncomfortable, desperate to free my body from the nine-year straitjacket of conditioning by ballet technique deeply encoded in my mind and body. I wanted to be free and I wanted to be original, to avoid repeating the already familiar.

So, my choreographies could not be identified with any particular dance technique, and in Bulgaria at the beginning they often upset my colleagues but not the audience, which watched my shows intuitively with an open, unbiased mind. My individuality was appreciated eventually in Holland, where I won an international choreography competition and was supported on several occasions by the Grand Theatre in Groningen. This gave me strength, much needed, to fight for a place on the national scene too.

In the last twenty years I have produced, participated in and staged more than fifteen shows, almost all of them with free-lance artists from Bulgaria and other countries. Dancers crossed boundaries as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, and have since been traveling and changing continents nonstop. To speak of Finnish dance or of Bulgarian dance is, in my view, a rather limited way of looking at things because Finnish dance or Bulgarian dance is made by names and not by nationalities.

The themes I “explore” in my pieces are common, human, natural reactions to my everyday and private life. I was once paid the compliment that I was a “Chaplinesque actress.” Or that my choreographies have a sense of humor similar to Mr. Bean’s.

Those compliments are my biggest reward.

I prefer modern variety and cabaret acts to intellectual experimental pretensions that nobody wants to see.

I am surprised sometimes by people who don’t understand that although there is no text, nonverbal shows also have a script that can be very serious. Whether I want to end my show facing or with back turned to the audience is a statement. What is conveyed not by words but by actions has a much more powerful emotional effect than verbal comments or statements.

Classical dance I associate more with appearance and aesthetics, beauty and vitality, while modern dance gives me more opportunities to rearrange reality because modernity means destroying the primacy of external reality.

In my latest shows I notice a distancing from the material I am creating. This enables personal interpretations of the observed and experienced. I use the immediacy of facts rather than sensationalism through their use. I am not interested in concepts of space, time, and movement because I think they exist in us. I am more interested in intuition, love, hate, risk… The ugly cuts through me deeply, like deep lines and wrinkles on the face, and the beautiful makes me cry, like something impossible to repeat.

After music, dance is what can make me open my eyes wide.

I can’t imagine that the future of dance lies in cloning of individuals who meet European standards. I believe in the survival of individuality. Sometimes at the expense of the individual.

You need to be very brave to “strip naked” before the audience, to show yourself directly but discreetly expose yourself unobtrusively. The scene shouldn’t be interpreted. It is perceived as a sensation and grasped through this emotion.

I call myself a mutant choreographer. In English, mutant means “changing, altering, something or someone that is the result of change.” I don’t know why in everyday Bulgarian mutant has negative connotations.

Galina Borissova

Sofia, November 20, 2005