NETA News

Medeea, my mother, produced by the Sfumato Laboratory Theatre in Sofia, Bulgaria, will open on August 30 on the National Theatre of Bucharest “Studio” stage within the 2015 NETA International Theatre Festival. The play received the Best show of the season distinction in the Icarus 2013 national awards and was rewarded with “A new theatrical language” in the fourth edition of the NETA Festival.

Medeea, my mother is a hurtful play, in which six documentary stories relentlessly pummel and invade us, disturbing our peace and rational thinking, writes Svetlana Pancheva in the “Duma” newspaper.

Even if author Ivan Dobcev (Stefan Ivanov co-author) subtitles it as “A naive improvisation of a myth”, the play staged at Sfumato by the renowned artistic duo Margarita Mladenova – Ivan Dobcev brings one and a half hours of elaborate theatre, with a striking contemporary drama. “This is our first show with a direct openness towards the audience. So far, we have only created new worlds for the viewers to travel to”. This time, starting from a transfusion, the hero of the play travels in imaginary worlds, searching for his real mother”.

A dramatic play of child abandonment and trade, Medeea, my mother warns against the dangers of the contemporary world, the loss of the sacred value of motherhood, dehumanization of the post-human and reducing life to bare survival. “Infants sold, abandoned children, abortions, abuse, the search for roots, the myth of Medea, the Goliath whale, Batman’s Joker and Harmanli, all in the terribly pulsing ‘boom-boom”, writes Kremena Dimitrova.

Innovative artists, prestigious university teachers, renowned throughout Bulgaria and the world for the Sfumato Laboratory Theatre they created in 1989 as a theatre for long-term subjects, authentic art-science “expeditions” in partnership with a wide array of experts, directors Margarita Mladenova and Ivan Dobcev have been successfully leading ever since this project. Poetically titled Sfumato (meaning ‘painting in the air’), this laboratory theatre turned into a State Theatre in 1994, aiming cultivate a unique theatrical expression and create innovation strategies. At Sfumato, captured in particularly sensitive artistic view, the indistinguishable becomes actual, visible.

Come to witness a show about the outcast, searching for their roots in Sfumato. Medeea, my mother, fulfills its purpose to create perceptible reactions within the audience, as Sabina Vassilieva noted in the “Sega Newspaper”.

The plays within the 2015 NETA International Theatre Festival are subtitled in Romanian and English.