ANKOKU INTERNATIONAL - SCENES AT DAWN
Teater Giljotin / Vasastan
SCENES AT DAWN (Bulgaria)
Based on poetry, letters and drama texts by Tzveta Sofronieva and on fragments of personal
narratives of the actors
Scenes at Dawn is an oratorio about human helplessness, about the fear of losing the person next
to us, about longing, about illusions, about the power and the solace we find in awakening.
Between the dream and the crisis of the coming day, there is the time of daybreak- time of the truth
that emerges between the excessive fatigue and anxiety. How we endure, how we live, what
happens to us when our feelings are turned inward and reverberate in the cavity of the body? The
most important rehearsal is the one where we try to express our feelings, and more importantly,
become able to share them. We put the audience in the role of the desired partner. We give it
scenes of eroticism and death, scenes of personal shame and reverie. The stage becomes a
psychodrama laboratory. We walk the audience through the spaces between loneliness that
closes our hearts and the kind of loneliness that pushes us to a new encounter. We begin with the
scene of The Personal Hell, with monologues of helplessness, rudeness and betrayal- these are
children of fear. Then we walk through the Cultural Purgatory, where we look for answers to the
questions of love and identity. We debunk the “Catalogue feelings” with our Love conference. In
the third part we reach the Possible Paradise where we experience an insight and also realise how
valuable meeting the Other can be. We find and write down the eleventh commandment: Don’t
die, please!
Director: Juliana Saiska
Playwright: Tzveta Sofronieva
Cast: Elena Dimitrova, Yana Moroz, Juliana Saiska, Elica Alexieva, Velislav Pavlov
Costumes, set and lights: Ralitza Toneva
Music: Elica Alexieva
Audio engineer: Nino Gomes
Duration: 90 minutes
Suitable for audiences aged 16+
About Emergency Theater Foundation
The Emergency Theater Foundation creates space for the human inner scene, for the search of
identity and fulfillment in a context the current social and cultural reality. Our performances are built
like a stage gathering, and at the same time they carry the essence of a therapeutic session. By
bringing experience from various art fields, we create our products on the principle of a support
group, both internally as a team and together with the audience, focusing on giving a new meaning
to what we’ve experienced on the stage. Just as in an emergency room, we are united by a sense
of urgency and the need for life-saving intervention in order to overcome the symptoms of anxiety.
We work on various ways of expressing tolerance and also awareness of the danger when life-
sustaining conditions in nature and society rapidly disappear and people face loss and alienation.
We study the human dialogue with the world. We work with texts that explore the aesthetics of the
Anthropocene. The focus is on the sociocultural wounds caused by the world we live in, on the
individual sensitivity and the ways to overcome psychological pain through drama, performance
and workshops.
The foundation is a NGO based in Sofia, Bulgaria with members Juliana Saiska (founding member,
author, director, actor, psychodrama therapist), Elena Dimitrova (author, actor, director), Velislav
Pavlov (actor), Yana Moroz (anthropologist, actor), Elica Alexieva (composer, musician), Theodor
Kotov (psychodrama therapist, actor). Nino Gomes (musician and sound designer) and Sophia
Kaneva (cultural studies).
Emergency Theater Foundation was created in 2021 on the basis of our joint projects from 2017, in
collaboration with the poet and playwright Tzveta Sofronieva.