Map Quest

Zornitsa Stoyanova's dance theater breaks down the fourth wall.

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Jun 17, 2008

Michael T. Regan FRENETIC JUSTICE: Bulgarian dancer Zornitsa Stoyanova's physicality comes from being "a regular person who can't pay attention." (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

As anyone who's ever been hopelessly lost can attest, maps can bear a tenuous relationship to the reality they're supposed to represent. The dancers in choreographer Zornitsa Stoyanova's first full-length dance theater piece, Point of No Return, run directly into that problem, becoming increasingly confused over the course of the evening as they attempt to adhere to a one-to-one correspondence between an audience-generated map and a pathway charted through the confines of Mascher Space Co-Op.

"I feel like this piece is a close comment on how people live their lives," Stoyanova says. "There's this really interesting tension between what you think you're doing and the perception of what you're doing. ... So the map is an imposed thing that the performers can't get out of. They think they know what they're doing, but they're never right."

Point of No Return begins with the five dancers of Stoyanova's Here[begin] Dance Co. — herself included — being guided by maps drawn by audience members. The troupe loses its way as the dancers stubbornly focus on the map and become increasingly unmoored from their surroundings. The idea of favoring instinct over instructions relates to Stoyanova's view of dance.

"I feel 10 times more comfortable doing improvisation than choreography," she says. "I get lost in choreography because I'm thinking of what's next and I'm not doing what's now. And in improvisation, I can just be."

Stoyanova was born and raised in Bulgaria. She came to the States to study dance at Bennington College in Vermont, where she also became fascinated with sound design and the history of math. Following the lead of a few former classmates, she moved to Philly in fall 2006 and became a member of the Mascher Co-Op.

Her experiences since arriving in the U.S. provide subtext to this piece about struggling to find one's way. "Usually," she says, "people who come from Bulgaria study finance or international relations or computers, and if they decide to stay, they get a job right away in a huge corporation that puts them in a cubicle, pays their expenses, no worries. My situation is that I'm an artist. Even if I was American it would still be hard."

Stoyanova comes by her physicality naturally: Her parents are both internationally renowned athletes, her mother in fencing, her father in judo and Sambo, a Russian form of martial arts. "In high school," she says, "I acted in a way that here would probably be called ADD. I'm from Europe, so I don't believe in those things — I'm just a regular person who can't pay attention. ... I think there's something genetic in me that's movement-oriented."

Still, their shared interest in the physical didn't mean that Stoyanova's parents necessarily understood her inclination toward dance. "During my upbringing, I never remember going to the theater with my parents," she says. "I went to a movie once with my dad, to see E.T. But I never saw the ballet. ... Whatever I was exposed to was strictly through school, and I think the reason I'm so passionate about it is because I don't know anything. I don't know much of the history of dance, yet I recognize what's boring to me and what's interesting."

One of the main things that Stoyanova finds boring as an audience member is staying safely behind the fourth wall, sitting and watching silently as performers ignore her. That's why she's gone to such lengths to incorporate the audience as active participants in her own piece. Besides mapping out the route the dancers will follow, normally passive viewers will be drawn out of their seats and into the performance space, becoming immersed in the dancers' realm and even, on occasion, enlisted as stagehands.

"I want to keep things very hands-on, very human," she explains. "There's not going to be any of those magical things that happen in performance, like music or projections suddenly coming out of nowhere. I've been shuffling in my head how to interact with the audience, how to create a piece that completely shifts that perspective. It's important for this piece to be this one randomly chosen audience member's personal piece."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Fri., June 20, 7 and 9 p.m., $5-$20, Mascher Space, 155 Cecil B. Moore Ave., herebegindance.com.

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