За границите на драматичния и кукления театър в режисурата на Веселка Кунчева
On the limits of drama and puppet theatre in Veselka Kuncheva’s directing

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with the theatre language and quests for aesthetic expression of director Veselka Kuncheva, who is one of the outstanding figures of the present director’s theatre in Bulgaria. Her stage career is traced from her earliest productions in 2000 (Pinocchio, Forbidden for Children to the recent ones (The Queen of Spades, The Last Temptation). Her work with actors is considered: workshops conducted in advance to study the subject and the matter along with teaming permanently up with the same playwright, set designer, composer and choreographer. In over a decade and a half now, they have made a number of productions, initially developing in the direction of heterogeneous puppet theatre expressiveness, where puppets have ceased to be a dominant element, becoming just one of the numerous components of this theatre such as a visible puppeteer, an actor behind a mask, many kinds of props, appurtenances and objects (in Henryk Jurkowski’s terms). Recently, dramatic devices and techniques are increasingly bravely occurring in her directorial quests. Her directing has shaped an idiomatic practice in its own right of her approach to the components drama-performability-reception, positioning puppet theatre in a niche attractive to the adult audiences, though she has also made puppet shows for children and family audiences. The paper dwells on several productions illustrative of Veselka Kuncheva’s directorial practice: Pinocchio, Forbidden for Children, Immured, On the Edge of the Sky, I, Sisyphus, Fear, Momo, The Queen of Spades, The Last Temptation, staged at different theatres, with different actors, in different styles, but unfailingly arousing curiosity and stirring up interest from both audiences and critics.

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