Author(s): Kamelia Nikolova / Language(s): Bulgarian
Issue: 3/2022
The study examines the development of the new Bulgarian drama from the political change in Central and Eastern Europe, and specifically in Bulgaria, at the end of 1989 to the present. The past 33 years have been a time of great socio-cultural transformation of the country from a totalitarian to a democratic state. This transformation is accompanied by deep social, moral and aesthetic crises, complemented by severe cataclysms on a global scale, which the modern world faced in the 21st century. The Bulgarian theatre and the new Bulgarian drama deeply reflect these complex and contradictory times. Their development during the last three decades is divided into two main periods, following the general periodization of the country's recent history. The first of them covers the 90s of the 20th and the first years of the 21st century, or this is the period of political transition - the time from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the totalitarian regime at the end of 1989 to the joining of the European union in 2007 (of Bulgaria), and the second is from the beginning of this century to the present day.The situation in the new dramatic writing in the first years after the political change in Bulgaria is significantly different from the development of the theatre then. If for the theatre, especially in the 1990s, it was a period of rapid revival and overall intensive transformation, regardless of the many financial, programmatic and organizational difficulties, then the drama experienced, above all, a deep existential crisis. From the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, the situation changed crucially. The new dramatic writing gained strength and self-confidence, and in the following years, until today, both its main thematic and aesthetic coordinates, as well as its main directions, were clearly established. In the present day Bulgarian drama, from the point of view of its writing, there are two main trends: theatre texts written by a individual author and the ever-expanding territory of the devised drama, created in a specific collaborative process by the performance team. The spectrum of dramatic forms and thematic lines is also large, ranging from conventional drama to post-dramatic texts, political plays and documentary verbatim theatre.
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