Room, empty. Cold walls. Outside the room – corridor, stairs and … Other rooms. Empty and cold. A gray-blue world in which the breath turns into steam, the voice leaves the lips but is not heard, the ears are deaf, the body is gone… Or maybe it’s there, down, under the bed, over the sink… Before the mirror… Spirit-at-the-bottom.

The performance places the viewer in the timelessness of the life in which the abused woman exists. Broken to pieces, disassembled, she searches for itself, multiplies herself in space, alienated from voice, body, and time.

According to a research by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, every fourth woman in Bulgaria is a victim of domestic violence – physical or psychological, within the framework of their intimate partnership. It’s hard to imagine that every day we pass by people who are afraid to go home. PIECES is a performance that addresses the issue of domestic violence through the means of dance and aims to hide the audience in close proximity to the action, to make the spectators an inhabitant of the spaces by making them feel alienated and unable to help.

Could society be an instrument in solving the problem or is it a personal drama the consequences of which do not concern us?

Welcome home!

***

In the spaces of the History Museum of Sofia, we will try to piece together the puzzle of the broken female essence, a victim of violence. All the dance pieces are inspired by the architecture and design of the former central bathhouse and are constructed from stories of male-female relationships. Stories of loneliness, dependence, fear, aggression, humiliation, love… Which in the reality we live in has become a “natural” scenario.

***The episodes are inspired by true stories of women-victims of domestic violence in Bulgaria.