Narcissus & Echo
Narcissus & Echo is a project for the closing performance show, "Narcissus and Echo", by the grantees and mentors in the first edition of the National Scholarship ‘Per aspera ad astra’ (through hardship to the stars) 2018. The grant, instituted by the Cultural Perspectives Foundation and the metallurgical and engineering holding company KCM 2000 Group, was inspired by an idea of the Bulgarian opera singer Ina Kancheva and supports young Bulgarian talents.
The show is the high point of the competition, in which grantees in five arts – visual arts, literature, music, dance, theatre/performance – going through the stages of the grant, will present themselves and their way of treating a common theme, at the same time making their first steps as free artists.
The grant provides financial support for growth and development, and the realization of a personal project. It includes also mentoring advice from five of Bulgaria's foremost artists in each area: Nedko Solakov, Georgi Gospodinov, Krassimira Stoyanova, Galina Borisova and Yavor Gardev.
The first grantees are Radoslav "Rudi" Ninov (visual arts), Alexander Gabrovski and Yoanna Elmi (literature), Stefani Krasteva (music), Stefani Handzhiiska (dance), Emona Ilieva, Konstantsa Getsova, Nadia Keranova (theatre/performance).
"The ancient myth about the impossible meeting between Narcissus, transfixed by his own image, and Echo, entranced by her own voice, exhibits the symptoms of one of modern time's most debilitating social diseases: alienation. It visits us inevitably when we put ourselves in the centre of our own world. Each time we are in the seductive thrall of our own vibrations, the road to the other inexorably closes and we find ourselves trapped in our own reflection. We see it while we're staring into the screen of our mobile devices, we swim in its irresistibility when looking in the eyes of the supposed others while other, real-life others are fading away, melting into the haze of the ever-diminishing reality. And later when, try as we might, we strive to call them back, what we hear is nothing but our own voice. We look into ourselves and hear nothing but our own voices, we open the gates of a bottomless, inconsolable loneliness."
— Yavor Gardev
"Narcissus & Echo" is made possible by the Cultural Perspectives Foundation.
