SOFIA NIGHT PERFORMANCE
2025
Oborishte District, under Dondukov Blvd.
We are pleased to invite you to Sofia Night Performance – the main event of the second edition of the Nine Elephants Festival. This special evening takes place immediately after the opening of the festival and brings together four artists to activate different urban spaces through theatre, dance, performance and music.
Sofia Night Performance is the first event of its kind in Sofia, where theatre, choreography, visual art and play practices intertwine in an exciting evening stroll through the city. We invite everyone to immerse themselves in this fantastic experience.
The evening begins with Ina Dobreva and a performance in the very building she has lived in for years. The focus of her latest work is the inner world and the secrets we hide, as well as the apparent surface that only remains accessible to others. Ina comes from the field of theatre, but in recent years her work has developed in the realm of installation and performance, with a focus on documents, archives and personal histories.
After that Sofia Dimova leads us to one of her urban interventions titled When There Are No Words Left, in which she transforms unused commercial signs into carriers of messages connected to historical events and current political issues. Through performance and visual language she draws attention to the hidden layers of the urban environment.
Next is Silvia Cherneva, who takes on the role of an inspector of “playability” in the urban environment and delivers a very short lecture. The event takes place in one of the districts with a record-low number of pleasant outdoor public spaces in Sofia. Against the backdrop of dominant parking lots, locked schoolyards, and overgrown excavation sites, Silvia — herself also a resident of the neighborhood — presents her research on where and how people can spend time outdoors without it being tied to shopping or alcohol consumption. It is an exercise in urban imagination and the rethinking of space — or perhaps the playability of a place depends not only on the place itself, but above all on the mindset of the player?
The evening concludes with Juicegroove by Karakashyan & Artists — an interactive dance performance for three dancers, directed by Kosta Karakashyan and choreographed in collaboration with the performers of the Karakashyan & Artists dance company. In the performance dance becomes a way to connect with the people around us, creating new relationships between audience, performer, and music. The piece boldly combines the diverse aesthetics of contemporary and commercial dance, inspired by the sensation of synesthesia — a blended perception of the senses — merging sound, touch, and imagery in unpredictable ways.
Sofia Night Performance transforms the city for one night, along with our perception, the space around us, and the connections between people — an encounter with remarkable artists in a slightly different Sofia.
Evening Program
A Story from the Bottom
28 Chumerna Street — Ina Dobreva
When There Are No Words Left
75 Tsar Simeon Street — Sofia Dimova
Lecture with a Demonstration by an Inspector of the Playability of Public Spaces
at the triangle on 3 Iskar Street — Silvia Cherneva
Juicegroove
at the intersection of Veslets Street and Tsar Simeon Street — Karakashyan & Artists
Sofia Dimova (1996) is a multidisciplinary artist born in Varna. She graduated from Minerva Art Academy (Groningen, Netherlands) with a degree in Fine Arts in 2019. In her practice, Sofia Dimova combines various materials and techniques that help her create an interconnectedness between personal, fundamental, and socio-political issues.
Ina Dobreva graduated in Acting from NATFA in 2009 and then specialized in Paris. Since her return to Bulgaria in 2012 until 2017 she has been working as an actress at the Stoyan Bachvarov State Theatre, Varna, and in the years after that – as a freelancer. She realized her first solo exhibition For Whom the Bell Tolls in the framework of Plovdiv 2019 – European Capital of Culture. In Alibi (2021) she explores the effects of the coronavirus pandemic through an installation of hundreds of silk cocoons. The documentary installation I Found These Letters (2023) tells the story of two letters found under strange circumstances and their sender 30 years later. The project unravels the theme of life in the 1990s was presented in Varna 2023 and in Paris 2024. In 2024 she realized the performance Salt is not lent within The Artist At Play – a platform for young artists. Ina Dobreva’s latest project Siyazh is dedicated to perfumes, stories and fragrances collected for nearly 30 years.
Sylvia Cherneva works with dance, performance and cinema. She is interested in the poetics of everyday movement, politics in public space and play as a way of creating and connecting with each other. In her debut performance Critical Mass, in which the performers hang from the ceiling by ropes, she discovered that the audience also enjoys hanging and swaying when given the opportunity. From then on Sylvia took it as her mission to create more opportunities for people of different ages to play. She is conducting research on the topic as a Trilateral Exchange resident in Budapest, Sofia and Philadelphia in 2023-2024, and her current project, Unstable Ground, presents a kinetic installation for public places. In her spare time, Sylvia works as a self-appointed playability inspector of public spaces, occasionally reporting her activities on social media.
Karakashyan & Artists is a multidisciplinary company of dance artists from Bulgaria that boldly explores various formats and disciplines with an emphasis on movement and telling powerful social stories. United by director and choreographer Kosta Karakashyan, the troupe creates innovative projects such as the dance-culinary immersive performances KITCHEN and Tales in Space: Unearthly Mysteries, the ecological immersive performance The Last Sunset, as well as the experimental video-game-style immersive show Insert Coin / Player One, a co-production of One Dance Festival. Their performances take over alternative spaces such as kitchens, waste depots, hotels, public spaces, offices, clubs, and beaches. Partners and supporters of the company include HRC Culinary Academy, Goethe-Institut, Singer-Zaharieff Foundation, Columbia Ballet Collaborative, One Dance Festival, and National Culture Fund.
In partnership with Oborishte District.
The presentation by Silvia Cherneva is part of the project Creating New Cultural Products in the Urban Environment – presentation in Sofia (festival Nine Elephants) and Berlin (C*Space), funded through Component 11 Social Inclusion, Investment 6 Development of the Cultural and Creative Sectors, Procedure BG-RRP-11.020, Grant Scheme Creation of Bulgarian Productions and Co-productions in the Cultural and Creative Industries Sector and their Promotion in European and International Arts Markets under the Recovery and Resilience Plan.
Links
Presentation of an audio guide that can be listened to individually or in a group during a walk through the city