The first edition of Ankoku International Performance Festival will be held at Teater Giljotin in Stockholm on the 16-21 May.
Teater Giljotin is collaborating with Emergency Theatre from Bulgaria for the first ever Ankoku International Performance Festival, to promote an artistic language with a strong avant-garde and transgressive nature. “ANKOKU” stands for darkness as a reaction against too much light. Ankoku is the name of the artist Tana Maneva’s iconic performance language, which is inspired by the dance from Butoh. The five-day festival will include three unique performance shows, artist talks with international guests such as Vasilka Bumbarova from the National Theatre, Bulgaria, as well as concerts with performance-oriented artists incorporating avant-garde elements, such as Emmanuelle June.
The initiative for the festival comes from Teater Giljotin and Tana Maneva, and it is aimed to showcase Teater Giljotin’s increasingly international profile with contacts such as Toplocentrala Center for Contemporary Art and collaborations in Georgia, Bulgaria and the Netherlands.
Tana Maneva has since 2017 run Giljotin Performance Lab – an international platform for contemporary performing arts, theater, experimental art and music, and produced critically acclaimed shows such as Strange Development (2019) and Beautiful Souls (2023).
Tana Maneva is a performance artist, director and actor/dancer. In her work she integrated theater, dance, butoh, photography and visual arts. Tana graduated from the National Academy of Theater and Film Arts in Sofia Bulgaria and has a training in Japanese Butoh dance in Dharamshala, India. She has toured throughout Europe and played and collaborated on international stages such as Young Vic in London, La Mama Theater in New York, Theater 199 in Sofia. Tana is one of the founders of one of the first independent theater groups in Bulgaria after Perestroika, New Forms Theatre. Since 2002, Tana Maneva has been based in Stockholm and worked in a close collaboration with the composer Rikard Borggård and Teater Giljotin. Within her area she stands out with several performances with strong cross-border and avant-garde language, such as Emergence Exit, Lucifer Effect and Concealed Party. Her works are often provocative and expressive, disturbing and unpredictable, where she creates an internal non-linear narrative. She explores the human persona, moral standards, taboos and dogmas. The purpose of her work is to release our creative nature, to integrate its chaos, unpredictability and irrationality and open space for another perspective than our mostly rational approach to reality and life.
The Emergency Theater Fondation (Bulgaria) was created in 2021 in collaboration with the poet and playwright Tzveta Sofronieva and focuses on sociocultural wounds caused by society, and the ways to overcome psychological pain through drama, performance and workshops. They visit the festival with two performances: The Room of Pleasure is Empty and Scenes at Dawn, both directed by Juliana Saiska.
