Transformability: Forever [partly musical]

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Transformability is an original performance by Willy Prager, provoked and inspired by the article of the same name by the philosopher Boyan Manchev, published in 2006 in the prestigious German performing arts magazine “Theater der Zeit”. The performance was created in partnership and with the participation of the choreographers and performers Sonja Pregrad (Croatia) and Tian Rotteveel (Netherlands), and later on the team was joined by Iva Sveshtarova (Bulgaria). The premiere of the original work took place in 2012 at the iconic dance festival “Tanztage” in Berlin, followed by numerous invitations from other festivals in Europe, and rave reviews in the media. 

Twelve years later, this cult performance returns to the Bulgarian stage with the title Transformability: Forever [partly musical] as part of the international educational project SEEDS. It started in 2023 as a kind of “academy” for dancers and producers who are at the beginning of their career and aims to integrate them into the European professional exchange through long-term intensive training. Therefore, the choreographer Willy Prager recreates his work with students from the Romanian Dance Centre and with young Bulgarian performers.

The full title of Boyan Manchev’s influential publication, which is the basis of the performance, is: Transformability. Performing Society and Contemporary Conditions of Dance. In his text, he discusses the relationship between contemporary consumer society, with its increasingly heightened “performativeness” and dance, in the context of capitalism and the global market economy. From this starting point, in his performance Willy Prager not only tells the key philosophical theses of the text in stage language, but manages to comment on them on a meta-level, viewing them from the position of practice and performing arts. For this purpose, the philosophical text has been turned into a script following the structure and rules of the musical. The performers are placed in the conceptual framework of this popular genre, which symbolizes the progressive society, but also aesthetically often moves on the edge of fake happiness, leading to a state of impossible pleasure and complete exhaustion.

Through its subtle play with the nuances of stage genres, philosophical concepts and contemporary sociopolitical reality, Transformability: Forever [partly musical] encourages us to think together about whether it is possible for a philosophical text to become an essential element in the creation of one of the most market-oriented stage forms such as musicals; how a theoretical text can be danced; how a bridge can be created between dance and theory using the rules of popular culture.