DELICIOUS SECRET: The silent creative boom in Bulgaria
Riding into Sofia, it’s not the decay that startles you. It’s the rapid, headlong bloom. Peeling Communist housing towers you expect, in their mustard-to-custard browns. But each apartment has a patio, strung with bright laundry and tangled with potted plants, like daubs of flushed color across the building’s face. Everywhere else is a universe of trees—trees-of-heaven, white birches, and flowering ones that flood the sidewalk with scent. No one cuts the grass, so it grows lushly, like sexy long hair. Sofia’s skyline is broken up by terracotta Mediterranean rooftops, golden domes and gabled embassies. Stray dogs shuffle through the streets. One horse-drawn cart fights the cars. Overhead, the tallest buildings announce the big Western brands of Sofia: MARRIOTT. NESCAFE. JVC.
What’s it like to live, and create, in a nearly invisible country? Put more bluntly, how do people who’ve grown up outside the world market leap into the action? Fast facts about Bulgaria tell a fraction of the story: formerly the affluent bread-basket of the Soviet Union until Communism fell in 1990, Bulgaria hit the news recently by offering support to Bush’s Iraq initiative. The move troubles the populace and hurts their EU bid, but also courts badly-needed foreign investment to remake Bulgaria as an American military seat. Now the situation is uncertain at best: everyone has enough to eat, but farmers still work with horses. The Mafia control everything; IMF funds dried up when the political upheaval of the 1990s settled down. Artists like Marina and Virgina Dodova—costume designers, sisters, and the cheerfully unconcerned drivers now weaving me through Sofia gridlock—are doubly hampered: they face the usual insecurities of an artist’s life, without a clear means of reaching markets or arts funding outside the country. Puffing heartily on a cigarette, Virginia—who goes by Gina—rocks in the passenger seat to Beck, wagging her head. “I like SO much, this!” she cries, not for the last time. As it turns out, working in secret has real advantages. Deprived of most other certainties, artists and d esigners in this post-Soviet state face their lack of clear opportunity with a merry nihilism—and their work is daring and no-holds-barred as a result. STEP went all the way to Sofia to get a feel for an entirely new creative state.
1. AZEM LOODA, LOODA!
Fate can be hilarious. Case in point: I first met Mimi and Gina at an enormous Texas wedding. Wearing pastel dresses and tough, none-too-delicate shoes, they were murmuring in Bulgarian and eyeing the extraordinarily froufy buffet. Later I caught them smoking behind the magnolias. Our mutual friend, the bride, had lived for two years in Sofia and raved about their loopy sense of humor and their deeply imaginative work. A year later I began swapping emails with them, receiving gorgeous jpegs of things they made. After a few dozen glowing pictures, I said, enough already, and invited myself over. Now I’m passing through their front hallway—eye-popping pink, with sepia family photos and a striped hatstand—and into the dining area (yellow and purple, with hand-painted lemons on the walls). Everywhere are flowers: in gourd vases, in glass bowls, bursting from pots on the patio. We pause at the table and look at each other. We barely know each other, but the freaky hair betrays sympathies: my spiky blond; Gina’s shorn, rust-red look; Mimi’s triangular bob of dense, dyed black hair. Suddenly we bust up laughing. “Azem looda, looda!” Mimi sings out. “We are crazy, you know? Bulgaria is crazy; you will love it. Look at you, here in our kitchen.” “WOW,” adds Gina, beaming and bobbling her head from side to side. To me, nodding this way means no, but to Bulgarians it’s an emphatic yes.
Mimi starts loading the table with food: banitsa, flaky pastries with a gritty, satisfying cheese filling. Palachinki, crepes smeared with honey and jam. Coffee and arian, thinned yogurt that you sprinkle with salt and drink. The cigarettes are piled majestically on the table as part of the feast; the sisters make tasty smacking sounds occasionally when they reach for a smoke.
We leaf through photos of their costume design work as we smoke, and eat, and smoke: lots of take-charge colors, texture-rich fabrics, and a quirky, layered personality. “We like costuming best, because we like telling stories with a body,” says Mimi, whose better English makes her the spokesperson. “Tonight we take you to Finale Grande, our new play. No words! No Bulgarian! Just a sweet story. People fall in love and remember young times.”
We head out to tour the Alexander Nevski church and the crypt of illuminated art below. (As I admire the gold-leaf, Mimi whispers: “They rub the gold with garlic, then take the tail of a—squirrel? A rat with a tail, yes? A squirrel’s tail to apply it. Poof! No fingers.”) Gina wears metallic-red jeans and a purple top with a faux-leather front, her own creations. Mimi clutches a matching fuzzy purse and cell-phone holder on a neck-chain; both came from a wooly thrift jacket she used to wear. “Woof, woof! Kuche -phone!” she whisper-yells, chasing me around the crypt.
Come late afternoon, we thread through the university—catching scraps of puppeteers squabbling and saxophones in full throttle—on our way to the theater. What could a play with no words really say? I wonder as we settle into the rubbed-velvet seats. The cigarette smoke pales over the crowd as the lights went down.
2. FINALES AND BEGINNINGS
It’s 11pm, well after the play, and we’ve shambled downstairs to Theodor Dukov’s apartment-slash-studio. Theo is Gina’s boyfriend and a sculptor and woodworker. Eight of us cram on the mattress and floor around my tape recorder, a bottle of rakia (a light whisky made of pressed grapes) and another grand pile of cigarette packs.
Finale Grande was gorgeous, but odd. Touching and hilarious, it tells the story of four elderly couples who reminisce about falling in love and becoming friends. Like vaudeville, it relies on visual puns—like black-and-white getups to signify old age, and full-color for youth—exaggerated gesture and evocative music and the audience, including me, loved it. (After the play Gina told me about the mermaid costume: they had a Coke-drinking party to empty enough plastic bottles to cut and spray-paint into scales.) Still, it was slightly embarrassing to feel satisfied from something that taxed me so little. A lot of Sofia life, I realized, has a lazy, relaxed quality, one that is calculated to hide the stings of real life.
Even my New Yorker’s eyes are popping at how tiny Theo’s place is. A ten-foot-square room with a mattress, a worktable, and intensely colored walls, no bathroom or sink. A sinuous wooden figure sits on the table, illuminated with Bulgarian flower-and-vine motifs and geometric patterns. Theo displays his sculpture in Sofia and Germany, hand-carves furniture, and is relatively prosperous. As it turns out, success or want for most Bulgarians comes down to a quixotic housing system. The post-Soviet government gave each citizen a parcel of land, but only some, like Mimi and Gina, got theirs in Sofia where they can rent it out profitably. (The Dodova family got two apartments—parents live in one, sisters in another—from the Communists in exchange for tearing down their home to build bloc housing.) Theo’s parcel is in the countryside, forcing him to rent in Sofia at astronomical (read: market) rates.
Bulgarians usually make merry like Mediterraneans, lingering over groaning tables of food, sniffing the damp, perfumed trees. But there’s a touch of dread to this new gathering. Time to dredge up the past: the March for Independence in 1990, a sock-to-the-belly of hope and fear that hit Mimi and Gina at 15 and 14 years old, respectively.
“Everyone was stressed out, because nobody knew...what the change was really about,” Mimi says through her friend Geri Atanassova who translates. Changes came fast for the Dodovis; their father Nikolai, an animator for a state-sponsored children’s show, lost his job practically overnight. Bank officials absconded with deposits. Gypsies dug up telephone wires from the streets and sold the copper. The old Communists got re-elected as Socialists. A gloom settles over the room. “We lived in total insecurity,” says Theo. “But we were not bored,” Mimi adds quietly. Giggles. “Something was happening all the time.” People grew disillusioned, as unwanted change rushed in and the dreams of a new order stayed distant.
Shifting gears, I ask where they want to be in ten years. That really breaks the crowd up. “We just solve problems now. ‘Ten years from now’ is like science fiction to us,” says Elena Spasova, a slight blond photographer. “It’s absurd to make plans in an unstable society. My grandparents could make plans.” “Maybe it’s a better way to live—no disappointments,” Gina offers. “Besides, artists don’t plan.” Geri smiles like I’m a slow but friendly child and says, “Bulgarians are dreamers, not planners.”
OK, then. What about the marketplace? What about fighting American consumerism? What about all that stinking money out there? Everywhere in Sofia, the music is familiar; American hamburger smells waft by; the premium smokes are Marlboros. Nothing could burn up the gloom in this group faster; this is apparently hilarious. “All that cultural stuff [you mentioned], it’s just crap,” says Geri. “Bulgarians have their own feeling about themselves. They’re not worried about becoming Americans.” Heads across the room nod. “We’d like to have more money to do our work in a different setting, maybe, or with different people [overseas],” says Mimi. “But if you can’t buy something, you have to use your imagination. That’s cheaper in the end.” She lifts her glass for more rakia, closing discussion. As they say in Bulgaria, nazdravay. Cheers to that.
3. KUNG-FU FIGHTING
Mimi is barreling the car up Mount Vitosha, dodging potholes and pointing out Mafia mansions that line the pitted drive. Vitosha looms over Sofia and houses yet another oddity of this city, a thriving complex of movie studios. Gina mouths Devo lyrics in English with an uncanny fluidity. It’s wet out, and we’re heading to the restaurant at the top to drink mountain tea.
The restaurant is snug and crammed with taxidermy. Heavy mother-of-pearl belt buckles—the ones young Bulgarian women still wear in the country—line one wall. Mimi smiles quietly; her big blue eyes rest in her pale face, mouth drawn up like a bow. This same attitude overtakes her features when she is alarmed or fearful, but then her eyes brim slightly and she stiffens herself. Now she’s relaxed, spooning her yogurt and honey. “Try my tea; it’s mashturka,” she offers. “It means 'grandma’s soul’.”
Bulgarians do a lot of waiting, and it can feel both benign (waiting for friends, loitering over drinks) and sinister (waiting for certainty, for acceptance into the EU, for the next job). It’s a lot of staring into the void for my taste. It starts to creep me out when we wait for anything, as if our friend Svetlo’s lateness today is the equivalent of waiting for reliable electricity in the provinces.
The sisters are tougher, or smarter, or just lighter than me. They hum a tune almost unconsciously, trading lines under their breaths. Mimi tells me about all the work they’ve lined up after I leave: Sunny Boys by Neal Simon in Varna; Vernisage by Vaclav Havel in Sofia; Mistaken Civilization by Dobri Voinikov, a Bulgarian playwright. She’s neither stressed nor anxious. She doesn’t even regret that this afternoon is sort of a dud; we’re all so talked out we sip our tea in silence. She smiles at me; I smile back, and Gina takes it up like quicksilver. At that moment Svetlo strolls into the room, just in time to drive with us back down for dinner. The fog steams up the windshield; we keep rolling and unrolling the windows. The radio plays “Everybody’s Kung Fu Fighting,” and Gina is ecstatic. “I like SO much, this!”
And then she sings: “Those kids were fast as lightnin’! In fact, it was a little bit frightnin’!”
—Jude Stewart for STEP Inside Design, June 2004
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