DanceMeld Platform Choreographic LAB with Zornitsa Stoyanova

Polyphonic Dance / Future Love
Summer Dance Intensive in Sofia

June 8–12 from 10:00 – 17:00
June 13 Public Showing – time TBA

BAZA Space, Sofia
Led by Zornitsa Stoyanova (US/BG)

This one-week summer dance intensive in Sofia with choreographer and performer Zornitsa Stoyanova(US/BG) is for dancers, performers, choreographers, actors, vocal movers, and interdisciplinary artists interested in expanding their performance practice.

The week combines dance improvisation, working with movement, text, voice, song, performance-making, and interdisciplinary composition. Participants can join the full week or choose between two separate labs: a morning lab focused on Polyphonic Dance as a tool for improvisation, instant composition, and devising, and an afternoon choreographic lab connected to Zornitsa’s new performance project Future Love.

This intensive is ideal for artists looking for a multidisciplinary dance workshop, an interdisciplinary performance lab, or a space to explore how movement, language, voice, singing, personal material, and live composition can meet inside performance.

Morning Lab

10:00–13:00 – Polyphonic Dance: Tools for Improvisation and Devising Practice

Polyphonic Dance is Zornitsa Stoyanova’s improvisational and choreographic practice, developed through years of working with movement, language, voice, text, song, attention, and instant composition.

In this morning lab, participants will explore the body as a many-voiced instrument: moving, speaking, sounding, singing, sensing, witnessing, and composing in real time. Through improvisational and compositional scores, we will practice tracking what is happening in the body. We will expand our attention into the room allowing movement, image, thought, memory, and language to appear at the same time. We will use scores from Deborah Hay and Jeanine Durning as well as voice and movement scores developed by Zornitsa.

This lab offers practical tools for dance improvisation, devising performance, contemporary dance composition, movement and text work, and interdisciplinary performance practice. We will work with solos, duets, group structures, speaking while moving, sounding, singing, sudden shifts of state, layered attention, and performance scores that support both personal truth and collective composition. Above all, we will play and watch each other.

This is a space to sharpen presence, listening, pleasure, curiosity, and choice-making as tools for performance.

The lab is open to dancers, performers, choreographers, actors, singers, voice practitioners, and artists from different disciplines who are curious about the meeting point between dance, text, voice, improvisation, and live performance.

Afternoon Lab

14:00–17:00 – Future Love: Choreographic Lab for a New Performance

In the afternoon, participants are invited into the research process for Zornitsa Stoyanova’s new performance project, Future Love — a choreographic inquiry into what love is in an AI-littered world.

This interdisciplinary choreographic lab will use contemporary dance, improvisation, movement, text, voice, singing, image-making, and group composition to explore love as connection, glitch, fantasy, memory, social contract, biological pull, political problem, and choreographic material. The lab will work with the large mylar inflatable sculpture and live feed video. We will explore, create movement, text, and song.

The lab is part workshop, part research room, part performance experiment. Participants will enter an active artistic process and contribute to the first layers of a new work. We will move between tenderness and absurdity, between human messiness and technological mediation, between the very old question of love in all its shapes and forms and the very contemporary question of what is becoming of us.

This lab is for artists interested in dance and technology, performance research, interdisciplinary dance, devised performance, contemporary choreography, voice and movement, and experimental performance-making.

Participation Options

Participants can sign up for the full week or choose one lab only. MAX 12 people.