STEAM ROOM (North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Spain, Sweden) is an artistic team within the field of choreography and dance. The team is formed by Aleksandar Georgiev – Ace, Zhana Pencheva and Darío Barreto Damas, three choreographers/dancers actively operating locally and internationally. STEAM ROOM is formed out of the wish to facilitate conditions and environments that contribute to the development of the work in the field of choreography and dance in different localities, with an intrinsic international vision. STEAM ROOM aims to open spaces for reflection and wider critical knowledge through artistic work and cultural initiatives. STEAM ROOM was formed in 2018 and until now they have produced two artistic works,(dragON aka PONY and dragON aka PHOENIX as part of the choreographic trilogy dragON), and initiated cultural programs focused on discursive and critical practices, the dialogue between artists-art-audience, research, artistic residencies and emerging artists throughout the institution project ICC (Imaginative Choreographic Center).

About the artists work at Köttinspektionen:

In 2018 we started a choreographic trilogy named dragON. The trilogy follows a main conceptual line initiated by Aleksandar and Zhana in their previous work: to look upon the celebration body as a protest body and vice versa. dragON focuses on drag practices, exploring and displaying dancing and choreographic playgrounds where the team questions: how can we drag dance and choreography?

In the first work of the trilogy, dragON aka PONY, we immersed balkan folklore within the set up of a ball room, (conceptually and aesthetically); disidentifying and transforming the principles which rule this specific moving frame or condition by using drag technologies applied to dance and choreography such as the practice of “realness”: the embodiment of a status, an expertise or a sentiment that by identity, political or cultural reasons are not linked at first with your persona. dragON´s second work, dragON aka PHOENIX, focuses on the practice of reading: a drag ritual where insults are addressed with sharpness to expose the obvious things that nobody dares to point out. (It is important to clarify that reading is a practice of communal care rather than a violent act). In this project we ask: how can we read dance and choreography? Borrowing methodologies and structures from musical theatre due to its inherent literalness, we constructed a work that reads all its flaws out loud.

At the Köttinspektionen Dans residency we will work with the last part of the trilogy, dragON forever. In this work we are interested in exploring the practice of lip-syncing applied to dance and choreography. Our initial trigger is the gap or space created in between the actual played song and the lips performance, or in other words between the mimic singing and the song being mimicked. Can we dance within that gap? What would be a lip-synced choreography? 

The understanding of dance and choreography as popular practices accompanies the three works of the trilogy.

 

STEAM ROOM Biographies

Aleksandar Georgiev – Ace is a choreographer/cultural worker. He has been part of formal and no-formal educational programs such as NOMAD, SPAZIO, DanceWeb, 50 Days Fly Low and Passing Through and Critical Practice program (3rd generation). He graduated at the Master program in Choreography at DOCH, Stockholm, in 2014. He has been exploring nomadic approaches in terms of working base, constantly replacing himself, but it is in the last 4 years when, while working, he defined four places he considers home/locality, (Stockholm, Sofia, Skopje and Tenerife). Lately he initiated the choreographic research CO-series. The research works with different artistic practices and methods exploring the ideas of co-existence, hyper and holography through the prism of dance and choreography.He is member of NGOs such as Lokomotiva (North Macedonia), Garage Collective (Bulgaria) and Interimkultur (Sweden). He is also a member of the network NOMAD (Balkan countries).

Darío Barreto Damas is a Canarian freelance dancer working in the field of dance and choreography. Darío is based in Sofia, Skopje, Stockholm and Tenerife. His education takes place at Teatro Victoria, Tenerife; Institut del Teatre, Barcelona and DOCH, Stockholm. Darío has worked with Cullberg as a guest dancer and ccap / c.off, (lead by Cristina Caprioli), Aleksandar Georgiev and Ofelia Jarl Ortega among others. Throughout his work, Darío focuses in the emancipation/independency of dance and in spaces of de-contextualisations/dis-identifications. Darío is co-creator, with Aleksandar Georgiev and Zhana Pencheva, of the artistic team STEAM ROOM and the cultural project institution ICC (Imaginative Choreographic Center). Darío is member of the NGOs Lokomotiva (North Macedonia), Interimkultur (Sweden), Garage Collective (Bulgaria), PiedeBase (Canarias) and TenerifeLAV (Tenerife).

Zhana Pencheva is a dancer and choreographer based in Bulgaria. She graduated,(Bachelor and Master), in Dance and Theatre in New Bulgarian University, Sofia. With strong interests around body and movement, she continued her education through series of workshops and non formal programs such as Nomad Dance Academy and DanceWeb. She is co-founder of Garage Collective, Sofia, a member of Nomad Dance Academy – Bulgaria and member of the board of Hamalogika, Burgas. As a performer, she is actively collaborating with Dune Dance Company, Bulgaria. She works pedagogically with groups of different constellations and needs, focusing her teaching around dance technique and choreographic structures. Artistically she is interested in the potential of the body as a moving structure and the role emotions play within it. In her last solo work, “Six love songs”, (prized by Tri3avisim 2018, Bulgaria, and nominated for IKAR prize 2020 in the category “Contemporary dance and performance”, Bulgaria), she is exploring pop figures in contemporary culture and the identification of self in performative contexts. Her latest fascination is pole dance.