Abstract
The text of this interview is based on a conversation between Bagryana Popov and Juliane Römhild on 1 September 2021. In this interview, Bagryana discusses two works which unite her research into political trauma and site-specific performance in the context of political repression under the communist regime in Bulgaria. For her choreography He is not here and the performance event Traces (2011) Bagryana returned to Sofia, the city of her birth, to explore her own family history and her grandfather’s incarceration as a political prisoner. He is not here is a meditation on the body at the receiving end of political power developed in collaboration with dancer Simon Ellis. Traces takes the audience first to the courthouse in Sofia, where Bagryana’s grandfather was trialled, and then to her family’s flat where Bagryana’s daughter reads from the diaries of her grandmother. Both works were a part of Bagryana’s PhD project at Melbourne University.
Juliane Römhild: Traces and He is not here are concerned with political repression, the body and place. Can you tell us something about the affective or emotional dimension of your research into these projects?
Bagryana Popov: Okay. Where to begin? Traces was presented in one day together with the performance work He is not here. In a sense Traces was a way of reproducing my own journey of discovery through the research into the experience of the body at the receiving end of political power but also into embodied performance. My question was how they meet and how performance can listen to trauma and be a way of speaking about trauma and experiences which are extreme.
And as I embarked on this research for my PhD, initially I didn’t even realize it was about my grandfather. I was driven in my performance-making before that by a politics of – let’s call it empathy and the ethics of listening to the voice of the other. The works I’d made until then were about refugees’ dislocation and experiences of war. But on the first day of performance research with my collaborator Simon Ellis in a studio in Sofia, I suddenly realized that this work, this examination, was actually deeply connected to my own family history, in particular to my grandfather, who had been a political prisoner for seven years, which is something that I had known since my early childhood, but very little had been said about it.
As I watched Simon working, it all just became clear. I recognized the connection. And that prompted the investigating, the kind of detective work that then involved a number of returns to Bulgaria where I was seeking out people who remembered – people from my grandfather’s generation who had experienced the camps and prisons, the generation following, and people from my generation. I spoke to people who had been directly politically repressed and those who weren’t necessarily repressed but had grown up in that regime.
And that detective work, that was a period of a kind of unearthing, like an archaeological site. There was an excavating and unearthing, but also the accruing and collecting, like Walter Benjamin’s engagement with history that Hannah Arendt calls his ‘gift of thinking poetically’ and working with ‘thought fragments’ that Benjamin retrieves from the depths of the past like a pearl diver (Arendt, 1968: 51).
So, there was this unearthing of things that I had never known and an accruing of fragments of history that were both told to me by people I met or that I read in published testimonies or found in archives. The site-specific experience Traces was a performative walking event. It has convergences with the way that Mike Pearson writes about a performative practice that brings together performance and archaeology. He calls it a blurred genre, a mixture of performative and scientific practices in an integrated approach to recording, writing and illustrating the past. (Pearson, 2006: 120)
Römhild: The central courthouse in Sofia as a place is highly emotionally charged on the level of national history but then also for you in the context of your family history. I was wondering if you could tell us about some of the affects and emotions that it holds or evokes, and how you worked with them in Traces.
Popov: The performance event involved taking a small audience on a walk through Sofia. It was winter, so the streets were grey and wet. The audience were my PhD examiners and a very small group of people who had a relationship to this event as part of the research. They weren’t told where they were being taken. My intention was to allow a moment-to-moment discovery of an unknown city in which the present and the past coexist. And so in some sense it brought the city into the event as a living city but also as a backdrop to this historical invoking of what had happened to people. We filmed the event, and in the film the eyes of some passers-by on the street are very present – and it’s interesting because one of the things that I found in my research was that the way people look at other people, the quick sideways look, the surreptitious check, was really important during the regime. It’s what I call the residue, embodied residue.
The first place the audience was taken to was the central courthouse. The courthouse … we’re talking about affect – I’m going to get quite emotional … so the courthouse is this very grand building with statues of lions in front. And when you walk in, there are marble floors, and they echo, and long corridors. And on the lower floor is where the archives are. There are wooden benches; it’s quite dark. Along the corridors there are windows that look out to courtyards. There was snow on that day. I asked the guide to take the audience there because the courtyard at the back is the place that the truck was driven into with the arrestees who were going to be tried and sentenced – among them my grandfather.
The audience was given quotes from an interview I did with Violeta S., a survivor who was tried and sentenced together with my grandfather in a mass trial of prominent members of the Agrarian Union in 1952. Audience members didn’t all get the same quote, but each quote was a very vivid, physical, affective memory from Violeta’s description of her experience inside the courthouse. For example, she described the moment of entering the courtyard: We got to the door of the courthouse, the door at the back. Not on the side of the lions, but directly opposite. They beeped the horn, some men ran out, they opened the door, they all had guns. The ones who took over all had guns. And they said, ‘Here we shoot without warning. Now you’re here you have to do as we tell you.’ And each one of these policemen took one of us to the cell, to be in until the trial. These cells were on an underground level. (Interview with Violeta S., 2008)
Image from Traces. Photographer: Ivan Nikolov.
Römhild: Can you tell us a bit more about the interview material and about the process of selecting the quotes?
Popov: That’s a good question. I selected exactly those moments that had stood out for me in their immediacy, their aliveness. What was being spoken about was not just historical or bureaucratic or legal: the whole project was about looking at how political and legal systems affect the person, the body, social and personal relationships. The courthouse was the place where many of those political trials had occurred.
So the quotes were about that which was most immediate and most personal and striking and heartbreaking. I’ll just share one other moment with you from the interview with Violeta. While the arrestees were being kept there in the underground cells, they weren’t fed, but relatives could bring them food. One of the arrestees didn’t have any. And one of the policemen said to her, ‘You’ve got quite a bit of food, but he has none, and he hasn’t eaten for two days – can I give him some of your food?’ And she said, ‘Of course.’
And as they were going up the stairs, this man looked back and just nodded to her. They weren’t allowed to speak to each other. And she told me, ‘The man I had given food to, he was ahead of me in the line going up the stairs. When he turned the corner, he did this to me [nods slightly], he was thanking me, he nodded his head to thank me’ (Violeta S., 2008). So this moment of the turning and nodding, it’s one of those moments – a split second in history which maybe no one else knew, but I am deeply moved every time I think of this. That man didn’t survive imprisonment, he died in prison … So, in answer to your question, the selection was about those things that were most human, vivid and striking as emotional or physical lived experience.
Römhild: You mentioned the importance of the eyes and the gaze earlier. I don’t want to use the word body language, but it is a body speaking in spite of the silence that is decreed.
Popov: I just want to comment on that for a moment because when I use the word body, I assume that the emotional life, the intellectual life, the life of the biological and the physiological are not separable, and that in those experiences especially it’s the bios as well as the emotional and intellectual self that is experiencing, that they’re not divisible. There is a quote by philosopher Kalin Yanakiev that suggests what I mean here: Peruse the palm of your own hand; look into its living tremulousness. Turn your attention to the warmth of this palm. […] it isn’t my palm that has this warmth, it is I who am warm – in my palms. […] As I am living, real, actual, I am this skin, these lines, this warmth, this space taken up. (Yanakiev, 2008: 29, trans. Bagryana Popov, emphasis in the original)
Römhild: In contrast to the courthouse, your family’s flat was a highly personal space that you opened to the public. Can you tell us about the affective dimension of your work there?
Popov: After the visit to the courthouse, the audience moved on to my family’s emptied flat where my daughter was reading my mother’s diary. I was interested in the layers of remnants and fragment residue, of place. My mother had written entries while her father was in prison and after he had been released. And I had selected quotes that were specifically about him. My daughter was the same age that my mother had been when she had written those entries, and she had never met my mother.
And so it was an event of being in the presence of that which was right there, this young person who had inherited this story and set of experiences and therefore carried the traces of the past. Although my daughter was born in Australia, she’s fairly fluent in Bulgarian and can read and write it. She was translating the diary into English, speaking it out loud. She was deciphering falteringly because my mother’s handwriting was difficult to read. So there, in the moment, was the presence of someone coming face to face with a record of that experience – the experience of someone who had died before she was born.
I also had this photograph of my mother as a little girl together with my grandfather in front of that very courthouse where he had practiced law, and I had placed a copy of the book he had written, published in 1944, War and International Contracts, on the table. And there were piles and piles of photocopies of documents from the dossier of his trial, which I had been able to access and photocopy. Mike Pearson has written about site-specific performance and memory: ‘I know that others have lived and died here before me […]. This “living with history” might cause us to ask with Benjamin, “What lives and loves, dramas and deaths have been enacted here, in this room?” (Benjamin, 1992: 93 cited in Pearson, 2006: 122). So there were these actual documents and the photograph, which attested to the fact that my grandfather had lived, he was real – had died long ago, was absent, but real.
There were also folded shirts. There was a performative aspect here: the shirts were not my grandfather’s shirts. This image of the folded shirts came from a police photograph of the shirts in the house of Nikola Petkov, the leader of the Agrarian Union, who was arrested, imprisoned and executed in 1947 (Alexandrova, 2007). My grandfather was a prominent and active member of the Agrarian Union and had worked with Petkov. The shirts in the apartment were not authentic artefacts but were an echo of an image of someone central in that history. The person arrested, the absent person, leaves material traces that mark his absence.
So, there was a layering of the present and the authentic with the remembered and the performative. The objects were original, and my daughter was reading an original diary. The sites were original, although changed by time. Things had occurred there. So Traces is about presence and absence, and then the layers of distance in time.
Images from Traces. Photographer: Bagryana Popov.
Römhild: I like that image of layering or a ripple effect in time. It reminds me a bit of the way that Sara Ahmed writes about how affect works. According to Ahmed, affect doesn’t reside in a body, but it is passed on between bodies. It impresses upon bodies, who then pass the energy on to the next body. And it is always something that happens in a social space. It doesn’t just emanate from an inside to an outside. It always passes between different people. To me it resonates with the idea of moving from the courthouse as a very public space that holds a lot of personal stories to the flat as a very private place that is connected to historical events. The ripple effect then seems to move on to the audience.
Popov: And it’s not inside to outside, or outside to inside only. The power structure – in which the secret police was central – was an organism that pervades every level of society: political, legal, military, bureaucratic, but also personal. I mentioned the eyes before, the quick glance to one side and then back because everyone suspected everyone because of the pervasive presence of the secret police, and because no one could ever know fully whether a close friend or family member was reporting.
The Bulgarian konzlageri were not dissimilar to the forced labour camps in the Soviet Union, the GULAG, which Varlam Shalamov documents devastatingly in Kolyma Tales (1981). It’s staggering to read his writing, almost unbearable at times. And although they were distant from people’s everyday lives, the presence of the camps was part of the reality, of the system. People were aware, always, of the camps as a possibility. They were in people’s peripheral vision, ever present. What you just said before about social spaces and the way that spaces were entered and inhabited – there was a pervasive fear and an expectation, a not-knowing who would be arrested. Anyone could be named an enemy of the people if they were perceived to be. A whole section of society was called the ‘former people’. And what became very clear to me in my research was that the residue, the remnants of this time were still there.
When I interviewed people as they spoke about their experience, there was a sense that at any moment there might be a rupture, a limit to what can be said or even remembered. There were physical signs as people spoke – a cough, a drink of water, repeated actions of the hands. One woman folded a napkin and smoothed it with her fingers over and over. And at the end of the interview, she pointed to her wig and said that she used to have beautiful thick hair, but she had lost it from the experiences during the regime – her father, her brother and her husband were all interned for periods of time. One elderly man, as he spoke about his mother, said she had lived ‘a damaged life’ while he had been imprisoned for ten years. When he spoke of her, his voice cracked; tears came for a moment; he paused to control the feeling, then brushed it away with his hand, in the air, and went on. The emotion is there, waiting to spill out.
When I applied to read the archives pertaining to my grandfather’s history, his imprisonment, even putting in the forms, I would physically shake. And when I went in to read for the first time, they’d bring out these big, dark green folders on these very bureaucratic new, clean desks. It’s all very respectful, like a library. And then you sit down and read. That first day I heard a sob behind me, and I looked around and saw a woman crying, mascara running down her face. She was in her 60s. There was a photograph of a man on the page she was reading, a police photo. She asked for water and took a pill. Looking at people’s faces in the archive room, some were journalists or historians. But then it was very clear who was reading something about a father or a mother or grandfather, grandmother. The emotion spills over. It’s like across time what was done to them, to their body, reaches you. It’s ten years now since I did that work. And I think it takes about 30 years after these events for them to really be talked about.
Bagryana Popov reading a dossier at the archive. Photographer: Ivan Nikolov.
Römhild: I’d like to move on to an aspect that we have touched upon already: the silence as a space that seems to surround people and even institutions. At the symposium in November 2020, which inspired this special issue, you said that people didn’t really talk about family members who had been taken by the police, that these stories are not necessarily passed on, or that people wouldn’t talk about their experiences at the camps. Can you talk a bit more about that silence as a charged emotional space and how you worked with that silence in Traces and in He is not here?
Popov: The silence was so pervasive. Externally during the regime there was a constant stream of language, of triumphant slogans, of acronyms, of future plans, of reportage. So the language above was deafening – the language of the system, of the ideology. But everything that was not allowed was silenced and internalized.
But there are different kinds of silence. He is not here is about the silence that comes from the fact that people have gone. So there’s that silence, the silence of absence, as well. But then their voice speaks in the fragments that I mentioned before – in the archives, in the letters, in the memories, in the books written after the fall of the regime, the stories told. And there is the silence of that person who has departed.
But there was also the silence of the internalised prohibition: ‘You just can’t mention that’. And many people mentioned in the interviews that the front door of your home is a major division. That which you say in the home, you do not say outside. One man even spoke about it being very important how you present your face. Because if you did not have exaltation on your face at the right moment – especially when the Soviet Union was mentioned, for example – that could be dangerous. So the silence is about hiding what’s on the inside to the outside world, creating a division between the two.
And also, just not letting people know about family members. If someone had a parent or even grandparent who was a political prisoner, then it was unsafe for others to know that because then you couldn’t study, you couldn’t get a job. You couldn’t live your life normally. You were marked. The repercussions were far-reaching. So to avoid persecution people kept silent if they had a relative in the camps or prisons. And once released, prisoners kept silent about their experience. Silence was a way of protecting yourself and protecting people you love.
Rusi Karapetkov at Belene, the site of the camp. Photographer: Bagryana Popov.
Römhild: In He is not here you use music only occasionally. For the most part, Simon Ellis moves in silence. I was wondering if that is one of the ways in which that silence has entered your work as a kind of performative aspect.
Popov: That’s a very interesting question. That was not a conscious intention. But I would respond this way: the experience of being present in the room with that performer in his physicality, those qualities of effort and his breath, and the affective and emotional states that he moves through are not containable within language, or language would add a whole other layer of complexity. But in that work I was interested in the experience of the body and how it can be investigated through creative practice. I was also interested in how we can speak about the states of the body from a position of people who haven’t had the physical experience of political repression, where we’re distant in time. And so the silence is part of that remoteness, that distance. In a way we were reaching for something across the silence.
In a way, the work was a way of asking my grandfather ‘What happened to you?’ through all of these associated and distant fragments. I sat and watched, and in the watching I had the opportunity to reflect, to connect and to find associations. The presence and emotionally exposed quality of Simon’s work as he improvised was the opportunity to imagine, to reflect on my grandfather’s experience in the presence of another. While watching Simon’s body move from his own remembered experience but also in response to prompts that came from testimony from people who had experienced imprisonment, I could observe and listen.
He never ‘performed’ my grandfather. That was very clear. We began with his personal history and experiences in his body that had felt in some way difficult or extreme to him. And he responded to the voice of the absent other through text – testimony of experiences of imprisonment, of repression. We also worked with the presence of the real space we were in. And so, in a sense, the silence was a kind of hovering silence between all of these parts of the work. A sense of the experience of the absent other – irreducibly other, but suggested through associations – began to emerge, hovered in the air.
Römhild: That’s interesting. In your PhD thesis you write that you were concerned with keeping the reality of life in your work with Simon, with creating a space that is obviously performative but not a closed off performance that happens on the stage, which is also a principle that you seem to be following in Traces where your own daughter reads part of her grandmother’s diary to an audience. So, you’re opening up a space that is performative yet also inflected with life experience.
Popov: Yes, we consciously looked for that. In fact, that was the beginning of the work and a central precept. By the beginning, I mean, literally on day one in the studio, I gave the simplest of instructions to Simon, which was ‘Move in response to the space’. And so the reality of the floor, the light, his boots on the wooden floor, his body, his breath, the texture … being in place is the way into responding, into presence. But also, when I watch, when I sense the actual presentness of the performer, I am brought face to face with something in life that is not an imitation. I encounter something. For example, Simon was working with his memory of running a marathon and what he felt in his breath, in his body, in his spine, in his joints, his physical pain, his emotional responses. It’s an encountering something that is deeper and more resonant than everyday life – an encounter, but on another level.
We’re looking at the inner history, the experienced history of the performer who enters into what I call conversation, the concept by Emmanuel Levinas – conversation as the ethical relation. We speak, and I don’t know what you will say next, and in that space something can open. The performer enters into conversation with the space, with me, but also with the voice of the absent other who has experienced things that are unthinkable. But in some micro moments there is an analogy, a resonance between the performer and the experience of the other. They intersect for a second. And through that analogy, through that actual presence of the performer, the resonance of another experience comes to my mind as I watch – an image, or a moment from the reading that I’ve done. Meaning is created between the performer’s movement and my reading of it.
And so, the voice telling that experience intersects for a moment with a real presence of the performer. And I can have an in-breath for a second – a moment of realization: that a person bows their head because they want to avoid the violence that can happen if they don’t bow their head. And in that gesture I see fear, compliance, aiming to be invisible, unnoticed. So that happens through the body, in that lowering of the head.
There’s this beautiful passage that Levinas quotes from a book called Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. It’s the story of how family members of political prisoners would line up at the Lubyanka in Moscow for news of their loved ones. He describes how the backs of those waiting would hold the tension, the anxiety ‘with shoulder blades tense like springs, which seemed to cry, sob and scream’ (Levinas, 1996: 167, citing Vassili Grossman, 1985: 683). Levinas quotes it in relation to the face – because in Levinas the idea is that we encounter the face of the other and that once we encounter the face of the other, something transformative happens, or there’s a call to the ethical responsibility for the other. But Levinas suggests that it is not necessarily only the face itself; it can be the entire body of a person. And so in working with physical performance and dance there are spaces that are opened up: speaking of and through the body, qualities of movement and the quality of presence, and the actual presence in the room that we looked for. That presence is a prerequisite for what I call conversation: the performer-as-himself, not aiming or pretending to be someone else. There is an irreducible here-now quality. That is why we did the performance in daylight and why we never fixed the form, so the agency of the performer is somehow present. He is in conversation with me as the viewer.
Simon Ellis in He is not here. Photographer: Boriana Pandova.
Simon Ellis in He is not here. Photographer: Boriana Pandova.
Römhild: How did the audience respond?
Popov: There was a small audience, international and Bulgarian audience members. I think that each person felt it and read it in very individual ways because in Bulgaria there is literally no one untouched by the regime. It lasted for 45 years – from 1944 to 1989. And almost everyone had either a history of oppression or a history of collaboration with the regime, or a combination of the two. It was not clear-cut. Everyone had lived within those structures. The residue is complex. So I think people read it in very personal ways.
I’ll give you one very small example. There was a moment in the performance where Simon did this little shuffling movement, like a broken old man. And then he knocked very quietly on the door. For me it was an image of someone knocking on a door to be allowed in. But I remember one audience member saying that she read it as knocking on the door to be allowed out. She read the moment as people participating in this ‘unfreedom’: there was this pale little knock at the door that didn’t open. So people read moments. In the work of the body a moment can have multiple associations.
Römhild: I’d like to come back to the question of the body holding physical trauma. In one of her memories of your grandfather’s trial Violeta S. describes how one of the prisoners was in such bad physical condition that he found it difficult to stand. He was offered a chair, which he refused for as long as he could. It was an act of bravery, of resistance, because he insisted on standing despite the trauma he had endured, displaying it in front of the judge, in front of the other people, of not hiding it, of actually making it visible by standing. How do you work with the body as the site of experience, as the site of trauma in your performance?
Popov: Carefully. It is very difficult material. So that care is taken to create a space around the performer, and between myself and the performer, where the process can allow us to enter that difficult territory together. But in entering that territory, listening to what people have experienced, this idea of the absent other is very important. The ethical acknowledgement of the other is very, very important. The acknowledgement that we haven’t experienced that: it is unthinkable, unknowable – there is a lacuna … it’s a conversation across time, and listening allows us to enter into that terrain, to respond. But for the dancer it’s hard work. It involves his body, his feeling states, his breath, his inner life. It’s not emotionally disconnected. It’s not just aesthetic. It’s important to find ways to be safe in the work, to take care.
Römhild: Would you say that there is a recuperative aspect to it, to the element of holding a space of being careful, of caring?
Popov: Recuperative aspect. What a lovely phrase. That’s a lovely question, a lovely thought. Yes. And thank you for asking that. I just get such a clear memory of being in the studio in Sofia; I just get that feeling of the kind of attention and care, attending to Simon’s every shift and move physically and emotionally, reading it and following it to sense when I needed to speak next in order to continue the exploration. So that the work was created by a gradual distilling of a set of states that were arrived at between him and me and the prompts. There’s a quality of care and attention that is very intimate. It’s a very intimate space in which there is a conversation between the historical and what is right there physically, in the present response.
For me the process was a kind of mourning – of what had happened to my grandfather, what had been done to him and to so many others. The mourning makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s image of the angel of history, who wants to go back to repair the things that have been broken, but he can’t go back because the storm of progress is pushing him back into the future. The recuperative quality in the work is in the presence of the performer, in collaborating. And later the presence of the audience. A space is created in which we attend, we listen, through the expressive body of the performer.
There’s an entering into conversation. I think of it as a bilingual conversation – between the movement of the performer and the language of my prompts. There’s a conversation with those who have passed who had told their story, or those who I met who told their story, with the audience at the performance, and then now with you also. Perhaps in the speaking, in the conversation there’s always an opening or a possibility to honour that which has been, honour and commemorate but also to release.
Römhild: Thank you very much, Bagryana.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.