What is SFUMATO

What ‘Sfumato’ is could be understood in terms of what it refuses to be like.
Conventional, ’’deadly’’ (Peter Brook) theatre makes its productions as ready-made products for sale, in accordance with the market situation and the taste of the audience. Conventional theatre follows a definite fashion-stereotype, gropes for a certain tinkling subject matter, and pushes forward to the foreground its similarity with the ’’great’’ ones in mass culture - the Americans. It is ashamed of its national identity, of its national character and even language.
All that is what ‘Sfumato’ turned its back to, leaving the cozy territory of commercial theatre, of the institution, which exchanges the act of creation with the craft of multiplying its yesterday success.
‘Sfumato’ emphasizes upon rehearsal, upon the process, and what the cast shows to its audience is not results, but the process of creation itself, the ’’here and now’’ of what is happening, of what is flowing among human beings in time and space of the concrete stage situation, where the audience is being incorporated as though participating.
‘Sfumato’ refuses to coin whatever artistic legislation. We trust the senses,
the memory of the biological cell, trying to revive the Poet within each member of the audience.
‘Sfumato’’’s language could not be studied in terms of a concrete formal system. Our theatre work is not a fixed type of theatre making. It is rather a road to be followed and experienced. A road leading back to the roots of theatre and its major objective to serve as a spiritual ritual, as an act during which the audience gets the chance for a journey throughout the enigmatic worlds of Genesis itself.
It is a theatre of the spirit, trying to turn Chaos into Cosmos.
Its central objective: man, who, once aware of his ancient energy potentials, is ready to face human condition in terms of a battle-field of cosmic forces and take the upper hand over delusions of time, demons of passion, revisions of consciousness.
The performance: a parallel reality corresponding to real life the way poetic verse is correlated to everyday syntactic structure. It is the cross-point between “here-now” and “there-always”.
A synthetic end life-image with increased temperature.
Or, to put it in another way: ‘Sfumato’ is a technique of painting AIR.
 
 
Margarita Mladenova        
Ivan Dobchev