STEAM ROOM makes their third visit to Bazaar Festival, this time with the performance dragON forever, which oscillates between stylised precision and performative fragility. At the intersection of music video and postmodern dance, it’s an invitation to collective release and a great party!

What can lip-sync choreography become? What’s possible when dance movement is combined with voice imitation? dragON forever is the culmination of the dragoON choreographic trilogy launched in 2018 by the STEAM ROOM artistic team of Aleksandar Georgiev, Zhana Pencheva and Darío Barreto Damas. Following on from the previous works, dragON aka PONY and dragON aka PHOENIX, this time the trio focuses on the lip-sync as a choreographic practice that oscillates between precise stylization and performative fragility.

STEAM ROOM creates a space where virtuosity meets failure, high art meets pop aesthetics, and intense kinetics meets performative tension. dragON forever is not just a dance performance but an endless party, a catwalk of emotions and physical expression, a place of celebration, acceptance of failure, desire, and transformation. At the intersection of MTV dance videos and Western postmodern dance, STEAM ROOM offers an approach to movement that is intelligent, playful and anti-elitist at the same time. Experience an evening of energy, joy, and excitement whose echoes will never die.

The performance will be followed by an afterparty with a DJ.

Running time: 70 minutes
No language barrier.

Credits

Choreography and performance: STEAM ROOM (Darío Barreto Damas, Aleksandar Georgiev, Zhana Pencheva)

Music: Tsvetan Momchilov

Costume and set design: Mihaela Dobreva

Lighting design: Grace Morales

Video work: Nataliya Sidorenko

Graphic design: Gjorgji Despodov

Production: STEAM ROOM, Garage Collective

Co-production: Köttinspektionen Dans, MDT Moderna Dansteatern

Supported by: Ministry of Culture of Bulgaria, Municipality of Sofia,

National Cultural Fund of Bulgaria, Station Service for Contemporary

Dance, Nomad Dance Academy, Dance On, Pass On, Dream On project and the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union

Bio

STEAM ROOM is an artistic collective focused on choreography and dance. It consists of a trio of choreographers and performers – Aleksandar Georgiev-Ace, Zhana Pencheva and Darío Barreto Damas – working between Sofia, Burgas, Skopje, Stockholm and Tenerife and developing a unique approach to collective authorship, not only as a formal method of collaboration, but as a way of thinking about choreography as a shared space of movement, dialogue and imagination. Since coming together in 2018, they have created the dragON trilogy (dragON aka PONY, dragON aka PHOENIX, dragON forever), which explores corporeality, performativity, and identity through choreography fraught with tensions between tradition and experimentation, and normativity and deconstruction. In addition to their artistic work, they initiate projects under the umbrella of the Imaginative Choreographic Center (ICC) to support discursive and critical practices, research, artist residencies, and the connections between artists and audiences. STEAM ROOM thus opens up a space for experimentation, mutual inspiration and new perspectives on contemporary dance.