WE
create dance performances, films, and photography;
teach screendance workshops, composition and improvisation dance intensives;
create programs in support of local and international artists;
mentor and support choreographers and dance filmmakers through their creative process.
we are based in Sofia, Bulgaria and Philadelphia, USA.
News:
GWYN residency in Philadelphia is on hiatus. Historically, by inviting younger artists and working as a mentorship for the last three years, we have been focusing on supporting the mentor artists in the creation of their work.
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TRILATERAL Dance Artist Exchange ’25/’26
Emilia Toncheva (BUL)
Adam Kerbel (USA)
Viola Levai (HU)
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We Value:
Interdisciplinary approach to art making
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Exchange of ideas, workshops, and sharing of methodologies.
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Community around rigorous research and/or experimentation and blending genres in dance performance.
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The experience of the audience.
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Popularizing experimental performance.
BodyMeld is the brainchild of multidisciplinary artist Zornitsa Stoyanova.
BodyMeld‘s mission is to support Zornitsa Stoyanova’s work as well as create programs that further conversation and collaboration in the local and global dance performance field. We care about a sustainable dance community and strive to connect with and serve other independent dance/performance makers locally and internationally.
We believe in the multifacetedness of each individual and that dance and artistic expression have the power to make us thrive in the unlikeliest of circumstances.
We value the exchange of ideas and sharing of methodologies. We care about rigorous research and experimentation in the field of dance, both in performance and organizationally. We strive to create a community curious and excited about the blending of genres in performance, experimentalism, and surviving and thriving in hard political climates.
We hope that through mutual effort, we can elevate each other and further the research and expressions of contemporary and experimental dance. Through our programs, we also hope to make experimental/new dance more accessible and understandable to our audiences.
We actively seek collaboration with organizations for artistic exchange. We have previously worked with Movement Research in New York City, Arts Station Foundation in Poland, Műhely Alapítvány / Workshop Foundation in Budapest, Hungary. In Philadelphia, we have partnered with Philadelphia Dance Projects, <fidget> Space, Mascher Space, Pew Center for the Arts and Heritage (previously known as Dance Advance), and Fringe Arts (previously known as Live Arts Festival). BodyMeld is also a member of the IETM network in Europe.
Who is Zornitsa Stoyanova?
I am an interdisciplinary artist who primarily makes performance. As an immigrant and a mother, my body holds a plethora of identities that shape the content of my work. Living between Sofia, Bulgaria, and Philadelphia, USA, I never feel a clear belonging. My nomadic body took years to recognize the sensation of being marginalized and “othered” as home. I make work that interrogates notions of otherness and polarization as a political act against division, war, and capitalist structures. I dive deep into the body to seek answers in sensation, reason, embodied research, and humor.
As a choreographer, I use text, song, man-made materials, and movement. I am interested in the autobiographical and political body and use my 20-plus years as an improviser to draw from the “here and now”. Most recently, I’ve been naming my devising method Polyphonic Dance – a space for deep research of all that I am, with the goal of devising performance material. In this approach, I relate to Simone Forti’s Logomotion, Ruth Zapporah’s Action Theater, and Deborah Hay’s approach to improvisation.
I seek to face truths and work from the not knowing. One such truth is that I am unable to escape my aging female body. Thus, my work often has to do with womanhood, feminism, power dynamics, death, and all of their political and historical implications. I seek to reveal, to make transparent, to share. In this, I often engage with my audience by inviting them on stage or choosing a non-traditional venue and format for my work. I also write occasionally for thINKingDANCE.net, where I am an editor.
I value honesty, experimentation, innovation, visual disorientation, and interaction with my audience. Sometimes, I work from the visual, where producing video and photography precedes the creation of live performances. Other times, I would explore embodied honesty and truth as a political act for years without having a specific goal in mind. All my process is focused on the practice of noticing emergence. Using specific choreographic tools, I make a lot of visual, movement, text, and sound material. I meld this material together, interrogating its meaning, its connection to the world, the body, and politics. After looking at this material (sometimes for years), I use it in performance. This way of working has created two modalities in me — a quick, instant composition performance, or an evening-length performance that takes years to complete.
Since 2013, I have worked with Mylar reflective material. I interrogate its potential for cultural meaning and use it to create new abstract and psychedelic imagery often related to otherness, alienation, and representation of sexuality. The creation of this sci-fi-inspired world started with photography and filmmaking and resulted in the works, Explicit Female (2016), Un-Seen (2019), AndroMeda (2020), EnTrance: Female Bodies in Digitalscapes – solo exhibit (2023). I continue to work with this (same) material, looking at its implications on ecology, sustainability, and my eventual death, as the material stays the same for hundreds of years.
Since 2020, I have been engaged in a performance practice researching honesty in the body. It is a process-driven approach of instant composition following traditions set by my teachers and mentors, Deborah Hay and Jeanine Durning. In 2024, after four long years of embodied research, Honesty and Other Fiends (a.k.a. Brutal Honesty) solo emerged. With a premiere at the Cannonball Festival in Philadelphia, USA, the solo and my practice continue to evolve and have been shown in Bulgaria, the US, and the Netherlands. This practice and research have culminated in the development of my devising method, Polyphonic Dance, which was the subject of my MA in Choreography at Codarts and Fontys Universities(2025).
A detailed bio can be found here.
For info about performances or our digital projects, please check the menu.