THE first Annual Bulgarian Student Play Writing Contest has been held by Peace Corps volunteers with the aim of promoting artistic awareness among students in Bulgaria
Art unites and teaches
Caption: THE PLAY’S THE THING: Peace Corps volunteers Jeffery Hawthorne, left, and Nicholas Bussleman are behind a playwriting competition designed to stimulate interest in the performing arts in Bulgaria.
THE first Annual Bulgarian Student Play Writing Contest has been held by Peace Corps volunteers with the aim of promoting artistic awareness among students in Bulgaria.
The competition closed in December and submissions included more than a dozen plays of very good quality from many parts of the country including Haskovo, Montana, Troian, Svoge, and Vratsa.
“The plays are written in a great variety of voices and cover a deep range of thematic topics that touch upon areas of death, life, escape, isolation and desire,” Nicholas Busselman, Peace Corps volunteer and a project associate, told The Echo.
Bussleman and Jeffery Hawthorne who are Peace Corps volunteers, in co-operation with the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts,designed the national dramatic playwriting competition.
The purpose of the project was to provoke interest in the performing arts throughout Bulgaria and provide Bulgarian students, through artistic recognition, the chance to attend university and continue the growth in this creative arena, organisers said.
“The project came up in an informal conversation between Hawthorne and the country director to initiate something student based for creative writing,” Busselman said.
Hawthorne’s focus is theatre design and construction and theatre management.
“I am not an actor and I have been on stage before only involuntarily,” he said with a smile and added that he enjoys everything that takes to see the play on stage.
He added that overall there is a very poignant and mature, if at times melancholic, creative force of young writers out there who have just begun to be discovered in the Bulgarian population.
“What has been received has for this competition exceeded the expectations that were originally set in place, and we foresee a difficult period of selection for ourselves and our counterparts,” he said. They have, as a result, put in place a contingency plan for the performance, which would allow for two, or possibly three, plays to be performed as a part of a single show. Busselman said that they had begun work in finding funding for the creation of an anthology that will include the works of all the writers who submitted both as a gift to the writers and as a potential teaching and learning tool.
Busselman said that after all is said and done with regard to the winning selections and the work done to prepare them for performance, they will be looking at a night in May when “a group of young Bulgarians will be sitting in a Sofia theatre watching as their words are brought to life,” he said.
Both associates of the project Busselman and Hawthorne express the strong desire for the continuing success of this project, and they have a desire to get this information to as many individuals, who are willing to support this endeavor, as they can.
“It will not succeed without their help,” Busselman said. He added that they did not envision a one-year project that lives and dies during our service, but as a continuing source of pride and inspiration for this country that thrives in the hands of Bulgarians and the young writers that continue to push this country forward.
“We want to make it a sustainable project,” Hawthorne said.
This project is designed to promote an artistic awareness and exchange in Bulgaria through the medium of theater arts. Organisers said that it is intended to be a completely Bulgarian endeavour, where participants are advised to research, write, produce and perform plays that investigate areas of Bulgarian culture and are written in the native language.
“The reason that we have asked it to be written in Bulgarian is for obvious reasons- it will be much easier writing in your own language. The goal of this project is to maintain culture and get the students interested in the history and culture of Bulgaria,” Hawthorne said.
For the students involved this competition, it gives them an opportunity to perhaps explore a creative energy that has never before had an outlet, organisers of the competition said.
Currently organisers of the competition are arranging dates for the production stages of their project, completion of the selection of the winning play(s) and a pre-production period of casting, rehearsal and other necessary work. Busselman said they are continually working with their counterparts from the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts and Balkan Media in our search for sponsorship, promotion and sustainability. Busselman told The Echo that they are in the process of preparing a grant, but will be searching aggressively for members of the greater Bulgarian community “to help make our vision a continuing opportunity for Bulgaria and its youth,” he said.
