Near Gone

Katherina Radeva defines the outline of her stage with 18 bunches of white carnations – perimeters as perishable as her attempts to share her grief at the story of her younger sister, in a moving performance with the language-crossing power of a ritual.

Radeva’s narrative floods out in rapturous Bulgarian, eulogising the hometown of her childhood, and its preservation in her parents’ country home. She itemises the fruit growing in their garden – apples, kiwis, even bananas. Her co-performer Alister Lownie translates. She comically goads him into replicating her vibrant physicality, while he gets the words for raspberries and blueberries mixed up. The device emphasises the alienness of Bulgarian culture – when he falters, she waits impatiently for the audience to translate the word for “fence”.

But it also shows the agonising awkwardness of narratives of grief. Each time she nears the conclusion of her sister’s story, she breaks off to dance to Balkan musician, Goran Bregovic’s 'Kalashnikov'. The song mixes folkloric joy with bleak, explosive lyrics. She brilliantly echoes this ambiguity by strewing flowers as though at a wedding, but with a violence that tramples them increasingly furously under foot.

After each dance, her narrative starts anew, and her frustration at her homeland’s traffic and smoking doctors grows. Lownie adds his voice—independent of hers, for once—to record his own reactions to the dirt tracks and new apartments of modern Bulgaria. Radeva’s grief is tied so closely to lost remembered places and rites that Lownie can’t reach – but this intensely personal performance crafts a bridge of floral delicacy.

 

http://festival14.summerhall.co.uk/event/near-gone/