I've been in Tryavna a little over a week now.  Thus far, I have more to say about the experience than I've had<a href="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/cae-painted.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-99" src="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/cae-painted.jpg?w=213" alt="" width="213" height="300" /></a> time to write about it.  So here's a quick update: I've been out almost every night this week and can confirm that men and women living in the Balkans take their drinking seriously.  It's a pretty standard that the students at the conference don't get around to going out into the town until 11:30 or 12 at night and will stay out until 4am.  I however am not yet acclimated to this schedule and am usually home by 2 or 2:30 in the morning. I expected that this would be the case when I moved to Bulgaria but what I didn't expect was that I was going to participate in a live art performance in Tryavna.

In many ways, I guess this is why I moved here--to push myself and to test my understanding of myself--because I never imagined I would end up lying in the town square in the small town of Tryavna having a Bulgarian word painted on my body.

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But maybe I should start at the beginning.  One of the other Fulbright scholars here is an artist and on the first night of the program he was trying to explain to a group of students what kind of art he does.  He does installation art and he has also started engaging in performance art.  Students seemed to be having a hard time  imagining what his art looked like and were asking him lots of questions about this and wanted to see his work.  He suggested a viewing of some photos of his art.  Later students began to ask him about putting together a performance piece of their own.

As a group, what we came up with was a performance that used the body to tell a story--a story that we created in collaboration.  This story was passed from person to person and each wrote only one sentence.  I'll post this to the blog in the next few days.  For the performance we wrote the story on our arms in English and then in our native language.  The question remained what to write on our bodies.

This was more difficult because the tendency was to write a "sentence" that was nice, warm, friendly--in other words trite and not unlike a hallmark greeting card. In the early versions, there was no tension, there was no pull in the writing and there was no play of ideas.  There was nothing sticky and nothing that grabbed the reader.  This was until we decided to ask for everyone to write one word on a slip of paper that was their response to the word hatred.

<a href="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/words-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-100" src="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/words-1.jpg?w=300" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a>The result of this was much more interesting and we played with these words to create a working poem.  This was written first in English and later in Bulgarian when the decision was made that our audience would be more comfortable reading in Bulgarian than in English.  The piece pushes at issues of hatred and misunderstanding addressing both causes of this hatred and reactions to hatred.

And then on Saturday night, we walked into the town clad in white tee shirts and sandals.  I wasn't nervous about the performance until then and standing outside of the square in little more than my swimsuit I realized that I was going to be exposing myself in a way I never have before.  I was turning myself into an object by inviting others to read my body.  Luckily the atmosphere was charged by the nervous energy of some and excitement by others and the result was a feeling of carnival.

A little after 9pm twenty-six of us, barefoot, walked out onto the square in one long line.  We created a small stir and when the first person lay down to be painted with a mix of chocolate and blueberry sauce ice cream topping a serious crowd began to gather.  I was sixth in line and had a good vantage point to watch the painting.  It took between two and three minutes to paint a person and the line stood until a whistle was blown indicating that it was time for the next person in line to lie down. And I stood there and waited for my turn.

It was clear that no one knew what to make of us at first but by the fifth person the crowd had grown in interest and when the artist made a spelling mistake leaving out an L the crowd corrected him and he squeezed it in.  They were helping him even though they had no idea where the painting was going or what kind of a story he was telling and creating.

Then it was my turn.  I don't really remember how I lay down on the cobble stones.  Instead what I remember is the sensation of the rocks in my back; it was night but the stones were still warm.  This was countered with the coolness of the ice cream topping being painted onto me and the sea of faces trying to make out the word that was being painted on my body.  The word I learned later was: overground.  So I lay there trying not to shake and trying not to make eye contact because I wasn't sure what I would do if I did. It was scary to lie there. My body open to everyone to read, to view, to interpret and to inspect.

I am not sure how long I was lying on the ground but a some point, I became aware of a little girl standing by my head looking at me.  Her mother was there talking to one of the Bulgarians who was documenting the performance.  She was asking about the project and about what we were being painted with.  The Bulgarian told her and she she laughed and told her small daughter.  The little girl came closer to me and I tried to say hello to her in Bulgarian.  Her mother said to say hello back but she didn't.

At this point, I knew exactly what she wanted so I took my index finger and dipped in some of the "paint" on my body and held it up to the little girl.  She licked the sauce off my finger. I didn't expect this.  I am not sure why but I expected that she would put her finger in it to taste it but I didn't expect that this little girl who wouldn't say hello to me would just lick the topping straight off of my finger.

It was a strange moment of intimacy with this little girl who was too shy to say hello licking my finger.  After tasting the chocolate-blueberry topping, her smiled revealed that until she had tasted the sauce that she didn't actually believe her mother: she didn't believe that we were grown-ups lying on the ground being painted with ice cream toppings and in a similar way, I didn't believe it until then either.  I didn't believe that I could travel to Bulgaria, begin making new friends in a country where I didn't know the language and somehow find myself in the town square wearing very little in order to have a Bulgarian word painted on my body in chocolate sauce.

I spent a long time lying on the ground. Probably close to an hour if not more and while lying there I was struck by the way perspective changes.  I am used to being among the tallest in a room and here I was looking up into the faces of everyone around me--some came down the line reading each body and then hurried on to the next avoiding making eye contact, others stepped over us as if we were not really people at all, some took pictures of each of us moving down the line, while others stopped and spoke to us about what we were doing.  One woman, a Spaniard, spoke to everyone.  She, I learned, had spent time in Washington DC at the Spanish Embassy.  She was interested in what we were doing and was familiar with the Fulbright program.  But in the end, all I could do was to lie there, to watch people and to sometimes respond to people.  For the most part, I lay there thinking about the experience. It was good for me.

It was good for me to challenge myself, to do something that I wasn't a 100% comfortable with and to share of myself with other people.   Ultimately, I don't know what the response of the Tryavna community was but I do know that the performance pushed the participants to test ourselves and to think about, question and name what hate means. What follows are the lines that were written on the participants' bodies--first in English and next in Bulgarian.

<em>English:</em>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">INTENSE PASSION FOR EASY PROFIT</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">OVER-GROUND LUST FOR PINK INDIFFERENT SMILES</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">PEACE SUFFERS OBSESSED WITH PAST AND VIOLENCE, PAIN, JEALOUSY, DISCRIMINATION</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">WAR MACHINE, BLAH-BLAH-BLAH</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">UNFAITHFULL OTHERS FIGHT HORRIBLE STUPIDITY</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><em>Bulgarian: </em></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">СИЛНА</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">СТРАСТ</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">ЗА</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">ЛЕСНА</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">ПЕЧАЛБА</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">НАДЗЕМНА</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">ПОХОТ</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">ЗА</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">РОЗОВИ</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"><span> </span></span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">БЕЗРАЗЛИЧНИ YСМИВKИ</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">МИРЪТ</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">СТРАДА</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU">, </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">ОБСЕБВAН</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">ОТ</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">МИНАЛО</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">И</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">НАСИЛИЕ</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">БОЛКА</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU">, </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">РЕВHOСТ</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU">, </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">ДИСКРИМИНАЦИЯ</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU">, </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">ВOEННА</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">МАШИНА</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU">, - </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">ДРЪН</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU">-</span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU"> ДРЪН</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">НЕВEРНИТЕ</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">ДРУГИ</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">СЕ</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">БОРЯТ</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">С</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">УЖАСЯВAЩАТА</span><span style="font-size:9pt;" lang="RU"> </span><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:&quot;" lang="RU">ГЛУПОСТ</span></p>