Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
On entering the labyrinth one actually becomes the main actor
he is the real actor.
The labyrinth actors are just helping him or her get its message,
whether everyone gets it or not is another matter.
But one way or another, everyone gets their own message.
To me this was the path of life – my life, the life of the person next to me,
the person X, the person Y – from the stage before birth,
in the womb of the mother, to the moment we have to leave this world.
To me it’s a proven fact that to understand art you have to experience it,
live through it. Like Aristotel’s catharsis. You have to switch off the rational mind.
Walking through the labyrinth I was trying to convince myself that I was able to trust someone to lead me
through it and take me out. It was interesting because I rarely trust people.
Yes, I did find a way to relax, because the person leading me had warm hands.
This was what I told myself - I can trust someone with such warm hands.
It was very interesting, and I never expected this – out of the darkness came something so sensorial,
and in a way playful and interesting. Its effect on you is not shocking but refreshing.
I remember this lady dressed in white kneading dough in something like white tent
and I had to knead the dough together with her. It was as if you were in a womb creating life.
You go into a room where your past is, there is a young woman, weaving or something like that.
Then you look through something like little window and you see the room of your parents maybe.
Your mother nursing you. Then you look to the other side and see her bedroom.
Or is it your grandmother’s kitchen? I’m not sure which of the two.
But in my mind it was the place of my past, of my ancestors.
Maybe because it was at the start of the labyrinth I was in my skeptical mindset,
and this had a very strong impact on me.
I remember my daughter’s reaction. After the first minute spent inside
she went out very frightened, after talking to me and some of your colleagues,
she mustered her courage and determination, and went back through the labyrinth.
Afterwards she shared that in fact
she fought her not fully conscious fear. The fact that she went through it after all,
being just 18 years old, had a formative, cognitive thought-provoking effect on her, no doubt about that.
For Bulgaria this is a very weak point in the audience-aimed methodology in arts education.
The teachers may be prepared how to teach arts, but there is no such thing like a method
to teach how to experience art, how to perceive art.
12-hour piloting course in the National Museum for Military History, Sofia
“People and things, objects and stories” – sensory theatre in the museums
Let’s take for example our Polytechnic Museum. Lots of people see this subject as unexciting
and difficult to understand, lots of formulas, numbers,scientific facts.
Your Labyrintheme project offers an approach which would make the transfer of knowledge,
the showing and presenting of scientific and technical facts to visitors more enjoyable and easy to grasp.
What we wish for, anyway, is to have more and more young people as visitors in the museums,
and we are looking for ways to wake up their interest. It should be something unusual, new, exciting,
that hasn’t been done until now.
Your Labyrintheme project offers a wonderful way to get in touch with particular exhibits,
cultural streams, schools in arts. We see this can be done in a more attractive way,
and the museums could be much more daring. That labyrinth idea, that game,
which in fact is the labyrinth, is challenging me,
makes me see in a new way everything around, and we know it all so well.
I believe every museum, independent of its specifics, could offer a lot in this direction.