Some events mark stages. In other words, there is a process. In the process of cultural rapprochement between Bulgaria and Spain two significant events took place in Bulgaria’s capital at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009.

The Tenth National Festival of School Theatre in Spanish

was organised by the Council of Education of the Embassy of Spain with the cooperation of Bulgaria’s Ministry of Education and Culture, Sofia Municipality and the Cervantes Institute in Sofia. It was targeted at the Spanish language students in Bulgaria. In the festival competed 17 troupes from different towns in Bulgaria: 180 students and teachers. For all participants this was an opportunity to immerse themselves in Spanish culture through the works of playwrights such as Calderon de la Barca, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jacinto Benavente, Alejandro Casona, to see adaptations of classical plays in Spanish.

This national competition, held in Bulgaria since 1999, is just a facet of the annual European School Theatre in Spanish, organised in Central and Eastern European countries since 1994. “The European competition aims at presenting and popularising Spanish culture as well as at establishing and strengthening the connections between young people from Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, who use the Spanish language as a means of communication,” Mr. Jose Felix Barrio, counsellor on education at the Embassy of Spain in Bulgaria, said.

Our young actors will participate in the next annual edition to be held between March 25 and April 1, 2009 in Bucharest, Romania.

Bridge Over Time, Bridge Over Space

Just like a bridge the name of the great Pablo Picasso connects 2008 and 2009. For three months the National Gallery for Foreign Art has been a place for an intimate relationship with the work of the cosmopolitan Andalusian who has probably moved the most the spirits on the world’s cultural scene. “A genius, a revolutionary, a warrior of art who knew how to destroy and how to create,” the curator Marisa Oropesa said.

“There was one understanding of art before Picasso and another after Picasso. He trained the eyes of the art viewer, he made the viewer understand art and rise to it,” Mrs. Oropesa said.

Among the events accompanying the exhibition was the show of documentaries that reveal the full-blooded image of a man who has lived according to his beliefs, no matter the price he had to pay. A confirmation of the interest, provoked even today by this restless spirit, were the debates at the roundtable “Closer to the Genius” organised by the Cervantes Institute with the participation of lecturers from the National Academy of Fine Arts, Prof. Andrei Daniel and Prof. Chavdar Popov. The expose of Prof. Popov, head of Art History department, revealed the artistic restlessness of Picasso and his influence on modern and contemporary art. Very interesting was also the specific literary reading of Picasso’s art, presented by the literature lecturer from St. Kliment Ohridski Sofia University Tatyana Marinkova.

The Cervantes Institute also organised an exhibition entitled The Unknown Picasso, featuring works from museums and private collections in Bulgaria.

Art is most frequently born in loneliness but it is destined to create a spiritual connection, to bring unity to the people in a universal space. Presently there are exhibitions of Pablo Picasso’s works in some 30 towns around the globe. In this way a concrete geographic location – Sofia, Bulgaria – is bound with invisible threads to the spiritual map of the world.

Slavena Ilieva, Plamen Kolev