Deyan Georgiev

Country: Bulgaria

Biography

Deyan Georgiev is a Bulgarian artist, director, choreographer, and performer working across theatre, dance, installation, and artistic research. His performances explore perception: some works are quiet and absorbing; others move through overload, disorientation, instability, and loss of control.

He trained in Theatre and Acting at NATFA in Sofia and holds an MA in Choreography and Artistic Research from Codarts and Fontys in the Netherlands.

His solo performance, Wired, was selected for Aerowaves Top Twenty and Last Orbit for Moving Balkans 2026. Clean received the Margarita Arnaudova Jury Award and an ICAR Award nomination. He was named in Forbes Bulgaria’s “30 Under 30” in Culture, Media and Art and selected for Prospero New European Wave 2026.

Alongside his performance practice, he collaborates with scientists and engineers to develop engineered living materials, exploring how living matter can shape the objects and environments we create. This collaborative work has been presented at Milan Design Week, BIOFABRICATE Paris, and World Expo 2025 Osaka.

TAM

The concept of locus amoenus, or “the pleasant place,” expresses a deeply rooted human need for safety and rest, for both body and mind. It is a refuge from the outside world, a place where we can withdraw, recover, and reconnect with ourselves and with others. Yet it is a fragile, vulnerable and easily disturbed place. It carries the intimacy of the moments created within it.

TAM is a performance-installation that explores how a sense of refuge is created and sustained on an island made of pillows. Its title means there in Bulgarian: a place we long to reach, where the body can stop defending itself. This island is a changing landscape – a body, a temporary home, a place to disappear and return. It is built, destroyed, entered, crossed, abandoned, and found again. Through these transformations, the place becomes intimate, unstable, and alive.

TAM places this idea within the contemporary world of dissonance. Every refuge has a boundary. Something is kept inside, and something else is kept out. Individual refuges are often built around survival, and sustaining them can mean controlling or dominating what lies beyond them. What protects one body may come at the cost of another.

What is your locus amoenus?
How can we build these places – TAM – together?

TAM brings these individual refuges into the fragile theatrical space shared by performers and audience. Here, bodies with different needs for safety collide, affect one another and soften. Refuge becomes something we make between us – a temporary possibility of returning to ourselves without being alone. A place that exists only while we are there together.

There is no separation between stage and audience – only shared air, shared silence, and movement passing from one body to another. This shared presence shapes the encounter. Each performance calls for the place to be found anew through the particular ways bodies arrive, attend to one another, and respond.

Choreography, voice, sound, light and image compose a living environment in which each element affects the others. Sound follows gesture, voices merge with the material of the space,  light travels and breaks apart. The work unfolds through shifts in sensation and attention, as intimacy, tenderness and unease inhabit the same space. What feels familiar can become strange, what seemed to offer shelter can dissolve.

TAM is an invitation to be. Simply to be present in the same room, with one another

Duration: 1 hour and 15 minutes
Genre: performance-installation

Performs: Snezhina Petrova, Yavor Valkanov, Kaloyan Trifonov, Slavena Kerezova
Direction, and choreography: Deyan Georgiev
Assistant choreographer: Bianca Braunesberger
Set and costume design: Gabriela Kardzhilova
Composers: Petya Dimanova and Bozhidar Vasilev
Visual environment: Petko Tanchev
Lighting design: Viktor Georgiev
Text: Deyan Georgiev in collaboration with the actors
Dramaturg: Mira Todorova
Assistant director: Marinela Sivcheva
Photo and video: Petko Mavrodiev, Nikola Gyulmezov, Nikolay Raychev
Poster and programme: Yanina Petrova
Production: National Theatre “Ivan Vazov”, Sofia