Zableyalo is the first of a series of collaborations from the Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices and choreographer/director Jennifer Rose. This film was created with Cinematographer/Editor Robbie Shaw and Performer Maija Knapp. A dance work where traditional folk music is made visceral. The soul made visible. A physical expression to make sense of tradition and use it as map to know where we came from and a guide for those who follow after us.

Directed by Jennifer Rose

Produced by Roberta Shaw

Key Cast: Maya Knapp

Director Statement
Dance is not just an observation of the body, but an exposure of a human being in its entirety. It is an excavation of blood, inherited from the generations before us; the same way an archeologist unveils buried and dark histories from below what is visible on the earth’s surface. I am a U.S. citizen. As I move with the sounds of the women from The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices, I unveil a deep American immigrant story of history, language and knowledge choked from the female body upon assimilating into a culture for a hopeful future. This music evokes unknown faces and names of women whose songs have been hushed. Their knowledge and wild nature severed from gut to nerve and deemed irrelevant by unconscious culture; scoured clean for the modern
world. But we cannot be deaf to their whispers haunting sounds inside of our skulls. Their shadows follow us.

Traveling for performance and education, I have listened to and absorbed the presence of bold family matriarchs from Spain, Java, Mexico, Vietnam, Germany and my own family in search for origins of bloodlines. These women are the bearers of valuable oral traditions and hold stories of loss of identities and self- sacrifice. We dance to speak their narrative to you.

These forgotten women are our real doctors. The only ones who can truly make us whole and collect the dismantled pieces of ourselves; abandoned on the soil from far away continents.The women of the Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices hold root of our physical and spiritual tissue which determines how we breath and think and therefore act in the world. We must dig beneath the earth’s surface to unveil the muck of our own personal histories and unleash the inescapable truth of who and what we are made of. For our bodies are the living containers of our history. We dance to embed unknown stories into our flesh.