A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN ACTRESS “For me acting is a way to feel alive”

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN ACTRESS

“For me acting is a way to feel alive”

I last watched Katia Paskaleva at the “199” studio theatre in Rakovsky Street. She was doing “The Bum”, her first and only one-man show by Jean Claude van Italy. On that night, the barrier between performer and audience seemed to have collapsed, as if they were both participating in a religious rite. The vibrations from stage to audience and back were palpable in the air and she was acting not simply out of professional habit, but out of a sacred inspiration, which was finely tuning her, from one minute to the next, to her act of impersonation. It all had the spontaneous enchantment of a jazz jam session. Then, when the show was over, we felt struck by her magic and were reluctant to go. So, each of us tucked away a piece of the virtual reality we had partaken of together and continued living with it for days on end. After I left the theatre I had the strange feeling I was not quite the same person any more, I could hardly pass by a bum on the streets of Sofia, without a sense of immediate bonding to him, a sense that, like me, he or she was one of God’s children. So, instead of pretending not to notice them, as we all usually do, I will discreetly drop a few bobs in their hat or can, careful not to hurt their human dignity...

Here I am now, a few months later, in Katia’s living room, sitting with her at the round table with a bowl of tangerines in the middle, fully equipped with a recording device and well-rehearsed questions. But suddenly I discovered that I am off the track of the usual interview- she must have played a professional “trick” on me-but somehow our conversation turned into an adventure, where we both explored each other and the world around us. I shared with her my impressions from her last performance at the studio theatre and she smiled in a roguish manner: ”In this production both I and the director were playing with fire, we were challenging the conventional attitudes of the audience, we were aiming at making it my own partner. But audiences have a different response from one night to the next, you can’t always achieve that. I am very much in love with this character that has refused to fit into the pigeonholes of society.  Clara is not simply a marginal character,  a bum from New York Central Park. I hope I have managed to bring across to the spectators some of her remarkable qualities, her defiant love of freedom and her sense of personal dignity, for example. It was a lucky coincidence that I had just returned from New York when we started working on this play.  So I still had about me the exhilarating sense of liberation I had experienced there, washing away our silly Balkan prejudices and inhibitions.”

We had a good laugh with Katia when she told me about the practical joke, that she and friend of hers had cooked up. It goes like this - one day, Katia put on Clara’s clothes and bum accessories like patched bags and bucket and lay down on a bench in a garden near the theatre, right in the city center. Svetla, her friend who was a well known photographer from BTA started taking pictures of her. The next day BTA issued the following message which went like this: “Katia Paskaleva, the eminent film and theatre actress has been noticed to sleep like a bum on a bench and to scavenge the dustbins for food”. The “Duma” newspaper took the message at face value and blew it out of proportions. It published an emphatically framed photo of Katia’s real-to life impersonation in the garden, with a portentous subtitle “The Fate of the Actor”. What a lovely friendly take-off! As Katia loves to say “You should take your work seriously, but you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously.”

She really takes her work god damn seriously. And every time she goes onstage, she is tense and worked up as if she is doing it for the first time. Each time, she  puts herself to the test, she stretches herself to the utmost. Many of her colleagues cannot understand this idiosyncrasy of hers. They expect her to be comfortably nestled in her professional routine. She never speaks out her cues the same way, something which annoys a lot of her fellow actors who can’t wait to have the curtain down. She is always exploring new possibilities, always adding up new touches to her role. When she accepts a new role, she takes her time to gradually get the feel of it, to hit the right pitch. Katia admits she gets completely absorbed and lost in her work. She spends most of her time in the rehearsal hall or on the shooting site, the virtual reality takes over from real life. There’s hardly any time to sleep during that hectic stretch but there is always time to carouse and have a shot with “the gang”, to love and then to hate the director or an acting partner and so on, building up to the climax of the first night show or performance...

If you ask Katia about the best years in her life, she wouldn’t hesitate to choose her first five years at the Pazardjik Theatre. It was one among a few provincial theatres, a kind of off-Broadway, where away from the dogmatic stalemate of the capital, experimentation was thriving. Those bohemian provincial communes produced some of the best actors and directors, many of whom made a difference in Bulgarian film and theatre history.

It was exactly there that Katia worked with Metody Andonov, who finely “molded” her talent before she made her debut in the cinema. “The Capricorn” (1972, director Metody Andonov, screenplay by Nikolay Haytov) was the first Bulgarian film which won world-wide recognition in the 60’s. It took by storm all reputable film festivals. The film was nominated for the Oscar awards for both directing and acting. The formal reason for missing this golden opportunity: the film was in black and white? One among many awards, it received “The Silver Hugo” for brilliant cameraman-ship.

“The Capricorn” has stood the test of time and stands on a par with 20th century classics like Kurosava’s Rashamon and Paradganov’s “The Shadows of Our Ancestors”. Katia assured me there was “a special astrological configuration” while they were shooting the film - they were all ecstatic and spontaneous like children, for instance she and her co-star Anton Gorchev went on riding escapades and were nearly perished.

Later she revealed various new facets of her formidable talent in a number of films but she says she never felt the magic spell which possessed all the crew while shooting “The Capricorn”. In 1991 she starred as leading actress in “Silence” directed by Krassimir Kroumov, an elitist artist, much acclaimed in Germany.

In the post-communist era there were quite a few years when Katia missed acting in the cinema badly and dreamt about it... Recently, a month ago, she starred in a film again and she was truly excited. “Visited by God” is based on a few novellas of the eminent Bulgarian writer Stanislav Stratiev and in Katia’s words “the film has a constellation of first class actors in it.”

And as far as the theatrical scene goes, my companion is quite positive and optimistic. In spite of the financial hardships, the Bulgarian theatre is in real upswing and she gasped for breath to name just a few out of the numerous significant theatrical events all over the place. Moreover, she had recently been to New York and she had seen an avanguard production of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” at the La Mamma Theatre. “It’s a pilgrimage you have to make now and again to recharge your batteries and to embark on a new adventure. As my maestro Boyan Danovsky used to say: to jump into the abyss and to attempt to fly...”   

   

Sofia Western News Monthly, December 1999