Alexandar Georgiev – Ace also known as Ace, works with/around choreography and dance engaged in exploring ideas of co-existence, hyper, and holography through his imaginative PhD program for the choreographic research CO-series. His latest works deal with notions and phenomena such as the politicization of the anus, “reading from behind,” “nostalgia as poetic archiving,” “radical tenderness,” “cheating as a social endeavor,” “imaginative structures as support system” etc.
Since 2008, Aleksandar has been active in the contexts of the dance and choreography field, fostering partnerships and engaging in collaborative thinking with fellow practitioners. He initiated and co-founded the artistsic team STEAM ROOM, and the project institution ICC (Imaginative Choreographic Center), with artists Darío Barreto Damas and Zhana Pencheva. He is affiliated with the Nomad Dance Academy Network, and legal structures such as Garage Collective, Lokomotiva – Center for New Initiatives in Arts and Culture, Interimkultur, and PiedeBase. His artistic and cultural work is marked by a commitment to co-thinking, co-imagining, and co-dreaming possible and necessary futures and structures.
Aleksandar’s working dynamics are defined by a nomadic approach, considering Tenerife, Sofia, Skopje, and Stockholm as his four key bases. This approach contrasts with the nationalistic tendencies often found in cultural dance spheres and reflects his focus on parallel/holographic existence and co-existing practices.
His educational background includes a Bachelor’s degree in Dance Theatre from New Bulgarian University (2008) and a Master’s in Choreography from DOCH in Stockholm (2014). Aleksandar has also participated in various formal and informal educational programs, including NOMAD, DanceWeb, SPAZIO, and the Critical Practice made in YU program, all of which have significantly influenced his artistic development.
For more information on Aleksandar’s work, visit: aleksandargeorgiev.com
Darío Barreto Damas is a Canarian dancer who works simultaneously in Tenerife, Skopje, Sofia, and Stockholm. His artistic work revolves around dance as an autonomous form of knowledge and practices of disidentification as mediation mechanisms.
He studied at Teatro Victoria (Tenerife), Institut del Teatre (Barcelona), DOCH School of Dance and Circus (Stockholm), and JLU University of Giessen (Germany). Darío has worked as a dancer, co-creator, and collaborator with Deborah Hay, Cristina Caprioli, Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Aleksandar Georgiev, Philip Berlin, and Poliana Lima, among others.
Darío is a co-founder of the ICC (Imaginative Choreographic Center) project institution and the STEAM ROOM artistic team, co-director of LAV Laboratory of Live Arts and Citizenship, and a member of the Movement Artists Association PiedeBase (Canary Islands).
Zhana Pencheva is a freelance dancer from Bulgaria, living between Burgas, Sofia, and Stockholm. She holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in dance and choreography from New Bulgarian University, and I recently graduated in the “New Performance Practices” master’s program at Stockholm University of the Arts. She has also participated in various transnational alternative educational programs, including the Nomad Dance Academy and DanceWeb.
She creates dance works, often exploring themes of sensuality, eroticism, love, and the kinetic and relational spaces inhabited by the body and dance. Her choreographic projects are created in close collaboration with music, sound, and lights. Some of her works include the choreographic concerts Six Love Songs (2019), Dance Baby, Dance(2021), and Before disappearing (May, 2025), alongside other pieces such as Glass of love and Garden. Her latest work is “I Love When You’re Watching Me” and has premiered in Weld, Stockholm.
In 2018, together with Aleksandar Georgiev and Dario Barreto Damas, they founded the international artistic team STEAM ROOM, which works with collective authorship practices, presenting creations in Bulgarian cities like Sofia, Burgas, Varna, and Gabrovo, as well as in Skopje, Tenerife, Stockholm, Ljubljana, Maribor, Belgrade, Zagreb, Prague, Budapest, Brussels, Leuven, Vienna, Katowice, and many other European cities. Since 2020, together they have been developing a long-term transnational project, the Imaginative Choreographic Center (ICC). This initiative explores collective practices within the framework of an imaginative institution, fostering shared responsibility and critical engagement in the fields of dance and choreography.
In recent years, she performed in both Bulgarian and international productions, including The Body as Reference for Revolution (United Cowboys), In C (Sasha Waltz & Guests), Free Fall (Marion Durova), The Power of S (Aleksandar Georgiev), Hommage à Merce Cunningham (Paula Rosolen), Impossible Actions (2021, Yasen Vasilev), and others.”
Gjorgji Despodov is a multidisciplinary designer from North Macedonia, currently based in The Hague, Netherlands. He holds a master’s degree in Non Linear Narrative from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. In 2025, he received the STRP Young ACT Award for his graduation project.
Despodov’s practice blends investigative methods with playful elements, rooted in storytelling deeply engaging with internet and digital culture. His work often employs familiar objects that reflect personal experiences while opening portals into speculative, world-building narratives. His work exists on the threshold between physical and digital environments.
He refers to his projects as provocotypes: prototypes that do not aim to resolve but to provoke, that insist on incompleteness as a method of critique. Unlike functional prototypes that strive toward optimization, provocotypes thrive in friction. They are not answers but interruptions, creating spaces for dialogue and critical reflection.
Viktoria Kostova is based in Sofia, Bulgaria and works as a freelance content creator and cultural practitioner. She is very interested in the topics of cultural entrepreneurship, educational initiatives in culture, sustainability in the cultural sector and alternative ways of funding. She joins the team of ICC with many ideas to develop, mainly about intersectionality, equity and equality in the cultural affairs. She is looking forward to working with ICC and contributing to the co-creation of experimenting content in the cultural field with strong alternative vision.She has graduated her Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and is currently finishing her Master’s degree in Management of Cultural Institutions and Creative Industries. She is the senior coordinator of Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and has worked for different independent cultural and educational organizations like DA Lab Foundation, ONE Foundation for Culture and Arts, Gutenberg 3.0 Foundation, Radar Sofia Association, Open Arts Foundation, Theatre of Responsibility, Panic Button Theatre, new visions, etc. She has taken part in numerous additional trainings in the field of culture and project management such as “Academy for Cultural Management” by Goethe Institute and “International School of Project Management” in Italy.
Natalia Sidorenko is a documentary filmmaker focused on capturing honest, unrepeatable moments — the quiet ones, the delicate ones, the ones that often pass unnoticed. Her work centers on people as they are: genuine, natural, sometimes vulnerable, yet always beautiful in their own way.
She seeks warmth in every frame — in a glance, a touch, a breath, or in the way light gently falls across skin. Natalia believes the most meaningful moments unfold organically, without staging or interruption.
For her, the camera is an extension of her sensitivity to the world. Through it, she tells human stories — subtle, tender, sometimes raw, but always sincere. Authenticity isn’t just an aesthetic for her; it is the heart of her work and the foundation of every story she chooses to tell.
Ida Daniel is working as an artist and researcher in the field of contemporary performance and dance, with a focus on strategies of the poetic, the imaginary, and the performative situation as a space for encounter. She is mostly engaged with structures of performativity that generate situations of dancing, writing, thinking, observing, and imagining. Often, these explorations become performances in themselves. Sometimes, they remain longer in research and are shared in closed circles. Other times, they become installations in digital or physical realms.
Ida enjoys the shifts between working solo and collaborating with many people, as well as weaving a process alone or together. Curiosity leads her in all cases, along with the desire to capture the moment of encounter between imaginary fabrics and immediate matters.
Since 2022 she is participating in co-thinking, co-making and co-hosting practices at the Imaginative Choreographic Center. In 2023/24 Ida co-curated the performance festival Implantieren, whose three-month-long edition was dedicated to processes of art as learning and learning as art. Often involved in other people’s work by being invited to accompany them as a dramaturg or in other capacities, in 2024 she joined the making of Reinaldo Ribeiro’s No/Mas/Sacre.
2025 was marked by the artistic exchange with Jenny Larson Quinones, khattieQ and Todor Stoyanov – Unlived Lives. The Reboot. (Austin, Texas) and Unlived Lives. The Reenactment. (Frankfurt a. M.).
Since 2024 Ida has been a jury member for Impulse Festival for performance, theatre and dance.