#kukeri dancers

[anoriginalderivative]

whenever i’ve missed my meds a couple days in a row i rewatch this video about the kukeri dancers in bulgaria. healing

[sheltiechicago]

“Kukeri tradition” – Rila, Bulgaria

Every winter, masked dancers, dressed up in goat skins perform pagan rituals. The masks allow the dancer to become a supernatural being and to enter the spirit world where he chases away the evil spirits of the old year and brings blessings and health to the new year. it is an ages-old tradition which is still well preserved around Bulgaria. There are more than 10,000 Kukeri organized in small groups around Bulgaria

By Ivo Danchev

Independent Photographer’s Travel Photography Contest

[myanhedonia]

Sofia, Bulgaria

Dancers known as kukeri perform during the international festival of masquerade games. Photography by Nikolay Doychinov/AFP/Getty Images

[xtruss]

Sofia, Bulgaria 🇧🇬!Dancers known as kukeri perform during the international festival of masquerade games near Sofia in Bulgaria. Photograph: Nikolay Doychinov/AFP/Getty Images

Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA 🇺🇸! Dr Kee Straits with her llama, called Dalai, who at 27 Years Old has been recognised by the Guinness World Records as the oldest llama living in captivity. Photograph: Albuquerque Journal/REX/Shutterstock

Yanomami Indigenous Territory, Brazil! An aerial view of the Mucajai river. Cases of malnutrition and malaria in the region have increased dramatically in recent weeks, prompting the government to declare a health emergency. Photograph: Michael Dantas/AFP/Getty Images

Yangon, Myanmar 🇲🇲! A blue peacock displays at the city’s zoological gardens. Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock

Tauranga, New Zealand 🇳🇿! Emergency personnel at the scene of a landslide. Photograph: Cameron Avery/EPA

Memphis, Tennessee, USA 🇺🇸! Darin Obston Jr prays at a makeshift memorial to Tyre Nichols near the spot where he received a fatal beating from police officers. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada 🇨🇦! The Canadian Parliament Buildings. (Matthew Bailey/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images/File/Getty Images)

[dykepuffs]

I've lately got a real interest in what I can only sensibly call "transformative costumes" - Stuff like the Ursari bear dance costumes, Bulgarian kukeri, mast beasts like the Old Horse and Old Tup, the Dancing Hosebeast, that video of the girl in the grey pompom jacket dancing to untz untz, and inevitably tattercoats.

So, I'm making a tattercoat for May Day! Inspired by Hedge Morris...

So I have about a week and a bit to finish it in if I want to be able to dance up the sun XD

So... Many... Rags! About 100 on there already and I reckon the whole coat will take ~500 plus.

[ualseyoung10]

Performance Artist 

Nick Cave

In invigorating performances that often involve collaborations with local musicians and choreographers, the Soundsuits can seem almost shaman-esque, a contemporary spin on kukeri, ancient European folkloric creatures said to chase away evil spirits. They recall as well something out of Maurice Sendak, ungainly wild things cutting loose on the dance floor in a gleeful, liberating rumpus. The surprising movements of the Soundsuits, which change depending on the materials used to make them, tend to guide Cave’s performances and not the other way around. There is something ritual-like and purifying about all the whirling hair and percussive music; the process of dressing the dancers in their 40-pound suits resembles preparing samurai for battle. After each performance, the suits made of synthetic hair require tender grooming, like pets. Cave’s New York gallerist, Jack Shainman, recalls the time he assisted in the elaborate process of brushing them out — “I was starting to bug out, because there were 20 or 30 of them” — only to have Cave take over and do it all himself. Much beloved and much imitated (as I write this, an Xfinity ad is airing in which a colorful, furry-suited creature is buoyantly leaping about), they can be found in permanent museum collections across America.

Their origins are less intellectual than emotional, as Cave tells it, and they’re both playful and deadly serious. He initially conceived of them as a kind of race-, class- and gender-obscuring armature, one that’s both insulating and isolating, an articulation of his profound sense of vulnerability as a black man. Using costume to unsettle and dispel assumptions about identity is part of a long tradition of drag, from Elizabethan drama to Stonewall and beyond; at the same time, the suits are the perfect expression of W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness, the psychological adjustments black Americans make in order to survive within a white racist society, a vigilant, anticipatory awareness of the perceptions of others. It’s no coincidence that Cave made the first Soundsuit in 1992, after the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1991, a still-vivid racial touchstone in American history; almost three decades later, the suits are no less timely. “It was an almost inflammatory response,” he remembers, looking shaken as he recalls watching King’s beating on television 28 years ago. “I felt like my identity and who I was as a human being was up for question. I felt like that could have been me. Once that incident occurred, I was existing very differently in the world. So many things were going through my head: How do I exist in a place that sees me as a threat?”

Cave had begun teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with its predominately white faculty, two years before, and in the aftermath of the incident, followed by the acquittal of the officers responsible, he felt his isolation painfully. “I really felt there was no one there I could talk to. None of my colleagues addressed it. I just felt like, ‘I’m struggling with this, this is affecting my people.’ I would think that someone would be empathetic to that and say, ‘How are you doing?’ I held it all in internally. And that’s when I found myself sitting in the park,” he says. In Grant Park, around the corner from his classroom, he started gathering twigs — “something that was discarded, dismissed, viewed as less. And it became the catalyst for the first Soundsuit.”

For many years after he began making his signature work, Cave deliberately avoided the spotlight, shying away from an adoring public: “I knew I had the ability, but I wasn’t ready, or I didn’t want to leave my friends behind. I think this grounded me, and made me an artist with a conscience. Then, one day, something said, ‘Now or never,’ and I had to step into the light.�� Initially, he wasn’t prepared for the success of the Soundsuits. For much of the ’90s, “I literally shoved all of them into the closet because I wasn’t ready for the intensity of that attention,” Cave says. He began exhibiting the Soundsuits at his first solo shows, mostly in galleries across the Midwest; he’s since made more than 500 of them. They’ve grown alongside Cave’s practice, evolving from a form of protective shell to an outsize, exuberant expression of confidence that pushes the boundaries of visibility. They demand to be seen.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/15/t-magazine/nick-cave-artist.html

[doubtspirit]

Bulgarian kukeri (кукери) mask

Bulgaria’s kukeri dancers don dramatic costumes to dispel evil and invite good. The ritual is a public one, profoundly ancient, full of spectacle and metaphor. Around early winter or midwinter, groups of kukeri (кукери: pronounced KOO-kuh-ree) don elaborate costumes—complete with fantastical masks and belts of massive metal bells—and accompany musicians throughout the village, dancing rhythmically to drive away evil and invite good.

[mementomoriiv]

Evo Danchev - Bulgaria’s Kukeri Dancers

[elliesasks]

I had to train my strength and body in order to be a Kukeri dancer.

[typhlonectes]

The ritual is a public one, profoundly ancient, full of spectacle and metaphor. Around early winter or midwinter, groups of kukeri (pronounced KOO-kuh-ree) don elaborate costumes—complete with fantastical masks and belts of massive metal bells—and accompany musicians throughout the village, dancing rhythmically to drive away evil and invite good.

That’s the simple version. Creed, whose decades of study in Bulgaria led him to write a book on kukeri practice, would be the first to tell you there’s more to it than that.

He describes them as “multipurpose” rituals: The bells’ clanging and the costumes’ shocking faces divert the evil eye, but the mummers’ dancing path throughout the village also invoke the fertility of people, animals, and agriculture. Kukeri rituals have also served as coming-of-age ceremonies for young men...

[myanhedonia]

Pernik, Bulgaria

Bulgarian ‘Kukeri’ dancers take part in the International Festival of Masquerade Games. The heavy swaying of the main mummer is meant to represent wheat heavy with grain, and the bells tied around the waist are intended to drive away evil spirits. Photography by Nikolay Doychinov/AFP/Getty Images

[coylady]

Bulgarian dancers  known as ‘Kukeri’ perform in a street February 17 in Edimane, Turkey. Kukeri  are Bulgarian men who dress in elaborate customers with masks of animals to ward off evil spirits.     

Photo by Chris McGrath                                                                                                                                                                    

[instapicsil3]

Dancers, known as "Kukeri", perform during the International Festival of the Masquerade Games in Pernik, Bulgaria. The three-day festival, which started on January 25, has participants sporting multi-colored masks, covered with beads, ribbons and woolen tassels while the main dancer, ladened with bells to drive away sickness and evil spirits, sways like a wheat spikelet heavy with grain. 📸Nikolay Doychinov, AFP/Getty Images #kukeri #masquerade #masqueradegames #pernik #surva http://bit.ly/2MzO45Y

[global-musings]

Bulgarian "Kukeri" dancers carry torches during a carnival in the village of Gabrovdol on January 13, 2012. The Kukeri Carnival marks the beginning of spring. Masks are intended to drive away sickness and evil spirits. 

Photographer: Dimitar Dilkoff

[wanderlustbuddy]

Dating back millennia, the kukeri dancers' dramatic ritual is equal parts fascinating and terrifying https://t.co/Rr09eqdDaQ

Dating back millennia, the kukeri dancers' dramatic ritual is equal parts fascinating and terrifying https://t.co/Rr09eqdDaQ

— Happy Wanderlust (@wanderlustbuddy) February 12, 2019

Dating back millennia, the kukeri dancers' dramatic ritual is equal parts fascinating and terrifying https://t.co/Rr09eqdDaQ