SHELL OF SILENCE – Contemporary Visual Dance Performance by Derida Dance Center

🐚 Choreographer: Jivko Jeliazkov

🐚 Dancers: Simona Todorova, Adreana Vaseva, Kalina Valchanova and Deniz Chaka

🐚 Visual artist: Ivelina Ivanova

🐚 Composer: Ivan Shopov

🐚 Actor: Lia Careddu

🐚 Scenography: Petya Boyukova 

🐚 Photos: Ivona Mashova

🐚 Producers: Mira Georgieva and Atanas Maev

“SHELL OF SILENCE” is a contemporary dance performance that places the ♻️ ecological crisis at the center of an artistic inquiry. At the heart of the piece is a Mediterranean tortoise – not as a literal animal on stage, but as a visual and symbolic presence that undergoes a gradual transformation throughout the performance. A quiet, slow creature, embodying nature’s resilience, yet also its vulnerability – a symptom of a deeper collapse: the loss of balance, continuity, and responsibility.

The piece is based on fragments from the work of Grazia Deledda 👉  the first Italian woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her texts, the Sardinian landscape is not merely a backdrop; it is an active, living, deeply dramatic character. The wind, the stones, the silence, and the light possess will and agency. This profound sensitivity to nature serves as a counterpoint to today’s reality 👉 merciless, exploitative, and destructive.

The performance uses this contrast – between Deledda’s contemplative, nourishing nature and the accelerating devastation of our time – to provoke reflection and urgency.

“SHELL OF SILENCE” addresses the ecological crisis not as an abstract global issue, but as a concrete moral and existential dilemma – here and now.

The mission of the performance is to break the silence around one of the most pressing challenges of our time. It seeks engagement – not only emotional, but ethical. It calls for concrete action – both personal and collective: conscious consumption, active civic stance, care for biodiversity, and demand for sustainable environmental policies.

Here, art is not a comfort – it is a wake-up call. It does not offer answers, but insists on a response. 

The Dancing Histories project is co-funded by the Creative Europe of the European Union and the Национален фонд „Култура“ / National Culture Fund, Bulgaria.

🇮🇹 Italian partners: Associazione Enti Locali per le Attività Culturali e di Spettacolo, Comune di Pula, Visit Pula, Ministero della Cultura, RAS – Regione Autonoma della Sardegna, Fondazione di Sardegna, ISULA Fishing Club Sardegna