In the bedroom of an improbable asylum which he sets in the remotest part of the Balkans, Hristo Boytchev has locked up his sick country, Bulgaria, minuscule, worried, inhabited by wolves and harmless madmen. In the company of a doctor as doubtful as the patients entrusted to him, we discover this strange land, cut off from the world, forgotten by all and by History, whose distant echoes reach us in the snatches of a random television newscast.

Thanks to chance and to the madness of the craziest among them, this small community is going to invent mentally before our eyes, with precarious means, an even greater madness: they are founding Europe and their citizenship. With fake, they create truth, they transform their dream into action.

As always and for a long time in the theatre, the fools are wise. Their delirium and their capering are the disturbing mirror of our own madness. With the poet who has invented them and who speaks to us in his own way of Europeans' aspiration to find themselves, they are saying to us, at a time when politicians' words get bogged down in pragmatism and political cant, that we must have our dreams in order to take action and that the reality which trips up dreams, is not necessarily the greatest truth.

Didier Bezace
June 1999

Notes taken for a bird
The bird. Birds. It is likely that we understand birds better since we manufacture aeroplanes.

Animals with feathers. The ability to fly. Special characteristics of the skeleton. Characteristic attitudes or expressions.

Some birds live alone, or with only their immediate family, others live in small groups, others in large groups. Some in close company, others in scattered groups, seemingly undisciplined. Some fly in a straight line, others freely trace large circles, some according to their will, capriciously. There are some who, more than others, appear determined by a fatal instinct, or by crippling manias.
There are few that can be approached closer than a few metres, some flee thirty or fifty metres away. A few city-dwelling species become accustomed to living close to man and sometimes seek from him, from a few centimetres in some circumstances, their food.

Francis Ponge La rage de l'expression