A dancing rose queen

Entirely alone, a young woman stands in a snowy mountain landscape. Dressed in seemingly folk-like clothing and headdress, her hands are placed proudly on her hips. In the silent and deserted landscape, after a few glances she begins an expressive dance, in which only the muffled jangling of her jewelry can be heard. The woman is Gery Georgieva (born 1986), and even without music, any pop music fan can recognize what’s being performed here: It’s Beyonce’s 2008 hit “All The Single Ladies”.

In “Polythene Queen” the artist, wearing a self-made plastic dress, roller-skates through her studio lip-synching along to a ballad of yearning. Snapshots of souvenir items from a British shop are projected onto the wall behind her, time and again these are reflected on Georgieva’s clothing and body. In “Blushing Valley” she dons the appearance of a dancing rose queen, underpinned with an audio recording from the rose festival in the Bulgarian town of Kazanlak – all set against the magnificent landscape of the Rose Valley, the most important area of cultivation for the country’s rose oil.

What is tradition, after all?

To a certain extent, Georgieva’s appearance in the works foregrounds a kind of representative principle of folklore and popularity: While every custom and every tradition has explicitly specific backgrounds and foundations, these are, from culture to culture, nevertheless so similar in terms of their codes and fundamental representations that they appear interchangeable. For the observer these are clearly recognizable – albeit not necessarily legible. In a globalized world, however, in light of their inherent content they are more the expression of a specific feeling of authenticity – the origin of which we can barely grasp nowadays. Tradition is tradition because it’s tradition. From this point of view, these days tradition plays a lesser role in shaping the individual; in fact, the individual becomes actively and deliberately individualized through codes through tradition. As Gery Georgieva put it recently in an interview with Broadly: “For me folk culture is a weird marker of authenticity”.

“Beau Travail” is based on Hermann Melville’s story “Billy Budd” – now a classic of queer studies. Several scenes are underlaid by parts of Benjamin Britten’s eponymous opera. In quiet, long sequences, Denis shows the legionnaires’ day-to-day life and their exercises, which she stages like modern dance. Here, in the homoerotic connotations inherent in the military, the male, martial body appears more as something melancholy than as the property of a fascistic state: The sense and purpose of the unit of legionnaires is barely comprehensible and seems to be more that of a self-help group than the state-organized, violent enforcement of political ends.

Pop music: Folklore of modern times

Hence the threat that Galoup perceives from the new arrival Sentain is indeed absolute. In order to secure himself love and recognition, allegorical, biblical fratricide is his only option. Ultimately, however, in “Beau Travail” it is pop music – or the folklore of modern times, if you will – that helps Galoup to his redemptive and almost transcendental moment of self-realization.