Борислав Ал. Мутафчийски/ Borislav Al. Mutafchiyski
Abstract: Dance is both an art and a way of life. For thousands of (folk dance) choreographers in Bulgaria, it is also a profession – romanticized, yet marked by insecurity, instability, and struggle. After 1989, with the transition to a market economy and the collapse of state cultural institutions, the professional path of the choreographer became a constant balancing act between inspiration and survival. Choreographers – as artists, teachers, cultural entrepreneurs, and often social workers by necessity – occupy a vulnerable position of labor insecurity, weak institutional support, and fragmented recognition. This article, written in an autoethnographic mode, traces these insecurities by embedding personal experience into broader theoretical frames of precarity, precariousness, and the transformations of social capital. Drawing on the works of Bauman, Bourdieu, Standing, Butler, as well as on ethnographic studies by Luleva and Benovska, I argue that choreographers in Bulgaria today embody the tensions of the post-socialist precariat: insecure yet creative, marginal yet indispensable, fragile yet resilient.
Keywords: precarity, precariat, choreographers, Bulgaria, post-socialism, social capital
