The 7^th edition of the Beglika Fest at the Golyam Beglik dam in the Western Rhodope Range /August 27 – 30/ is devoted to the real and conscious exchange of knowledge, goods and services, along with emotions and ideas for the future. The slogan this year is Create, Play, Be, the way the different modules of the festival are named. Play represents the typical aspects of the festival – music, live performances, dances... Create unites all the creative activities – inventions, workshops, theatre and dancing ones, creative corners and old and new crafts. Be seizes all the meetings at Beglika as various forms of discussion, talks and exchange of experience.

Besides the main Kaba Stage, the new thing this year is the DJ Stage in the Tree, which will bring joy to the audience with sets, serving as a music background for the free time of the festival. The Acoustic Jam Session will be open for collaborations between all musicians from the different bands, thus encouraging the exchange of music.

The festive program also includes theatre and 3D performances, a fire show, a circus and air acrobatics. The events will take place at different spots of the festive zone or around it – the Silent Meadow, on a stage in the water, in the forest or even on an island that will be reached by a raft. All game forms will challenge the imagination and will be ways of studying and cooperation.

The so-called cinema camper will screen every day movies on conscious consumption and the care of Earth in contemporary world. A part of the festival’s artistic creativity will be a sculpture of natural materials, which will “speak up” at a certain hour of the day and in a certain Moon phase.

Live painting, natural collages and a pinhole photography workshop – those are some of the creativity forms included. The visitors will have the chance to attend different workshops, Bagpipe Plays among those, also a calligraphy workshop, one for the creation of figures and jewelry from polymer clay and epoxy resin, the latter allowing beautiful flowers and other natural elements to be eternalized. There will be also a Recycle Your Old T-Shirt workshop, giving a chance for the renewal of T-shirts worn out. A plastic art workshop will be available and it will be demonstrated how anyone can make a rocket heater on his own.

The main accents of the Be module are subjects like Parenthood and Learning with the slogan Be A Parent, as well as Health and Welfare. As the festival is related to nature an experiment has been prepared this year, trying to answer questions like: Is it possible for societies to go to self-sustaining systems via the exchange of goods and services at the decreasing mediation of money and finance capital? Other painful topics are focused on here, concerning issues like the shrinking of irrational consumption, optimization of production and excesses, waste treatment, solidary agriculture and the overall softening of human interference in natural processes – all this is related to what will allow us to live in a world with a future.

English version: Zhivko Stanchev