Kliment Denchev: The Canadian actor
Kliment Denchev: The Canadian actor

Summary/Abstract: The ambition of this conference paper is to fill a gap in the knowledge of the professional accomplishment in Canada of Kliment Denchev (1939–2009), a distinguished and popular Bulgarian actor who migrated, in the second half of the 1970s, to settle in the city of Montreal, province of Quebec, where he lived till the end of his life. With his animated television series Klimbo at Radio Canada (in the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s), his roles in the theatre, the cinema and the television series, he established himself as a Canadian actor and became a member of the Artist’s Union of Quebec. Although his Canadian professional experience is rich, his most acclaimed achievement in Canada is his unique artistic performance in the Klimbo series as an actor who tells stories for kids – playing different roles, while drawing behind a glass characters, scenes, actions and emotions. Almost all of his professional awards in Canada honoured the excellence of his performance in the series (Peabody Award – 1981, Banff World Television festival – 1982, etc.). This fact provokes our questioning of the fragility of the categories that we, as researchers, use in order to facilitate our understanding of complex phenomena as, for example, the Personalia in arts. Labels like “Bulgarian actor” or “Canadian actor”, suitable for encyclopaedia entries – cannot describe the complexity of the artistic phenomenon. Paying attention to the Canadian period of Kliment Denchev as an artist, I can call him a Canadian actor. But this fact ignores that his Klimbo series in Canada is a natural artistic development of the same performance he had as a Bulgarian artist during his Bulgarian period Bate Kliment pee i risuva (Big Brother Kliment is drawing and singing). One of the consequences of the immigration is the transgression of the national categories. After being an actor in Bulgaria, Kliment Denchev continues his artistic career in Canada. Thus, his professional experience can be signed by both titles: a Bulgarian actor and a Canadian actor of Bulgarian origin.

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