Three women thrust and hurl themselves with abandon, their intensity suggesting a fierce urgency. They are tough, fleshy and free of any vanity. The stakes are high in Delta, the latest collaboration between Bulgarian director Petar Todorov and Slovenian choreographer Gregor Kamnikar—who identify their work as “physical theater,” and the focus is on the individual’s relationship to the moment of death.

Todorov and Kamnikar, who form the professional tandem Satores, have collaborated on performances and taught courses together since 2000. Speaking recently from Baltimore, where the current three-city tour of Delta began, Todorov described their approach as “the expression of emotion through physical action. The main focus of the work for the performers is producing and articulating their unique movements, which comes out of their own experience, related to the chosen theme.”

The work furthers the investigations of their 2004 work Anatomy of Extreme and features two of its performers, Desislava Mincheva and Lyudmila Miteva, both in their 30s. They are joined by 64-year-old Toni Pashova, an acclaimed Bulgarian dramatic actress. “We chose to work on the idea of three women of different ages and their relationship to the moment of death. They are all actresses with backgrounds in drama, quite known in our country, but they were willing to try something new.”

“There is no text here; they work with physical action. We give them emotional tasks—a theme to work on—then they improvise, and we articulate their movement. They’re not trained in dance, so they don’t use any dance technique, and they don’t work with dance clichés. So they really do things through their unique movement.”

Freed to move into more exploratory, innovative ways of working once the country was no longer under Communist rule at the end of the 1980s, Bulgaria’s theater artists began to create their own opportunities. Prior to 1989, Todorov explains, “All the money went to so-called mainstream theater and developing Stanislavski type of work. There was almost no contemporary dance, and no physical theater at all. So everything started about 15 years ago: Young artists were trying to do different work, to develop things outside the state and city theaters.”

This is the first Satores project to reach the U.S., but Todorov’s earlier ensemble, New Forms Theatre, performed at La MaMa in 1996. He shuns the term “experimental” for his collaborative work, preferring to describe it as “free artistic expression: developing, devising your own ides, but not interpreting ideas of somebody else.”

Delta’s developmental process took place in the remote Bulgarian village of Bostina, in the Rhodopes mountain area, where Todorov and Mincheva established the adventurous Pro Rodopi Arts Centre in 2004. “The idea is to create an international arts residency center for independent artists, for physical theater work. We chose this rural area on purpose. There is nothing like this in the Balkan countries,” Todorov explains. “We decided to go outside of the big cities where everything is concentrated, and create a remote place for artists to come and work in peace, in relation with nature—to give them a time and place where there is no stress, no rush.”

Sept. 20–30, La MaMa Annex, 74A E. 4th St. (betw. Bowery & 2nd Ave.), 212-475-7710; Thurs.–Sat. 7:30, Sun. 2:30 & 7:30, $15/$20.