Ivo Dimchev
You can’t be successful without anger – not impotent anger, but honest anger. Bulgarian master Ivo Dimchev therefore seeks risk, not morality. He seeks his audience and not public opinion.
This is the story of someone who left my home country of Bulgaria, as many did after the fall of communism. Someone who sought his fortune with so much glorious rage, someone who doesn’t present himself as a tortured victim, however queer and non-conformist he may be. Rather, this is the story of someone who has returned and is breaking all the taboos he can find. Am I, as a dancer, not allowed to also seek success as a musician and performer and painter and activist and entertainer and sculptor? Am I not allowed to wow the judges on a second-rate British TV show? Am I not allowed to tell a story like the one about how an all-powerful technical director of a major theatre dared not let any artist cross the threshold of the theatre who had not sucked his “big, filthy cock”? Not even Pina Bausch was exempt; she, too, knelt before him.
Anyone who makes such blasphemous claims rather than simply holding his tongue and dancing Butoh properly, as he was trained to do, can be sure of one thing: he has a huge fan club, and its numbers are still swelling. All the fury of art culminates, not only in Bulgaria but worldwide, in Ivo Dimchev – this frivolous figure of light who embraces his audience with grand gestures and disgusts them, makes them marvel and laugh, who sends them into ecstasy with smug humour and clever thoughts and then milks them without restraint. At his bidding, they themselves dance on stage, take selfies with the master or take great pleasure in buying original Ivo Dimchev paintings at an auction disguised as a production.
He has just performed in New York, Sofia and Vienna, where he is using “METCH” (an acronym that stands for Music, Exhibition, Text and Choreography) to promote the fusion of all the arts in order to escape death in such firmly walled-off disciplines as dance, opera and theatre. Aren’t things the same in art as they are in retail? It is also dying because the public does not want to be a specialized audience, but instead only cheers for the successful. Save the independent scene. It will perish if it doesn’t do everything it can to learn the business of the popular arts. Curtain up for Ivo Dimchev!
The provocateur, the risk-taker, the healer, the activist, the ultimate performer. And don’t forget to bring cash when you go to see Ivo Dimchev’s latest work ‘METCH’, because he delves deeply into the question of the value of art.
… or as a lover read for free
