Ivo Dimchev

I still remember vividly that late autumn evening in 2004 when the Sofia premiere of ‘Lili Handel’, Ivo Dimchev’s first solo, took place. It launched the performing arts programme of the newly-opened Red House Centre for Culture and Debate that back then was the main venue for independent arts and culture, but has since closed. At that time, Ivo Dimchev was a familiar name mainly in professional art circles, who eagerly followed the outbreak of new forms and initiatives in theatre and dance after the fall of the totalitarian communist regime and into the early 2000s. He had already garnered attention in several landmark dance and theatre performances of the period with his unusual presence, always tending towards excess.

Dimchev offered his own interpretation of butoh in his first original work, the group piece ‘The Garden of the Singing Ficuses’ (2002). But it was only in ‘Lili Handel (Blood, Poetry and Music from the White Whore’s Boudoir)’ that he revealed his full potential.

Certain scenes from the intense 50 minutes of this solo are etched in my mind and I now invariably associate them with Dimchev’s artistic individuality. The opening song ‘Mona Lisa’ accompanies the appearance of the androgynous Diva, who enters, taking small, hesitant steps in high heels, wearing only a pearl-adorned G-string and a fur coat. Their entire body is covered in white powder, their face heavily made up. The Diva sings along with Nat King Cole in an operatic voice that builds to a crescendo, the hands following the movements of the voice as if body and sound merge into one. But the aging Diva looks worn, like they have given themselves away. The performer’s body exudes ambivalent eroticism and intense magnetism, tragically bearing the traces of the transience of time, of human ability, of glory. There is a decadence to the excessiveness and extravagance of Ivo Dimchev’s Lili Handel that is akin to self-parody.

The body as a musical instrument, the performative body as a piece of art, the relationship between the sexual and the aesthetic, the genderless body, the relationship between value and art, the artwork as a commodity, the body as a commodity, the partnership with the audience… All these ideas started in ‘Lili Handel’ and developed much further in other works later on’, explained Dimchev in a short written interview that I managed to do with him in between his flights and tours. Today his oeuvre includes more than 40 solo and group stage performances produced all over Europe and in the US, and he has received numerous international awards for dance and theatre. Now he is hard to reach, with a packed schedule booked a year in advance. I caught him shortly before his appearance at Glastonbury, the world’s biggest music festival, where he performed a concert a few days before Marina Abramovic took the stage.

Indeed, one fundamental characteristic of the performative body in his practice is that it also knows no boundaries in art. Today, Ivo Dimchev’s artistic activity can hardly be pigeonholed into established categories. It is both hyper-theatrical and highly physical, using the body as the main instrument. With his extremely rich means of expression, which equally involve movement, singing, speech and are also gradually incorporating the visual arts, he makes the boundaries between physical theatre, contemporary choreography, performance and installation fluid. For several years he has been enjoying success through musical concerts, making each of these, too, a vivid stage performance. ‘I am interested in the physicality of music and the melody of my muscles’, Dimchev says of the special significance of music in his performances, in which singing becomes a physical effort – an extension, even an excess of physicality.

Whatever Dimchev gets up to, it is marked by a defining feature of his ethos as an artist that can broadly be described as ‘provocation’, the meaning of which, however, lies in constantly asking what value there is in art and how this value is determined; in what terms it is defined. He introduced this question in ‘Lili Handel’, but it appears in most of his pieces. One such example is ‘Som Faves’ (2009), which includes a scene in which he kneels as he holds a cheap painting high above him, and shouts ‘Respect art!’ with increasing insistence and building up to a hysterical, almost sarcastic rage before performing a series of elaborate physical actions with the painting (such as placing it on his head while standing in a difficult pose). In these actions, he continually alters the viewers’ relationship to the canvas, making them examine in a paradoxical way the reasons why they are called upon to ‘respect art’. ‘The value of art is a very interesting topic. What has value and what does not have value, what helps us or gives us the right to define these values… So I bought a terribly cheap painting from a market in Amsterdam and tried to manipulate the value that the viewer attaches to it. (…)The value of things and, respectively, their price – not only in art but in life – is a huge topic. There is no way to ignore it’, Dimchev had said in a previous interview I did with him after the presentation of ‘Som Faves’ in Bulgaria years ago.

One of his most extreme experiments with the value/price ratio in art is his first fully interactive performance ‘P Project’ (2012), in which he directly involves the audience as performers. Dimchev organizes this event as a conceptual performance, a social experiment and a reality show at the same time. The bare white stage contains only a keyboard, a chair and a table with a laptop. The performer appears in his well-known persona – this time almost naked, again in high heels, wearing only a red sheer scarf, the pearl-adorned G-string and a black wig, the face hidden behind heavy make-up. Thus, he stages himself as a total artificiality, a ‘body fiction’, and immediately claims the scene as a second-order reality. This is relevant to what is to follow. He invites the audience to voluntarily participate in and add content to the robust dramaturgical structure of the performance. This consists of a series of tasks that willing spectators can perform on stage, and it is the rare instance of participatory performance in which the spectators get paid for their labours.

The tasks that Dimchev sets as author, presenter, and master of ceremonies are sometimes quite borderline. Participants are asked to write a poem, which Dimchev briefly transforms into an improvised song, or to perform a dance, which he accompanies on the piano, as he did later in his performance “Begeraz” (2023).

A couple (regardless of gender) kiss on stage or simulate sex, other participants have the freedom to perform any way they want. Finally, two volunteers have to write and read a positive and negative review of what just happened. And all the while, Ivo Dimchev does nothing to make the task of his temporary collaborators any easier. He constantly provokes them, alternating between roles as a statue, stage owner and host, dictator-director, encouraging collaborator or artist-creator, who sings the texts of the poets as they appear on the screen in front of him, giving a special emotional intensity and dramatic feeling to each moment.

Basically, the ‘project’ behind ‘P Project’ is to set a kind of trap for preconceived expectations and notions of art, to test their limits by placing in controversial relationships the categories through which it is usually evaluated, creating a paradox between mastery/amateurism, role/authenticity, artifice/ineptitude, success/failure, socially acceptable/unacceptable etc., bringing all of them onto the stage. But the goal is not to ‘devalue’ one and validate the other. In this territory of relationalities, the performance also brings onto the stage, quite literally, the monetary cost as capital that is invested in art and usually remains invisible to the spectators beyond the tickets they buy. Here the price serves as a kind of regulator.

In “P Project,” Ivo Dimchev pays his volunteers and determines the degree of risk involved in the task based on the amount of the fee. Those who dare to perform intimate scenes receive the highest “fee” because they touch the boundaries of whaat is generally accepted. Only the last task, writing a review, is unpaid. The critics must be paid by the audience themselves, a clever move. Dimchev draws attention to the fact that writing reviews is a public activity and is done in a position of responsibility towards the public. This, too, should be paid for – by the general public, who can only be informed in this way.

Speaking of criticism: The format of “P Project” also raises questions. What criteria can be used to measure the success of a show? In Dimchev’s case, let’s just assume that traditional standards, such as a perceived degree of virtuosity, skill, and mastery, do not apply. Since Dimchev largely hands over responsibility to his co-earning audience, what counts is the degree of interaction, of personal commitment, which is more reminiscent of betting. When Ivo Dimchev started singing Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” in “Som Faves,” it sounded like a commentary: with every performance, there is always a real stake at play. The audience should feel this for themselves.

When I asked Ivo how justified this view of mine is, this was what he said: ‘The only aspect in regard to which I can relate to a gambler is the risk-taking. I love taking risks and playing with comfort zones – my own and those of my partners on stage, whether they are performers or audience members. Gambling in art is good because it creates ‘errors’ and errors, for me, are gateways to freedom, losing control and allowing the artwork to separate from the artist and have its own life, its own creative process.’ At another point he stated: ‘One of the reasons I’m a good solo performer is that I turn the audience into the perfect partner: A partner in crime. The crime of crossing the line.’

In his own way, he accommodates ‘I-Cure’ (and, to some extent, also his preoccupations with music) within this tradition. Like ‘P Project’, ‘I-Cure’ is also hailed as an ‘interactive performance’, but it no longer lifts the audience out of their seats, no longer puts them on stage, but merely dissolves the barrier separating stage from spectators by addressing them directly.

In the manner of a flamboyant moderator, he greets the spectators who have come to the ‘most healing performance of the year’ and coquettishly and insistently introduces his main instrument – the so-called ‘i-cure card,’ an image of which lights up on a large TV screen. Everyone in the audience holds one in their hand along with a pencil distributed prior to the start of the performance. The card contains four circles in which audience members are to write the name of an organ of the body, a situation in life, a person or something else they wish to heal as a means of supporting the performance and directing the ‘frequencies’ and positive energy they receive from it towards them with ‘healing intention’. The centre of the card is occupied by a red dot that symbolizes each card holder. In an unexpected way, the solo facilitates an exchange of energy between performer and audience as the performance unfolds.

He portrays this mother in the form of a waterfall, which spreads energy, invokes the healing power of sexual energy by simulating sex on stage, speaks in different languages while being given a massage, which is beneficial not only to the giver and the recipient, but also to the onlookers…

‘Do you really believe in the transformative power of performance?’, I asked Dimchev in our recent brief written exchange. ‘Yes, I believe a good performance can inspire and unlock suppressed potential in the viewer on a personal and on a professional level. I have seen it happen many times’, he answered.

And he also tries that in his latest stage work ‘METCH’, which premiered last February at La Mama in New York. The title is an acronym for Music, Exhibition, Text and Choreography and Dimchev uses the piece to blend the artistic methods and strategies he has experimented with so far by combining elements of previous creations, and, of course, singing some of his signature songs. ‘There are ideas in my old works that I really need to recycle’, he explains. And ‘METCH’ looks both familiar and fresh. Here he blends all his manifestations – the queer diva, the performer, the singer, the painter.

In ‘The Selfie Concert’ (2018), he let the audience walk around and take selfies with him as he played and sang. In ‘METCH’, he keeps the audience under control and gives them the role of the ideal partner, tasking them with reading questions projected on the wall, asking him to explain his artistic decisions and actions and propelling the dramaturgy forward.

In this regard he mentioned also the group piece ‘Fest’ (2013), a brutal satire of the festival market in the dance world.

‘I find the power dynamics very theatrical’, continues Dimchev. ‘I can’t pass up the chance to explore and amplify these very obvious but sometimes well-hidden dimensions. Also, you don’t know where exactly the art work starts and where it ends… The blurred lines between the artist, the artwork and the art world, the rest of the world, God and the World Bank… They are each part of one another… And it has been always that way. Anyone who declares themselves to be separate is simply delusional.’

In ‘METCH’, Dimchev does not fail to expose the performance as a product that needs to be attractively promoted and eventually sold. He summons the performance’s photographer to take special photos for the press while practicing onstage his new ‘trick’ of choreographing – talking and moving while keeping the dynamics of voice, text and choreography separate. On one hand, this is intended to prove that he is a ‘good professional’, and on the other, that form already has content, and content already has form. The question arises as to what makes more sense in today’s world, oriented as it is towards the constant production of images that are valued more than the things they represent (if any): the acts themselves as they occur or the images of them which capture elements of their form? What determines the price of the paintings and does the fact that they are exposed and even painted during a live performance event make them more valuable?

‘Price is the simplest and most common form of value’, says Dimchev in the interview. ‘That’s why it’s easy to play with. But value has many other dimensions, all of which can constantly be manipulated by the artist, the producer and the audience. The question is who has the most control of it. I would like to think the artist has the last word… but you never know!’

In ‘METCH’, he again tackles the question of the value of an artwork – as always not through an anarchistic, destructive gesture, but instead by provoking clashes of ideas and perceptions, by staging paradoxes whose resolution may not be possible, but which elicit a continuous change of perspective. It is this transformative power of performance that is central to his oeuvre, and he pledges himself to it in a physically affective, extraordinary way that covers a wide spectrum of moods – from instances of humour and absurdity to moments of fragility and a deep sense of the nature of his creation and how it relates to everything around it.

There is a scene close to the finale where he arranges his paintings in several rows on the wall with the help of the audience – bright colours and rough human figures in a variety of sex positions in an almost trashy, neo-expressionist style. Seen side by side, they resemble an open abyss of the dark obsessive power of sex and sexuality while also unveiling a troubling tenderness and desire for extreme closeness and love. They look horrific yet painful, unabashedly carnal, even pornographic, yet simultaneously magnetic thanks to the explosive energy they emanate. In the finale, as he listens to positive and negative comments coming from the audience upon his instruction, showering himself with positive and negative energy, he paints a mother carrying a dead child in her arms.

He breaks into a kind of ritual dance in which he rants about the catastrophe in Palestine, the evil Russians, the evil Americans, and an evil, evil earthquake, and mourns the dead mother and child. The scene is a remake from “I Cure,” when, at the height of the Syrian crisis, images of death and destruction were constantly circulating and a picture of two murdered children and their mother’s corpse next to them was shown on screen.

In a kind of psychotic trance, Dimchev then delivered a monologue in which different voices featured – those of people looking at the photo (presumably the viewers’ opinions), his own voice (what is his responsibility as an artist in the face of violence in the world?) and the voices of the dead children with whom he ‘talked’. He feverishly embodied all these positions, negotiating the shock elicited by this sight of extreme violence but also seeking an exit that could transform it into another kind of power. In this tense moment, in a strangely comical manner he took his ‘i-cure card’ and urged the viewers to extract ‘kindness’ from the image. The naivety and seeming absurdity of the gesture was quickly overcome by the seriousness of the message, and it invited us to follow Dimchev’s idea and perceive the performance as an attempt to connect with the world and each other in a way that can transform pain and violence into something else – for Ivo Dimchev into love, into empathy, into a strength that enables us to move forward.

‘METCH’ continues to propagate this idea in a world that is much more deeply embroiled in violence and tragedy. Projected lines on the wall prompt the audience to demand that the performer on the stage ‘love these dead children as they are’, to accept that the picture represents ‘the very complex nature of life’. With his wig removed, Dimchev paints his upper body, head and face with white paint taking on a shaman-like appearance. The artist places his keyboard on the easel and performs his song ‘I’m travelling light’. Can the artist be ‘a travelling light’ between different worlds, an embodiment of some superpower that is called to transform the sufferings in the world into ‘frequencies’ as Dimchev terms them, that bring reconciliation, love, a positive relationship with the other and with the world? Can a performance have that kind of value?

The most recent stop on the ‘METCH’ European tour is Vienna’s ImPulsTanz festival. The programme reads that ‘few artists are as closely connected with ImPulsTanz as Ivo Dimchev’. And that is very much true. He first appeared there in 2003 as a participant in DanceWeb, and was already featured in the festival’s main programme by 2009 along with ‘Lili Handel’. Since then, ImPulsTanz has presented and even co-produced some of his major pieces and has played an important role in his career.

I watched ‘METCH’ in Dimchev’s native Sofia at the Bulgarian Dance Platform as part of the 18th Antistatic Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance. One curious fact is that the festival is organized by Dimchev’s former classmates – dance artists and producers Iva Sveshtarova, Willy Prager and Stephan Shtereff.

In the 1990s, they completed an experimental theatre class in a secondary school in Sofia led by director Nikolai Georgiev, himself a disciple of the neo-avant-garde theatre maker Jerzy Grotowski. Now Iva, Willy and Stephan are strong advocates for contemporary dance in the Bulgarian capital. Over the past decade, the Antistatic Festival, along with the Varna Summer International Theatre Festival and the short-lived DNA-Space for Contemporary Dance and Performance have contributed to the presentation and recognition of Dimchev’s – mainly internationally produced – work in Bulgaria.

‘Bulgaria is the context in which I have grown up as a person and as an artist’, was Dimchev’s reply when I asked how he relates to his native context. ‘It’s a context in which there has been a strong resistance against me since I was a child. And I find this resistance very important and useful because it goes in both directions. Part of my work has appeared as a resistance to this same context. So it’s a love/hate story.’ One of his battlefields is opening public perception to contemporary art. The other is LGBTQ+ rights.

Locally Dimchev has become something of a cult figure for the experimental scene and queer community. Here, he owes his fame mainly to his music and activism. Which is not that surprising, ѕіnсе his songs demonstrate to the fullest the versatile, eclectic and provocative nature of his artistic individuality. What’s more, they also manage to reach a broad and very diverse circle of fans.

Relatively regularly Dimchev organizes concerts in Sofia and all over the country. Here, he performs songs that blend high and low genres, drawing on opera, cabaret, lullabies, pop and techno, but also on pop-folk, or chalga, the popular Balkan genre that matches Eastern melodies with disco beats and extols the ordinary pleasures of life – lustful romance, alcohol, money. However, as The New Yorker recently wrote, Dimchev remains ‘profound even when plain’. And he always sticks to his ethos of challenging conventions and creating contradictions.

During the Covid-19 lockdowns he contested the ban on public gatherings by performing concerts at apartments and houses in Sofia and beyond. A kind of private cultural service that not only placed his art in the everyday environment of people’s homes but was also meant to create some positive and – why not – even healing vibes in rather difficult times. Now we are expecting the release of a feature-length documentary on these concerts filmed in Sofia, Istanbul, Los Angeles and New York. In addition, Dimchev has announced that one of the stages on which he will appear in 2025 will be the Komische Oper in Berlin where he is supposed to perform in ‘Cabaret’ directed by Kiril Serebrennikov. Furthermore, Vienna can expect him next year at the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival) with the newly-commissioned work ‘The Strauss Technique’ based on the music of Johann Strauss. So it’s safe to say there is more to come from Ivo Dimchev.