Paradise Gone
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By Ivo Dimchev
Are you a music expert?
Probably not, but at Ivo Dimchev's concert, you’ll need to be.
Ivo is putting together a new music album, and his audience will have to evaluate 20 of his original unreleased songs. The highest-scoring ones are most likely to be included in his upcoming album.
For example, how would you rate the lyrics of his song "Elton John"? (1) “So-so” or (2) “Good” or (3) “Great” or (4) “Excellent”?
What about the melody?
What about the commercial value?
Have you ever been to a concert like this? Most likely not.
As we know, Ivo loves to empower his audience and make everyone a partner in his artistic “crime.” And we can’t resist. Specially when it’s about his music?
Ivo Dimchev is a theatre maker, choreographer, visual artist, singer-songwriter, and queer activist from Bulgaria. His work is an extreme and colorful mix of performance art, dance, theater, music, painting, and photography. He is the author of more than 40 stage performances and has received numerous international awards for dance and theater. Most of his stage performances are included in his book Stage Works 2002-2016. He has also written more than 100 original songs all included in his Songbook. His work has been presented throughout Europe, South and North America, and Asia.
During the Covid pandemic Dimchev performed more than 400 private concerts in people’s homes in Bulgaria, Istanbul, New York, and Los Angeles. The New Yorker covered these performances in a profile on Dimchev titled The Extravagant Exuberance of Ivo Dimchev.
Dimchev is the founder and director of Bulgaria’s Humarts Foundation. In 2009, after doing his master’s studies on performing arts at Dasarts Academy in Amsterdam, he opened Volksroom in Brussels, a performance space that presents young international artists. In 2014, he opened MOZEI in Sofia, Bulgaria, as an independent space for presenting contemporary art and music. In addition to his artistic work, Dimchev gives master classes at the National Theater Academy (Budapest), the Royal Dance Conservatorium of Belgium (Antwerp), Hochschule der Künste (Bern), Amsterdam University of the Arts, and DanceWeb (Vienna), among others.