\n<\/p>\n
Ivo Dimchev, a queer performance artist from Bulgaria whose brash charm has been known to compel people to take their clothes off and join him onstage \u2014 it happened at Joe\u2019s Pub last month<\/a> \u2014 has questions. And more questions.<\/p>\n Would you choose to have a monument of Madonna or of Marina Abramovic in Washington Square Park? What does a show need most: good music, good choreography or a good story? Who would you rather have sex with: Biden, Putin or the Dalai Lama?<\/p>\n For \u201cIn Hell With Jesus\/Top 40,\u201d<\/a> opening at La MaMa on Thursday, Dimchev is full of queries, including one that swings back to his title: Would you rather be in hell with Jesus or in heaven with Trump?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At La MaMa Dimchev<\/a> combines \u201cIn Hell With Jesus,\u201d which premiered last year in Vienna, and \u201cTop 40,\u201d a mix of scenes and elements from previous shows. In this interactive anti-musical, Dimchev plays a character holding auditions for his next musical. For the New York iteration, he has no interest in repeating himself. \u201cI\u2019m experimenting,\u201d he said after a rehearsal a couple weeks ago at La MaMa. \u201cThe thing is we don\u2019t have much time with the cast. I got the people a few days ago.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Or so he thought. Five singers backed out, two as recently as last week, because of its sexual content. (You have to be 18 or older to see the show.) But now the cast is set: Joining him are Chris Tanner, an actor, drag artist and La MaMa veteran; the singers Xavier Smith and Cassondra James; the writer, dramaturg and performer Andrew Fremont-Smith; and the musician Louis Schwadron.<\/p>\n The roots of \u201cIn Hell With Jesus\u201d began during the days of the pandemic. Dimchev spent lockdown in Bulgaria, where he began a series of living room concerts. \u201cI was like, I need to find my way to go to the audience,\u201d Dimchev said. \u201cI\u2019m not going online. Where are people? The audience is in their living rooms.\u201d<\/p>\n Dimchev said that an hour after posting a notice on social media, \u201cI was already in somebody\u2019s house singing \u2014 and they were so happy having me.\u201d<\/p>\n His rich voice, with its startling control and vocal range, can melt defenses. It seems to pour out of his body, which can take over the stage with fraught intensity or become delicate, even fragile. In a way, it is the state of Dimchev\u2019s body that directs his voice. But when he was performing his home concerts in New York he found that singing alone wasn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI wanted to interact on a more deeply dramaturgical level,\u201d he said. \u201cI wrote all these questions that are spread around culture, sex, psychology, politics. I felt complete somehow. I\u2019m not just entertaining my hosts in their houses, but also triggering something that is all a part of our reality.\u201d<\/p>\n His questions \u2014 which he summed up as \u201cfake dilemmas that most people will never even think of\u201d \u2014 stimulate the imagination of the audience. \u201cEven if I don\u2019t ask the people in the audience directly, I know that they are making their decisions in their head,\u201d Dimchev said. \u201cWe don\u2019t go deeper in that. I don\u2019t want to go deeper. For me, it\u2019s more showing a spectrum of directions, of possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n In the show, audience members will be invited to do more than imagine their responses to his questions. They will be paid for performative tasks, which include reading a monologue or, in one case, enacting a scene from Dimchev\u2019s \u201cThe P-project,\u201d in which two volunteers take off their clothes and simulate sex onstage. All payments are in cash; Dimchev said that the show pays out about $1,000 to the audience each night, half of that for the sex scene.<\/p>\n Dimchev understands such propositions are risky. \u201cWe don\u2019t know how far people go, but I like this clash between the unexpected, the clumsy,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He added, \u201cI think La MaMa is the right place for these kinds of experiments.\u201d<\/p>\n And La MaMa knows what it is getting itself into. In 2011, Dimchev, who is H.I.V. positive, presented his acclaimed \u201cLili Handel\u201d<\/a> at La MaMa, in which he played an aging androgynous diva who, at one point, draws a vial of blood onstage and sells it to the highest bidder.<\/p>\n Mia Yoo, La MaMa\u2019s artistic director, will never forget Dimchev\u2019s commitment to being completely in the moment during that performance<\/a>. \u201cIt really does make us think about what it means to be in that room together,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat is that performative act? Who is that human being that\u2019s up there revealing something of themselves or putting themselves out there in a way that feels so raw, and so like it could have fallen apart?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Dimchev elicits a rare kind of trust as he cultivates a close-knit community with audiences. When he invited the crowd to shake their breasts (he used another word) onstage at his recent Joe\u2019s Pub performance, Anita Durst, an arts philanthropist<\/a> and a founder of Chashama<\/a>, which in part helps to provide unused real estate for artists, followed suit, wanting \u201cto be closer and participate in the energy of the night,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Durst plans on bringing her 18-year-old son and his friends to \u201cIn Hell With Jesus\u201d so they can experience Dimchev\u2019s work, which \u201cwill open them up to another dimension in a way,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve never heard anybody sing the way he does and use his body to emote emotion. It transforms your being in the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n When Dimchev was growing up in Bulgaria, that brand of excess caused him pain. \u201cI was performing all the time, and I was disturbing everybody with my performance,\u201d he said. \u201cI started disturbing my schoolmates, so I got a lot of abuse because of this. For me, the schoolroom was a stage. I had to pay a big price to explore my art, to explore my weirdness and my extravagance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Life became a little easier when he went to theater school. But even as an adult, he said, he realized that the cost never fully goes away. \u201cI\u2019m still paying this price in Bulgaria as an artist, as a queer artist, as a whatever an artist,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I think I\u2019m trained from my childhood that freedom costs. It\u2019s not for free. I\u2019m OK paying any price for my freedom. Almost any.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Dimchev never wants to feel ashamed or guilty about anything \u2014 either in art or life. \u201cLife is raw,\u201d he said. \u201cBut at the same time, life can be a piece of art, it can be a masterpiece of art. This relation between rawness and mastery for me is very important to always be present in the work.\u201d<\/p>\n In Bulgaria, where he is well known, Dimchev said he was surrounded by resistance and homophobia \u2014 even death threats. \u201cI realized I don\u2019t want to do this war, this battle,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m tired of doing it already three years. So I\u2019ll just go to a place where I\u2019m appreciated.\u201d<\/p>\n Dimchev recently moved to New York City, after living in Amsterdam, Brussels and for a brief period in Los Angeles. \u201cIt\u2019s an amazing place for music,\u201d he said, \u201cBut I was always so strangely depressed in L.A. I thought the relaxation, the kind of chillness of L.A. would balance my neurotic side, but it didn\u2019t work that way. I get more depressed.\u201d<\/p>\n New York is different. \u201cThe city fits my nature,\u201d he said. \u201cI move at the same pace. You do five things at the same time. It\u2019s scary, but this is how I am. And New York is the same.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n