Review: Ivo Dimchev’s METCH at La MaMa
Marcus David
February 2024
“Metch is a concert exhibition, an auction dance, an excessive production of paintings, an obsessive dialog with the audience and of course the songs…I know many people come to my shows because they love my songs. For good or for bad those people will need to experience or clash with my very complex and unpredictable relationship to theatre and contemporary art. La MaMa is a legendary place for experiments and very safe place to feel unsafe. So I’m happy to bring Metch to life exactly here and not somewhere else.”
— Ivo Dimchev
Back by popular demand, and just a few months after the run of his delightful In Hell with Jesus, Ivo Dimchev delivers a new experimental piece titled METCH, presented in The Club at La MaMa. In this experimental work Ivo creates a combination painter’s studio/art gallery/auction house — a minimal ruse serving as a disguise for an up close and personal concert of beautifully sung musical numbers.
The awkwardness of Ivo’s well-conceived choreography can generate genuine feelings of concern for artist.. It cannot be helped but to worry for our glamorous crooner as one might fear for friend deep in the throes of chemical withdrawal. The appearance is that of a shattered Nico in divine despair.
METCH follows two distinct tracks. One track is the music and, of course, the singing, which is amazing, and in this intimate venue offers us a stripped down experience perhaps close to the private concerts Ivo is well known for. The other track is presented as a feeble attempt to produce and sell paintings using direct dialog with the audience, mixing humor with gut-wrenching angst. Questions arise. Love versus hate, the heaviness of dead children in art, calling out wars that are being waged, the horror that makes the art political and not personal, yet a poem about death brings us back to the personal and in the end the actor himself is transformed into work of art and the body itself becomes the ultimate punk canvas.
Recently The New York Times wrote, “Dimchev elicits a rare kind of trust as he cultivates a close-knit community with audiences.” Back from popular demand, Ivo Dimchev continues his exploration with audience engaged works in the second part of his residency at La MaMa. There is a moment when things you love doing become a nightmare. Later this very nightmare becomes an opening.” In his new work Ivo is revisiting some of his theatrical texts, songs and visual art to look for new ways of interplay between his main areas of artistic interest: METCH = Music, Exhibition, Texts, and Choreography
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