Two people are sitting on the ground, kissing intimately. Both are wearing jeans, and one is shirtless. In the background, another person is watching, sitting beside some musical equipment.

Prep School: P Project

In P Project, multidisciplinary and “vividly provocative” Bulgarian performance artist Ivo Dimchev asks the audience to consider what they’ll do for cash, in an interactive performance project that takes “audience participation” to new extremes. He describes P Project during an interview with Bean Gilsdorf at SFMoMA:

In P Project sometimes I don’t like what’s going on, but I have to deal with it. I have to get in contact with elements that I find very stupid and very bad and very disgusting as dramaturgy or as movement material. I put myself in relation to those subjects, and I look for the beauty… It’s very hard for me to fail. It’s almost impossible for me to fail. But in P Project, everything’s falling apart. The lyrics people write are always really bad and sometimes very weak. I have to immediately make a song out of it, and I have to accept and find joy in it. And it’s possible to find something beautiful and have a nice experience with combining elements, but everybody’s failing and nothing is perfect — and somehow, because of our intention, it somehow works, we accept these failures and find beauty in them.

Learn more about Ivo and his other works (or buy a t-shirt featuring his art), and read more about his thoughts on P Project with another interview from What’s On.

RELATED EVENTS
  • Wed Oct 17 – Sun Oct 28, 2018

Karl Marx Festival: On Your Marx

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Alisa Zhulina on Ivo Dimchev

In Capital, Karl Marx explains that “money as a measure of value is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities, namely labor-time.” Put simply, money is an extreme form of fetishism. The invisible hand is not that of the all-knowing, mystical market but that of labor. Marx was interested in the social: how people came together to work and how power relations were forged between them. 

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A performer in an orange outfit stands on stage before a seated audience. A man in the crowd leans forward, extending a phone or device toward the performer. The audience looks engaged and attentive.

GET INTO IT

An excerpt of P Project

An excerpt of P Project

OFFICE HOURS

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Anatomy of a Walk-Out: When the Critic Leaves the Theatre

I would like to apologise to the organisers of the BE Festival and Ivo Dimchev for my melodramatic walk-out towards the end of last night’s performance of P Project.

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EXTRA CREDIT

Typically, we like to bring something not-quite-related to the show for the honor of the Extra Credit section … but did you know that Ivo Dimchev was recently on the X Factor? He “accidentally discovered” he could write songs and is now taking the world by storm, one reality competition show at a time. Spoiler: the kid from One Direction is not a fan.