Paradise Gone by Ivo Dimchev is an acoustic live concert in which Ivo explores the potential to create and present an acoustic album based on 20 of his unreleased original songs.
Most of the songs are nostalgic and deal with loss and grief of all kinds...of love, peace, friends, dreams, hope, paradise.
“It’s important to me to have a musical project in which I’m able to leave my humour and cynicism aside and deal with grief and pain in a more direct, delicate, introvert way. This might become a new music album and the discussion about the choice of songs and the final outcome will be part of the concert."
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.