Ivo Dimchev, Perforations Festival NY

Searing performance: Ivo Dimchev

I dragged myself to the opening night of the Perforations Festival – 10 days of cutting-edge Balkan performance at La MaMa in the East Village. The sad saga of an ageing drag queen is a New York speciality. What could Bulgarian physical theatre artist Ivo Dimchev’s Lili Handel possibly add?

A lot, it turns out. Dimchev’s solo takes the phrase “stage animal” at face value to refashion the pitiable old diva into a riveting spectacle of impulse and restraint. He makes palpable the hunger to appear under the limelight – and the fear.

In a ratty wrap, a string of pearls for cover and low pumps, Lili (Dimchev) enters the black-box theatre quivering. Dimchev’s studies in Butoh, in which the body is in constant minuscule motion, have paid off. A palpable tension rises from Lili, as if she is suffering under some colossal force of containment.

Her beautiful singing sounds like a voice on an old record: poignantly far away. When she strikes a seductive pose – a caricature of a 1950s pin-up – the posture hardens around her like marble. When she settles into her dilapidated boudoir armchair, it gives her no comfort. She strokes a crossed leg as if smoothing out the wrinkles in a clingy dress. Her skin fits badly. Under pressure to appear, her body is becoming alien. It is terrible – and fascinating – to behold.

Dimchev understands “performance” in the largest possible terms. It consists of whatever you do to feel alive. Lili has the same impulse to keep busy as Beckett’s Molloy, who compulsively circulates the stones from one pocket in his overcoat to another. Lili lurches between bouts of debased fury and mechanical eroticism – “poetry” and “pahtying”, as she puts it. Boredom is death.

And it nearly gets the upper hand. About two-thirds through the hour, Dimchev stops the show to approach a man in the front row. “Is this the best way to spend the evening?” the Bulgarian asks incredulously. The two arrange to decamp for the nearest bar.

When they return five minutes later, the tall Dimchev with his arm around his short new friend’s shoulder, the audience’s relief is palpable. We want our full hour of Lili Handel, however painful and ridiculous.

perforationsny.com