Words are not the only language. At best, they’re only half the story, the part which can be reduced to the calculus of thought.
The strength of Marina Abramović’s artistic practice is her fearless embrace of the story’s other half; the irrational depths seething below the gentility of wordplay. To misappropriate the basics of neurobiology, and to mix metaphors with geography in contrast to the western hemisphere of narrative structure, Belgrade-born Abramović uses performance to liberate the eastern hemisphere of the ineffable divine.
In essence a waking biography unmoored by dream, Balkan Erotic Epic is a singular, captivating, discomfiting, uneven and occasionally preposterous masterpiece. Birthed in Manchester and showing at the city’s Aviva Studios, the production is seeded in Abramović’s inner world, her life, her times and especially her relationship with her mother. It externalises both the stream of her particular consciousness and the wider, oceanic collective of which hers is only one extraordinary tributary.
Photograph by © MARCO ANELLI.
In tethering each of the 13 scenes to a definitive interpretation, in some ways the production’s accompanying programme works against its effects, which arise as much from their ambiguity as their more literal underpinning. To surrender to the uncertain terrain artificially carpeting the Factory floor with an approximation of wild grasses is to slip into a space in which the past and the present, the here and there, the why and the wherefore, dissolve into the unfixed points of dreamscape and dreamtime. Indeed, the dividing lines between the tableaux are themselves porous. Some sit on top of one another, for instance, while from many vantage points multiple scenes can be seen, each unfolding simultaneously, and often bleeding through their borders, heightening the sense of displacement and atemporality.
Equally to the point, with the safety of the performers very much in mind, the audience is asked to kick away the crutches of their mobile phones, severing them from the nag of needy notifications and the comfort blanket of a distancing device. Neither do the performers themselves offer reassurance; like somnambulists or the mesmerised, they are complete in their self-absorption. The effect is to be left with the inarguable facts of one’s own reactions, be they trepidation or excitement, empathy or dismay, discomfort or desire.
Abramović’s genius lies in leaving the audience no hiding place. Unsparing of herself over the course of her practice, whether risking asphyxiation or exposing herself to the possible unkindness of strangers, she is equally unstinting in the demands she makes of those she invites into it. With this in mind, to delineate the specifics of the production is to distort them in the mirror of one’s own sensibilities, seeing Abramović through one’s own dark glass. I found myself haunted by her Black Wedding, an arrangement out of de Chirico, in which, below the dome of an Orthodox church, a young man in an upright coffin is laid out at the side of his mourner, a young woman clad in extravagant red. At the same time, on the hallowed ground from which the house of God rises, a second scene reflects the one above as black-clad women attend to the naked body of a disinterred corpse, themselves convulsed by passion or sorrow, the divine or the diabolic. Akin to the literature of Angela Carter, the excesses of its aesthetic arise from the folklores which inform it; an intentional invocation of the Gothic which makes sure-footed play with the archetypes of sex and death while avoiding the chasm of camp.
Photograph by © MARCO ANELLI.
Arising from the craft of a host of collaborators, not least of which are choreographer Blenard Azizaj and set designer Anna Schotl, Balkan Erotic Epic‘s surrealist performance art is above all a work of true magick. Prepare to be spellbound, and freed.
By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent
Main image: Photograph by © MARCO ANELLI
