Robert Wilson’s Life and Death of Marina Abramovic
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Marina
Abramovic, Yugoslavian performance artist famous for her long durational works
once said, “The only last thing an artist can control—his own funeral.” She in
fact wrote her last will and testament in which she wants three coffins to be
buried in three different countries, and her memorial ceremony to be a
celebration of life and death combined.
Marina’s
desire to rehearse her own funeral was not unexpected. However, it probably took
some guts from Abramovic, whose performances deal with real time and space to
give full control of re-envisioning her life to Robert Wilson, whose works are
famously abstract. When about a month ago I asked Marina about her work with
Mr. Wilson, she told me about her initial shock when Wilson announced she will
be playing the role of her own mother…
Entering
the 55000-square-foot Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory, to view the
production of “Life and Death of Marina Abramovic,” the audience first faced a
massive construction that later revealed itself to be a specially installed
stage. On each seat there was a newspaper announcing that “Artist Marina
Abramovic dies at 67.” On stage there were three white angular coffins and
three bodies each with masks all resembling Marina.
Where do
you begin when making a piece of biographical theater? Robert Wilson certainly
didn’t follow any chronological order in the life of his subject. He bombarded
the audience with visually surreal, fragmentally structured scenes that were
rather reminiscent of paintings. Meanwhile Willem Dafoe, the narrator, was
chaotically pronouncing the dates and facts from Marina’s life, bursting,
giggling, whispering, and rolling his sounds. Dafoe was like a mad scientist
dissecting and examining all the emotional and painful stories that make up the
artist Marina Abramovic. “The story of the washing machine,” “The ashtray,”
“The story of the shoe polish,” “The story of the Russian roulette”—all the
absurdist suffering and black Slavic humor becomes so tragic in this staging
that you almost have to laugh.
Directed
and designed by Robert Wilson, the whole piece was like a puzzle of abstract
visual and sound elements with, of course, endless light cues. Traditional
Serbian music by Svetlana Spajic was interwoven with the emotional performance
of Antony from Antony and the Johnsons, who wrote several compositions for the
production. Excerpts of original works of Amanda Koogan’s “Yellow” and “Medea”
as well as Kira O’Reilley’s “Stair falling” were also organically incorporated
into what turned out to be something of a quasi-opera. It seemed that each
character, each element in the visionary staging of Robert Wilson, spoke its
own personal story yet being a metaphor to the life of Abramovic. Marina’s
acting, on the other hand, was awkward, but beautifully so. She seemed to be in
constant need of “reality” in order to feel in sync with everything on stage,
and yet she was the furthest from it. In the end, all the pieces came together.
In the
closing scene, Wilson brought us back to the funeral. While Antony was singing
“Volcano of snow”—an overall transcending experience—Marina Abramovic was
elevated on the ropes suggesting ascension of the spirit…
What were
you thinking about, Marina, levitating above us?
By Masha
Froliak
NY Arts
magazine
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pubblica:
Massimo Nardi