Advertisement

Matters of life and death explored by Marina Abramovic, Robert Wilson

Share

NEW YORK — The reports of her death are only slightly exaggerated.

The U.S. premiere Friday night of the highly anticipated, all-star, high-culture event “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic” opened with three actors, wearing masks to represent the Serbian performance artist, lying on top of three coffins.

Before the show, director Robert Wilson told a gala dinner crowd assembled in the Park Avenue Armory that he and Abramovic had wanted to work together for a long time, but it was only in 2007 that she inspired him with this request: “I want you to stage my funeral.”

The three coffins, he explained, represent the three cities in which she has resided: Belgrade, Amsterdam and New York — and what followed that striking, exquisitely lighted tableau was a two-hour, 40-minute opera-cabaret-dance-oral history about Abramovic’s life, from its humble beginnings in Communist Yugoslavia to her rise on the international art scene, to her “death” in 2013 (the program is a broadsheet newspaper with the headline: “Artist Marina Abramovic dies at 67.”)

Advertisement

PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times

Serving as the evening’s emcee, actor Willem Dafoe — sporting kabuki makeup and a wild bouffant of red hair — recounted events, dates and stories from Abramovic’s history. Wilson calls the work an opera, but its music comes not from one composer but is culled from a group of artists, namely Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons) as well as William Basinski and singer Svetlana Spajic, who also sang her work on stage.

Despite being silent for most of the first act, Abramovic — who in her 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art sat motionless for 736 hours — the artist was present on stage throughout and about an hour in, she finally spoke, reciting nine “recipes,” or bleak aphorisms about life. Her voice (like all the performers, amplified) resonates, but as in museum galleries where she made her name, it’s the stillness and power of her posture and facial expressions on stage that speak volumes.

Wilson also designed the production, and it has all his visual signatures: intense lighting, a smattering of neon, lots of slow, trance-like motion. (The past work of his that it resembles most is “Woyzeck,” which played in Los Angeles in 2002.)

There are new oddities too: dogs that roam the stage, a nude woman tumbling down a staircase, a lobster being walked on a leash — but in many ways “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic” feels sort of like Wilson’s “Hannah and Her Sisters.”

It employs many of his avant-garde tropes and tricks but assembles them in a very user-friendly and straightforward biographical story — relatively; still, a few seats were empty after intermission. But there were also fervent cheers at curtain calls, and this split was echoed in the critical response: “visually opulent but dramatically opaque” wrote the New York Times, while the Huffington Post reported: “gorgeous to behold and, when music plays, mesmerizing to hear ... it appears to be deliberately distancing.”

Advertisement

CRITICS’ PICKS: What to watch, where to go, what to eat

How did these two art/performance world celebrities collaborate on this piece? At the cast party afterward, Abramovic said, “I have known Bob’s work for a long time and I always thought his stillness, his sense of time was similar to my own. So I gave Bob access to everything and simply trusted him — but it was more than trust. It was surrender.”

The piece ends with three Abramovics (including the real one) on wires ascending to the heavens. This collaboration started in Manchester in 2011 and has since played in Madrid; Basel, Switzerland; Antwerp, Belgium; and Toronto. This New York run, according to Armory director Alex Poots, represents, at least for now, the final performances (tickets have been sold out for most shows for months).

When asked afterward if he’d like to see the show come to Los Angeles, Wilson replied — after a long silence, of course: “Let’s do it, tell them to bring it. Absolutely.”

ALSO:

The life of a Beethoven Hunter

Advertisement

It’s Brit versus Yank in Shakespeare on Broadway

Minnesota Orchestra musicians defy lockout, set concert dates

Advertisement