Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
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written and directed by Robert Wilson
Luminato, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
June 14-17, 2013
Antony: “My heart is a record of dangerous scenes”
The theatre piece The Life and Death of Marina Abramović is a curious work for many reasons. The first is that its subject, the self-proclaimed “grandmother of performance art”, not only is still alive but appears as herself in the piece. The second is that if you know nothing about Abramović and her works, you emerge no wiser at the end of the piece than when you went in. The piece is basically a collage of beautifully staged sequences of mime, song and spoken monologue inspired by images and themes drawn from Abramović’s life and work. Together they suggest that theatre can only present an images of the artist – even when the subject herself is present – but not what it is that makes the artist an artist.
The first scene that greets the audience when it enters the Bluma Appel Theatre is also the most powerful. On three coffin-shaped biers lie three figures all dressed alike and all wearing identical masks modelled after Abramović’s face. The stage is strewn with large bones and three Doberman Pinschers roam about apparently licking them (but in fact searching for kibble scattered about). The scene encapsulates the themes that director and designer Robert Wilson pursues throughout the rest of the show. The dogs seeking only food make us ask what makes us more than animals. The large bones allude to Abramović’s performance Balkan Baroque, 1997, when she washed 1500 fresh cow bones, thus turning death into art. The three Marinas evokes the three-in-one of the Trinity while simultaneously suggesting that an individual is composed of many personalities. The three masks convey the theatrical paradox, central to Wilson’s piece and to Abramović’s exploration of the relation between performer and audience, that a performer dons a persona (literally “mask” in Latin) even when she plays herself. It’s a pity that none of the subsequent scenes in the 2½-hour piece are as resonant with allusion.
The work is divided into two acts. The first focusses on Abramović’s childhood and early adulthood in Serbia from her birth in 1946 to the year 1976; the second on her relationship with German performance artist Uwe Laysiepen beginning in 1976 to their breakup in 1988 and continuing to the present including the premiere of the very show we’re watching at the Manchester International Festival in 2011. The playing area is divided into three parts – the space behind the curtain, the space in front of the curtain where Wilson uses “Kneeplays” to create transitions between scenes and a small hydraulic stage in the pit on house right where actor Willem Dafoe sits and serves as narrator.
Dafoe, with white face, upswept red hair and black makeup, looks rather like Batman’s nemesis The Joker. In Act 1, Dafoe’s acts as the maniac master-of-ceremonies of the piece and focusses on giving us a chronological date-by-date rundown of the events of Abramović’s early life mixing the important with the trivial. The first four of the scenes that Wilson stages are about Abramović’s oppression by her tyrannical mother (also played by Abramović). In the first the girl (played by a male dancer) gets herself caught in her mother’s precious washing machine. Her mother slaps her before taking her to the hospital. In the second the girl (now played by three dancers) is so ashamed of her big nose, he deliberately tries to break it by falling on the corner of her parents’ bed. She succeeds only in gashing her cheek and her mother slaps her before taking her to hospital. In the third the girl, now played by eight dancers, destroys her bedroom by covering it with brown shoe polish.
In the last two scenes Wilson shows us a scene we do not understand before Dafoe provides the narration to clarify it. In Scene 2 the dancers make swooping gestures from their noses outwards, but we don’t know precisely what it refers to. In Scene 3 the dancers slowly drag a train of tiny beds onto stage right that reflect the large bed on stage left. After the careful dragging on of the tiny beds, the dancers one by one proceed to smash the beds to bits until all is a chaos. Scene 2 at least made reference to the girl’s nose. Scene 3, however, has depicted the girl’s destruction of her room by using a theatrical metaphor completely different from its biographical source. In this way Wilson highlights the nascence of Abramović’s performance art as a reaction to her mother’s authoritarianism. What could be much clearer is that Abramović seems also to have internalized her mother’s harsh discipline since Abramović’s initial forays into performance art involved so much physical self-punishment.
Wilson takes the process of the first scenes a step farther in a later scene about hatred between Abramović’s parents. First, Wilson stages a surreal parade in front of the curtain of a woman holding a fresh brain on a tray, a man with a huge live yellow snake writhing about his naked torso, a young nude woman, and old woman in traditional Serbian dress and a man dressed like a dragon who sets about hogtying a man dressed in high heels and a bare-shouldered showgirl outfit. We then learn through Dafoe’s narration that Abramović dreamed of giving birth to her daughter as giving birth to a snake and we see that the images before us relate in various ways to the physical and mental abuse Abramović’s parents meted out to each other and that her mother meted out to Abramović. It’s no wonder that Abramović thinks of the year she spent in hospital because of a false diagnosis of haemophilia as the happiest year of her life.
The difficulty in moving from Act 1 to Act 2 is that Wilson leaves out entirely what happens between the time he sees as the birth of Abramović’s urge to create performance art and the time when Abramović is at the height of her fame. One of the repeated notes Dafoe reads is “Selling less”, and we have to wonder what exactly Abramović is selling. The fact that chronology is abandoned in Act 2 makes us wonder why it was followed in Act 1. Abramović says in her programme note: “The deeper you go into yourself, the more universal you become. This biography could be anybody else’s biography.” The problem we face in Act 2 is that all we know of Abramović is that she had an unhappy childhood being brought up by parents who hated each other and a mother who hated her. She had a once fruitful relationship with a man that later ended. From what we’ve seen, this really “could be anybody else’s biography”, because it does not explain why Abramović goes on to become a famed performance artist while other people with unhappy childhoods, bad parents and once-happy relationships do not. As in many plays about creative artists we find yet again that the details of the artist’s life are insufficient to explain the workings of the artist’s mind or the work she creates. Wilson attempts to find the source of Abramović’s creativity in her childhood traumas, but ultimately this information turns out to be useless in explaining her achievements.
Despite this, music that had intermittently enlivened Act 1 becomes dominant in Act 2. The music consists of eleven songs by alternative pop singer/songwriter Antony Hegarty, traditional songs by Serbian folklore singer Svetlana Spajić and her group and avant-garde instrumental music by William Basinski. Even Dafoe and Abramović, who had only spoken in Act 1, have songs in Act 2. While never overcoming the overall atmosphere of melancholy, Act 2 presents the liberation of Abramović from her relationship with Laysiepen as a resurrection of the self. The act concludes with a return to the three biers, now without the bones or dogs, but with three floating spirits wearing Abramović masks hovering above them. One of Abramović’s artistic tenets is “An artist should not make themselves into an idol”. Wilson seems to have done just that to Abramović and one of Antony’s songs even compares her to Christ returning to His Father.
Abandoning chronology in Act 2 completely obviates the need for a Narrator there or in Act 1. Dafoe gives a terrific performance, alternating for unknown reasons between a Serbian and NewYork accent, but is always riveting. Unfortunately, given how immaterial Abramović’s life and background appear to be in understanding Abramović the artist, one can’t help but think that the piece would be much stronger if Dafoe’s narration were completely eliminated.
Abramović herself has a charismatic presence. Her immobile face has a depthless gaze and radiates a mystery that biographical detail can never explain. As for Wilson’s direction, anyone who saw his revival of Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach last year, has already seen all the signature techniques used here but in a deeper and more significant work.
Yet, what impresses most about the piece is the music of Antony and Svetlana Spajić. The wonderful scene where Spajić sings the traditional call-and-response song “Oj jabuko zelenko” that leads the entire cast into dance and song is the most uplifting sequence of the evening. Antony’s unearthly voice makes his renditions of “Watch Me” about creativity or “The Cut” (released on an album as “Cut the World”) transfixing in their beauty. This last song gives more insight into Abramović with more poignancy and precision than the entire rest of the show. He sings:
My eyes are coral, absorbing your dreams
My heart is a record of dangerous scenes
My skin is a surface to push to extremes
But when will I turn to cut the world?
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (top) Marina Abramović, Antony and dancer; (middle) Willem Dafoe. ©2011 Lucie Jansch.
For tickets, visit www.luminatofestival.com.
2013-06-16
The Life and Death of Marina Abramović