The Life and Death of Marina
Abramović
Directed by Robert Wilson
Park Avenue Armory, December 14,
2013
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Marina Abramovic and funeral mask.
Photo credit: BAM |
Biography is not a genre that
typically ends up getting played out on the stage. Yet, over the last year
several biographical pieces have found their way to New York theaters. In early
2013, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times: Volumes 1-4 brought
to the Public Theater a 10-hour musical epic, based on the verbatim transcripts
of a series of phone interviews with an ordinary Williamsburg resident, one
Kristin Worrall, that recounts her journey through youth and young adulthood in
minute detail, unabridged of all the likes,
ums and ahs of colloquial speech. Over the summer 2013, biography on
the stage came in the form of a dense and stimulating one-woman show, Sontag: Reborn, based on the early journals
of Susan Sontag, that chronicles her creative, intellectual and sexual
coming-of-age. New York City Opera staged the lives
of two salacious female subjects: Margaret Campbell, the dirty Duchess of Argyll in Powder Her Face, late last winter;
and the notorious centerfold in the eponymous Anna Nicole, this fall. Finally, by the end of the calendar
year, the Park Avenue Armory brought us Robert Wilson’s magisterial The Life
and Death of Marina Abramović (LaDoMA), which purports to give us a
biographical sketch of its eponymous protagonist, but, nevertheless, winds up
delivering that and so much more.
Billed variously as a free form or “quasi-opera”
in the manner of Robert Wilson, under the spell of whose Einstein on the
Beach I fell earlier this year as well, The Life and Death of Marina
Abramović (LaDoMA) was most thrilling for its musical eclecticism.
Experiencing it live, I was reminded of the fact that there is no reason why
opera has to maintain slavish attitudes towards its traditional roots. Like so
many of his theatrical collaborations, Wilson and his collaborators draw on
just some of the many musical vernaculars that are available to a contemporary
opera composer. In the case of this avant-opera, the soundscape consists of an
intermingling of pop music, the rock ballad, Balkan folk music, electronica,
modern minimalism, simulated orchestral music, and an assortment of other Dadaist
noise experiments, like the sound of a snare drum rolling through the woods
down a steep hill. As ever, Wilson runs the gamut.
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The Balkan folk singer Svetlana Spajić.
Photo credit: Robert Wilson website |
Collaborators on the project are
listed as Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons); the experimental
electronic duo, Matmos; the Balkan folk singer Svetlana Spajić and her group of
traditional singers; and three other musicians performing live from the
orchestra pit; with additional musical elaboration credited to Nico Muhly, among
his myriad projects, of recent Two Boys fame.
Against such a variegated musical
texture, Svetlana Spajić’s Balkan folkloristic singing really stood out. Her
exotic Eastern European-tinged chants were phenomenal. The closing number of
the first act – Scene A8, “The Green Apple” – featured a seemingly endless
repetitive call-and-response arrangement of a traditional Balkan folk song that
droned on beautifully with a small chorus of gypsy-looking women dotting the
stage, standing virtually motionless, who sang with such feeling. I could have
listened to them forever. They stood so still within Wilson’s choreography that
it was hard to tell if the voices we were hearing were actually emanating from
the bodies adorning the stark minimalist composition of Robert Wilson’s
signature staging.
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Robert Wilson's signature staging.
Photo credit: Joan Marcus |
In classic Robert Wilson fashion,
the lighting effects were immaculate from the moment you arrived. As the
audience filed in to take their seats the stage was already impeccably
illuminated and on full view. Three gorgeous long-legged dogs were seen
wandering languidly between a trinity of bodies laid out on coffins as though
at a wake, with their funereal-masked faces brightly lit. Patterns of three, as
well as other Christological imagery, run through the show from beginning to
end. Life, Death, Resurrection is the basic trajectory that it follows, as it
proceeds in trinities and recurring trios of Marina Abramović figures.
After the show opened with Marina’s
funeral times three, it became clear that this was not going to be your typical
biographical stage show, but rather biography done Robert Wilson’s idiosyncratic
way – the song sung by Antony in the first Kneeplay is, in fact, entitled Your Story, My Way. The life of the
great performance artist, who also stars in the show, is broken up in his
treatment. Rather than a monolithic chronicle of a “great woman,” he gives us
the fragments of a life with its daily trials, doubts, insecurities, its
familial struggles, phases of youthful rebellion and tireless search for
selfhood amidst the domestic din of a life really lived like any other.
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A chorus of ghoulish hospital patients.
Photo credit: Lucie Jansch |
“The Story of the Big Nose,” Scene
A2, is just one such moment that elevates the particular to the universal.
While Marina Abramović’s nose does play a particularly prominent role in her
unique beauty, it is precisely this kind of formative memory that most of us
have to carry around with us as part of our baggage. Part of growing up and
finding ourselves includes an ongoing process of recognizing and accepting the
idiosyncratic imperfections that make each of us unique. An intentional head
injury is how Marina went about tricking her mother into finally seeking out a
medical solution to her insecurities, though her plan was foiled. She winds
up in an eerie bureaucratic hospital room, which is staged by Wilson as a
hauntingly systematic game of leapfrog over lines of miniature hospital beds played
by a gaggle of ghoulish in-patients, but her broken nose never procures the plastic surgery her heart so desired, much to her chagrin. The story is at
once devastating, heartwarming and humorous.
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The devilish MC.
Photo credit: Lucie Jansch |
There were other moments of humor too,
like the first full-fledged narrative reminiscence in Scene A1, “The Story of
the Washing Machine.” Narrated by the demonic Willem Dafoe who played the
overlord and MC for the entire evening, the scene was acted out with the
exaggerated gestural visual language of mime, like many of the rest of the
acting performances – that is, anytime the actors were not just standing still,
or rolling down the stairs naked, backwards, and in slow motion, the dominant acting
style was mime. In “The Story of the Washing Machine,” we are given a glimpse
of a surreal domestic world from the point of view a child who is intrigued by
the magical activity of the one big household appliance that spins and spins.
She loves watching it spin until one day she gets stuck in it. Beyond the
initial shock of the adults who were present for the accident, she only really
seems to remember how her mother scolded her for her carelessness – a big theme
in this portrait of an artist is the problematic and tension-driven
relationship she had with her mother.
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Close encounters with a washing machine.
Photo credit: Robert Wilson website |
Much of the show has an artifice
heavy self-consciousness to it, a signature Bob Wilson stiffness to it that
bespeaks the great master’s attention to detail, his perfectionism, his
indulgence in the illusion of theatrical experience. There are moments where
Mr. Wilson’s theater of endurance for his actors comes vividly into contact
with the Abramović method – in one incarnation or another. At least that’s what
I made of the highly meditative, though physically exhausting exercise Willem
Dafoe put himself through in Scene B3, the disintegration loop, as he runs back
and forth at an angle on the stage while counting out the rhythm of his actions,
referring to himself in the third person. It was intense though uniquely
imprecise in its choreography and so the fatigue of the human body shined
through, the fallibility of the flesh. This seems to be an approximation of
just some of what Abramović has put herself and her pupils through over the
last several decades in order to achieve the incredible feats of endurance
she has accomplished.
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Willem Dafoe singing Willem's Song.
Photo credit: Robert Wilson website |
This brief repetitive running
interlude then served as a transition into the series of scenes that set up for
her death. What came next – in this my experiment in “being there,” namely, my
attempt at conjuring in writing an experience I lived in the flesh – was the
scene in which Marina was rolled out on her pedestal, lying recumbent on
something like an elevated Roman triclinium. As she reached the center of the
stage, a glorious low-lying layer of smoke seeped majestically out from either
side of the proscenium. At first the layer of smoke looked like the sea
flowing violently with all the force of Mother Ocean onto the stage to engulf
our fearless freak of a narrator, Willem Dafoe. Then as the two sides of the
fog cover collided and combined into one uniform but still dynamic undulating
body of smoke, it looked like a view of the clouds from above, as though we had
somehow ascended with Marina up above into some level of the heavens. The
effect seemed so simple yet it was so profoundly perfect, so neat, so clean, so
beautiful. It was a glorious moment of repose, despite the slightly grating
off-key singing of our narrator. This is his big musical number, where he gets
to sing Willem’s Song. Needless to
say, he’s not a great singer, though it too does have a haunting off-kilter
beauty to it.
And then there’s the seeming non-sequitur interlude about the Wolf Rat.
The cold detachment of the surreal
surface of Robert Wilson’s abstraction cracks dramatically when Antony comes
out in the show’s emotional climax, and sings with such feeling: “My skin is a
surface to push to extremes... But when will I turn and cut the world.” The
sensation is a tingle that pierces the soles of your feet, runs through the
body and up the spine leaving in its wake a trail of goose bumps on your arms
and down your neck.
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Sorting through the scattered fragments of a life.
Photo credit: Robert Wilson website |
The narrative thrust of the
fragmentary piece, which builds in fits and starts according to the familiar Wilsonian
alternation of “Scenes” and what he calls “Kneeplays,” slowly falls apart over
the course of its nearly three-hour run time. Dates and facts are eventually
presented out of order as Willem Dafoe’s surreal narrator figure begins to give
up even trying to keep things in order by the end. Death and resurrection take
over, universal biography is subsumed by the hagiographic impulse, and
everything is swept away by the transcendent musical image of a volcano of
snow. Antony’s angelic voice taking us into the snowy ether, as those three
familiar Abramović figures hover over his head, like a trinity of
transubstantiated Virgin Mary statuettes, and he sings: “I want white breath. I
won’t ever rest. I’ve become a volcano of snow.”
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Marina's funeral prologue (times three).
Photo credit: Park Ave. Armory
|
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The assumption of a trinity of Marinas.
Photo credit: Joan Marcus |
It was a cold and blustery night
when we were released from the show’s spell. Back out on streets of the city the
gorgeous volcano of snow that had been erupting all afternoon to the tune of
some six inches of accumulation had given way to a more unpleasant sleety rain
that was threatening to transform prematurely all that snowy white crystal powder
into big puddles of messy, wet slush. Fortunately we had the depth of vision
and perfectionism of Robert Wilson’s genius to keep us warm even as we
struggled to keep dry. The Life and Death
of Marina Abramović, if nothing else, is a reminder of the variety of
musical vernaculars available to the composer of contemporary opera:
folkloristic singing, pop music, minimalist modernism. And that is a lesson
that I cannot emphasize enough. Robert Wilson and his variegated team of
collaborators told her story, his way.
– Lui
