Motherland: Marina Abramović's Balkan Erotic Epic
On the Serbian performance artist's four-hour, durational exploration of Balkan rites and rituals.
Hello, from London. As promised last week, I have attempted to gather my thoughts on Marina Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic. I had a lot of thoughts hence the slightly late arrival of this week’s newsletter.
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There is a famous clip of the Slovenian philosopher Slvaoj Žižek posing the question “What is Balkan?” No one in the region, he suggests, really wants to claim the label. The Slovenians definitely don’t think it applies to them, The Croatians are part of the EU now, plus they’re a Catholic nation, and so on and so forth. There’s a reason why people from the Balkan region tend to use the very fuzzy term ‘the region’ when talking about the, well, region.
Marina Abramović, the Belgrade-born godmother of performance art, is unconcerned with such semantic distinctions. It’s Balkan. It’s Erotic. It’s Epic. It’s four hours long. It features 70 performers and musicians and is her largest scale, if not longest lasting, work to date, a reckoning with her roots as she approaches her 80th birthday. All this and a field of five-metre-high penises.
The piece had its world premiere at Manchester’s hanger-like Aviva Studios. We enter the cavernous space as part of a funeral procession. The funeral is for Josip Broz Tito, the president of communist Yugoslavia, who ruled the country until his death in 1980. His death was a source of national trauma. Žižek has argued that along with their physical body, totalitarian leaders also have a mystical body personifying the State. When Tito died, that second body died with him. This entanglement is such that Tito’s mausoleum - the House of Flowers – is now part of the Museum of Yugoslavia complex in Belgrade (despite the efforts of the Mayor of Belgrade to have him moved somewhere less prominent).
The procession is led by performance artist Maria Stamenković Herranz, playing Abramović’s Partisan mother, Danica, an upright and stern figure in a uniform carrying a bouquet of red carnations. Tito is represented by a photo of his face attached to an empty uniform. Behind him there is a video of multiple women in black headscarves rhythmically beating their breasts while a female performer dressed in the garb of an Orthodox priest sings a lament. While Comrade Tito’s absence/presence is a recurring motif, it is the figure of Abramović’s mother who provides the key thread. She walks around the space, acting as a beacon for the audience.
There is no set pathway through the piece. Most scenes play out on a loop over the course of four hours. You’re free to make your own way around the space, to exit and enter as you wish, though there are some key moments where everyone congregates. The floor is covered in thick black carpet, on which people frequently sit (though stools are available for those not up for sitting on the floor).
In the middle of the space, a group of women in village attire – puff-sleeve blouses and black headscarves - are trying to ward off the rain and spare the crops, to cow the gods into submission by thrusting their vulvas towards the sky. They lift their skirts and roar. They lay on the ground with their legs spread wide. They charge forwards with their skirts aloft, bushes resplendent, saluting their heavens with their nether parts. Opposite them a group of naked male performers hump the ground - an ancient fertility rite, apparently - their pale buttocks juddering, looking like strange convulsive mushrooms, a somewhat pathetic sight in comparison to the women raging and roaring and ululating across from them.
In one corner of the space a woman has elaborate wedding makeup applied, her face painted white, sequins delicately affixed to her skin. Around the corner a heavily pregnant woman dressed in a clinging red dress dances to pop songs while another older woman pours milk over her. A Roma tradition designed to boost milk production, according to Abramović, though interestingly the programme labels this as a wedding rite.
All of this, I again need to stress, goes on for FOUR hours. It is an incredible feat of durational performance by everyone concerned. While some performers get moments of respite and calm, those dudes are humping the ground constantly and the woman in the milk bath is never not wet.
The interplay between sex and death is – unsurprisingly - a recurring theme. Most explicitly in the skeleton orgy underway on one side of the room, which I only catch a glimpse of in between the crowds. Mannequins lay on high glass plinths, like exhumed corpses laid out in the sun (initially I did wonder if Marina has made some unfortunate performers lay up there for the duration of the show). One scene features a ‘black wedding”, a ritual from the Vlach region in which, if a young man dies unmarried, he can be wed to a woman during his funeral. A group of female dancers caress the body of a naked man, their bodies arching and writhing, sometimes cradling him, sometimes holding him aloft. The choreography by Blenard Azizaj is sensual and compelling, combining folk elements with the demands of durational performance. High above them a woman in a sculptural, bell-sleeved crimson dress – the costumes, by world-renowned Serbian fashion designer Roksanda Iličić, really pop – perches next to a waxen figure in a coffin.
Throughout the evening, there were regular interjections by a Flemish “scientist”, describing other ancient spells and myths, from a love potion involving menstrual blood and pubic hair (very Midsommar) to Bosnian grooms sticking their dicks in bridges to ward off wedding night droop. This was quite a tonal contrast to the intensity on display elsewhere, a reminder, if one were needed, of the playful aspect of the performance, the fact that some of this is - and is meant to be - funny. I mean, there’s a field of enormous cocks in the middle of the room, I don’t think we’re meant to engage with this with complete reverence.
When the heavens finally open over the vulva-dancers, they screamed and howled as water cascaded from above before collapsing, spent and giddy, when the rain finally stopped. It was an awesome thing to witness, the vagina presented as something powerful. But for me the key scene of the evening was the ‘Kafana Complex.’ A corner of the space had been decked out like a traditional Yugoslav kafana, a kind of taverna where people go to eat, drink and carouse. There were red-checked tablecloths and the inevitable photo of Tito on the wall. A group of older women seated around the space are dressed like Jovanka Broz, Tito’s young widow and a glamorous figure in her day who would outlive her husband by over 30 years – and outlive Yugoslavia too. (Though if they really wanted to recreate that authentic kafana atmosphere, the air would be thick with cigarette smoke and they’d need to throw in at least one mildly nationalistic waiter).
Throughout the night the musicians would strike up at regular intervals in the kafana, often accompanied by the opera singer Aleksandar Timotic. While not exactly a typical kafana singer, his voice is swooningly beautiful. The figure of Marina’s mother is repeatedly drawn back to the space, as if summoned by the music. There she dances with increasing abandon, shedding her uniform, leaping on tables and balancing a glass of rakija on her arm, her skirt hitching up around her thighs as she gives herself to the music, cumulating in a sizzling duet. One of the Jovankas looks on with, if not approval, then healthy curiosity. Abramović has imagined the kind of uninhibited release for her mother that would not have been possible in life.
The whole experience was liking walking around in someone else’s dream space, with all that entails. It was often mesmeric, a world in which you could lose yourself (all that dark carpeting had a cocooning effect), but also frustrating at times and maybe, whisper it, even a little boring. Four hours is a long time to spend in someone’s head, there’s only so long you can stare at waggling vulvas, and there was nothing here anywhere near as visceral as, say, Abramović’s Balkan Baroque, in which she spent hour upon hour cleaning bloody cow bones.
While Adrian Chiles, whose mum is Croatian, reviewed the show in the most Adrian Chiles way possible, The Telegraph predictably turned their nose up and talked about “X rated content” and “soft-porn clichés” (which really begs the question what kind of porn they’re watching). This is in keeping with what Abramović expected from British critics and, indeed, anticipated when I interviewed her earlier this year for this piece in The Stage. “When we see any kind of nudity, we always talk about pornography.” She viewed the piece, instead, as a kind of reclamation and celebration of the region’s horniest folk traditions. “These rituals are from ancient times. I did not invent anything.”
“I really wanted to put all my energy something that is so much to do with my past and my DNA, being from that part of the world,” she said. “I never had the wisdom, courage and stamina to do this, like I do now.”
For Abramović, the initial scene with Tito is pivotal. “When he died, women beat their chest, asking God why did you take him and not me. But who is God? But we are communists. We don’t believe in God. It’s this crazy contradiction.”
The intention was to create a piece that captured these contradictions, a piece of different layers. “It’s painful, it’s sad, it’s humorous, it’s erotic, it’s disturbing. Everything all together.”
Which is about right. My own response to the show is complicated and still shifting. It’s an incredible durational spectacle, a piece of thrilling scale, and yet some choices made me uneasy. As seductive and exquisitely performed as the kafana scene is, it is also reminiscent of a scene from a Kustarica film. The films of Emir Kusturica, most famously 1995’s Underground with its undeniably banging brass band soundtrack, have sold the world this image of the Balkan people as chaotic, passionate, wild-tempered. Kusturica has been accused of pandering to Western Orientalism. This is Žižek’s line: “[Underground] is a mythical Balkans shot for the Western gaze.” (This excellent essay by Fedor Tot articulates a lot of my own evolving feelings about Kusturica and I’d also recommend the essay on him and his weird replica ethno-village in Dubravka Ugrešic’s collection Karaoke Culture). The Balkans have often been characterised as Europe’s “Other within,” leading Maria Todorova to coin the term Balkanism to describe this tendency to dismiss or reduce the region to this fighty, noisy, disorderly, disobedient, rakija-swigging corner of the continent.
While Kusturica’s world is an intensely masculine one, Abramovic offers an alternative but no less romantic vision of the kafana as a space of release for her mother. “My mother, she always said that sex is dirty,” says Abramović. Part of the purpose of the show is to liberate her from “the kind of feeling of sexual taboos that my mother had.” The kafana scene is one of liberation. Abramović’s mother doesn’t just shed her clothes, she sheds “the protection of being a communist.” Abramović depicts her mother doing everything she could not do in life. “I make this to liberate my mother’s soul.”
So, the kafana scene is a romantic fantasy - and the most erotic thing in the whole performance. Other sections could arguably be accused of auto-Balkanism, like the knife dance, in which a group of women in shiny costumes clang blades together. This - according to the programme notes, I don’t think I’d have made the connection myself - is inspired by the burrnesha, women who in some communities in Albania and Kosovo assume the status of men. They essentially become men in the eyes of their neighbours. Needless to say, there’s a whole string of articles about burrnesha, some more prurient than others. Kosovar playwright Jeton Neziraj has a whole play about the West’s endless fascination with the burrnesha.
Then there’s the black wedding, an example of the pre-Christian traditions that exist in the Vlach region of eastern Serbia, sometimes known as Vlach magic. While these customs have inspired the inevitable Vice article, it’s fair to say Serbs also share this fascination. There’s even a Serbian TV thriller called Black Wedding. Goodbye, Lindita, the acclaimed second show by Mario Banushi, the hotshot young Greek director of Albanian heritage, also includes a sequence in which the body of a dead young woman is dressed like a bride (though he is drawing on a different regional tradition). I understand the impulse to want to explore and engage with the pagan and ancient, particularly the rituals that centre women. (As someone with a healthy interest in British folk horror and films in which terrible things are done to Edward Woodward to make the crops grow, I get it. I’m a sucker for this stuff too). And obviously I’m not really worried that audiences will go away thinking that everyone in the Balkans is sticking their dicks into bridges or humping pumpkin patches or attempting to cure covid with garlic and rakija (oh, wait, hang on). Perhaps it was the scale and the commodification that led to my unease? The fact that tickets cost up to £80. That there was Marina merch - very nice merch to be fair – and Marina cocktails in the bar. They had rakija in them, but weirdly you couldn’t order a straight rakija at the bar (I know, I asked). This is all in keeping with what Factory International artistic director John McGrath has described as the event-ification of culture, but also veered dangerously close to making it feel like a Balkan theme park attraction.
There was also the apolitical nature of it. The fact that at this very moment in Serbia young people are marching across the country, walking from town to town - surely a form of durational performance – as part of an ongoing show of resistance against President Aleksandar Vučić’s increasingly repressive regime. I’ve written previously about why students – and, increasingly, people of every age – are demanding things change and have been for almost a year now following the collapse of a train station canopy that killed 16 people last November. During our interview Abramović herself drew the line between the silent vigils that have taken place regularly and her own work. “It’s almost like redoing my performances. It is a silent protest.”
Abramović has previously put out a statement calling the students of Serbia “the heroes of today.” “They are just incredible,” she said to me. “The unity is heart-breaking.” Nor was she shy of voicing her feelings on the current Serbian ruling party: “It’s very concerning. Those fucking guys are not moving anywhere. They’re ready to see civil war.”
She has, however, not lived in the country for decades, and this is very clearly not a show about now but about the past, her past, and her mother’s liberation from what the show makes out to be the sexual straitjacket of communism. While it’s true that Abramović herself crashing the end of her own show to slow-dance with Azizaj in Kate Bush/Peter Gabriel fashion – a late addition apparently – slightly undercut the power of her mother’s glorious last dance, which felt like the more natural endpoint, (and also left the audience a little baffled about when and if to clap), it’s also true that the Serbian tabloids would have a fucking field-day with such an image.
And yet I cannot understate how much the electric tingle of recognition shaped my response. To hear this kind of music in a venue of this size in the company of friends and colleagues. To see a piece made by a creative team of artists from the region, not just Azizaj but composers Marko Nikodijević and Luka Kozlovački, and singer Svetlana Spajić, in Manchester of all places. To see a piece about the Balkans on an international stage which was not about the fucking war. To spend time in a fantasy kafana populated by handsome countertenors and not by members of the SNS. I found this stirring and seductive in a way I can’t fully articulate. Despite all the issues I had with it, I fell under its spell.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
Transform – The Leeds festival of international performance returns with an excitingly varied programme including Dan Daw’s new show EXXY, Mexa’s trans, queer The Last Supper plus a mixture of installations, dance and performance from artists including Ira Brand and Basel Zaraa. It takes place at venues around Leeds until 25 October.
Kosovo/North Macedonia showcase - Next week the annual showcase of work from Kosovo takes place with an opportunity to see Jeton Neziraj’s new play Under the Shade of a Tree I Sat and Wept. This year the showcase will take place partly in Skopje, giving attendees a chance to see new work from North Macedonia. The showcase runs from 28 October - 1 November.
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com
What a terrific description and rich analysis of the performance! Thanks for this!
Super piece, thank you Natasha!