"The Life and Death of Marina Abramović": bumpy business with Antony as rock #HF12

Antony, Dafoe and Abramović together on one stage, directed by Robert Wilson - it promised to be the hit of the theatre season. But Abramović's private life does not really lend itself to a triumphant or compelling narrative. Its impressive artistic careerère stands in stark contrast to a childhood scarred by domestic violence and emotional neglect. Wilson delivers a beautifully moving, singing and talking picture book, with an icy undertone.

"Against a blue sky, all birds are black," the poet wrote Jan Arends ever. The Life and Death of Marina Abramović opens with little dogs roaming uninhibitedly on stage. Their silhouettes stand out in black against the red and blue of Wilson's theatre sky. Bones are scattered around and Abramović rehearses her death there with two fellow performers, by lying still, laid to rest.

The scene is exciting and nonsensical at the same time. We know they are living people hiding there behind masks and make-up. The dogs do not touch the bones as they are plastic. Using explicitly artificial means, Wilson paints one quasi-macabre scene after another, none of which would be out of place in a picture book like the one by Auntie Pau - one of those late-nineteenth-century factotums, in which, among the children's joy & family virtue, cut-off sucking thumbs also pass by.

The curly tails of Wilson's pedigree dogs are unclipped. Their wagging stature draws black curls through the stiffened image of the risen Abramović times three. And, as the dogs sniff, Wilson delved into Abramović's personal papers and turned them into an opera.

Robert Wilson is a master at building steadily moving, highly aesthetic landscapes in theatre. Things appear there as people and realistic relationships are replaced by a bizarre, dollhouse-like logic. The bright and minimal mise-en-scène often gives the whole thing a deceptive calm. Like roadside bombs and quicksand, pain and damage lie hidden everywhere in Wilson's landscapes.

Marina Abramović on the other hand, is mistress of mirroring the all-too-human. Her work is fuelled by the hyperreality of her own body and mind, deployed in numerous performances and video works. Her main weapon is persistence; in public pushing the boundaries of what is physically, emotionally and mentally possible. In 2010, she spent a combined 700 hours sitting in a chair at a table at MOMA with a different museum visitor facing her each time. Marina was a radical in Europe, but in America she became a megastar, citing the achievements of performance mainstream wanted to make. Every few years, the artist had her biography staged. After some urging, Wilson was willing, provided he could use her private life as material. And that, beyond the personality glorification, provides a very different view of the Iron Lady of performance art.

At The Life and Death of Marina Abramović the stories of the unloving behaviour of a tyrannical mother and a nihilistic father, complicated loves, visions of destruction, revenge, SM and ultimately the desire to let go, are delivered understatedly and jokingly by the narrator Willem Dafoe, who seems to be applying for the role of The Joker from the Batman series after all. Ambramović walks by as her merciless mother in an Aunt Pau dress and is actually quite funny too. But in details like the curly tail or a glass of water - is it half full or is it half empty? - hides a load of pain and irreparable damage.

Wilson, like Mesdag, is a panoramic painter. But the panoramic Abramović delivers more theatre than usual. The opera does not have the buzzing, slow x-factor of some of Wilson's other work. Time and timing are in this collage bumpy business become. It could be that Theatre Carré is just too small for this performance - at times it seemed The life and Death ... on a maddening Victorian diorama - but in, for example, the stacking of disparate musical genres, there is a continual outpouring of sinc switched. The beautifully abrasive Balkan yodel of Svetlana Spajić, languid stomping industrial, breezy 1920s jokes and the unparalleled immediacy of Antony Hegarty's songs, all performed live, are nowhere forged into a harmonious whole. The incongruities of Abramović's inner existence seem literally translated into the disjointed rhythm of an evil dream.

Like an evolved, as loving Angel of Wrath, it is the sinewy Hegarty who gets to act as a rock. With his voice as fragile as it is powerful, it is he who asks the right questions, speaks plain language and dispenses the necessary expressions of love to A. In retrospect, looking back, repairing, he still does the gestures that were missing in the Ambramović family.

In this grotesque and beautiful parade, there is really only one moment when the emblematic, the caricatured, the poetic and hushed of the picture book is abandoned. After cutting into one's own flesh and being cut off from others passes in various keys (Antony sings: "But when will I turn and cut the world?"), Abramović is suddenly at the front of the stage just like that, her mother's crinoline out. It's terrifying almost, how ordinary she stands there. Unfortunately, no abbreviated MOMA session follows, but she very bravely starts singing a song Hegarty wrote for her. But from the seventh row, the vulnerable woman, who we normally only get to see as a fighter, in full costume (which in her case often meant nudity), and who wouldn't budge. "As if I had a choice, As if I had control, Salt, salt in my sounds, Hanging like a skin on a man, Pain hangs onto me, As in a dream, As if I had a choice, As if I had control, ..." she sings in a sultry voice. And again there is a beautiful form that soothes and makes the pain bearable, allows some distance.

 

On Tuesday, June 26, the AVRO Close-up the documentary Marina Abramović The artist is present from director Matthew Akers. According to many, including Emy Koopman, a very moving account. In the Muziekgebouw aan t IJ an exhibition of video work by Marina Abramović will be on show until 29 June: three never-before-seen parts from The Kitchen Series (2009) and the Video Portrait Gallery (1975-2003). At the boiler factory in Schiedam is on display until 15 July with a museum 'making of', featuring video portraits of Wilson, Abramović, Antony and Dafoe, rehearsal photos, Wilson's sketches and also a recording of the performance Confession. For more video work online, see the catalogue of the (due to government cuts soon to be closed) Netherlands Institute for Media Arts. The life and death of Marina Abramović is in Antwerp and Basel in the coming weeks visible.