Marina Abramovich officiated at a pagan liturgy of lust and death

Barcelona. A gloomy and gloomy cemetery suddenly becomes the scene of a riotous orgy, a ritual mating dance between two silent bodies absorbed in the blackness of the night, a group of women who offer their sex naked and open to the sky, in a kind of ritual to stop the rain so that the sun can come out and the crops can be saved, or a wedding march in which Tito, the founder of the old Yugoslavia, is at the same time the one who dies and the one who looks sternly. All of this brings together in a mixture of genres and languages ​​the Balkan Erotic Epic, the last work of the Balkan artist Marina Abramovich, who turned the Gran Teatro del Liceu in Barcelona into the setting for an ancient pagan liturgy of lust, eroticism and death.

Throughout her career, the Yugoslav artist has sought the keys to understanding the present in the origins of her land, those Balkans full of mythology and ancestral traditions. At almost 80 years old, Abramovich conceived what is, perhaps, one of his most hypnotic, suggestive, disturbing and beautiful creations, in which it suddenly seemed that all the animals and mythological figures of The garden of delights will come to life in a music and dance festival.

The figure of Abramovich, like almost all of his works, is at the center of the plot. It is she who begins and closes this pagan liturgy, in which dance, opera, dramaturgy, Balkan and electronic folk music, animation and video are mixed, of course. The work is threaded with references to some of his key works: from the body excess, he Balkan Baroque Ritual (1997) to the almost ascetic The Artist Is Present (2010), where everything rests on the look and the presence. And so it mixes folkloric myths from the Balkans and archaic rituals linked to fertility, sexuality and death – sometimes deliberately harsh, like the one in which the women of a village in Turkey are invited to open their sexes with mournful screams to stop the rain.

The Balkan Erotic Epic is divided into performative acts in which the artist fuses eroticism with folkloric traditions, challenging conventions about desire, power and collective memory. A part of the story is born from family memories, when she recalls that her grandmother “exposed her to spiritual rituals”, but in which there is also a rigorous investigation into pagan myths, popular traditions and the culture of a region marked by war and ethnic conflict.

Grief for a disappeared world

The play begins with an introduction in which a traditional band with Balkan wind and percussion instruments led by Danica Abramović, Marina’s communist mother, played by the Spanish-Serbian actress Maria Stamenković Herranz, mourns the death of Josip Broz Tito, the leader of communist Yugoslavia. It is a kind of mourning for a disappeared world and a ritual in the face of a foundational death, which gives rise to something new.

Then comes the Knife dance, in which a couple of artists perform a traditional dance with bladed weapons. The dancers represent the husband or “sworn virgins” of the Balkans, women who, by tradition, swore chastity and assumed the role of head of the family in communities where the men had disappeared or died due to war. Then, after brief explanations from the scientist who acts as narrator, four large penises appear on stage to present the new chapter or “station.” Phalluses/falos, in which the narrator appears in a forest of phallic-looking mushrooms, and explains ancestral rituals and recipes.

In Scaring the gods, A group of performers perform an ancient agricultural ritual in which they show their vaginas to the sky to “scare the gods” and stop rains that threaten the harvest. The female body becomes an instrument of telluric and collective power, the only way to save the community from disaster. Then it starts black wedding, which in Vlach tradition requires that when a young unmarried man died, a “black wedding” was celebrated, symbolically marrying him to a young woman during the funeral. The work recreates this ceremony in which marriage and death are intertwined. This is how it comes Slavic soul, in which throat singers (ojkanje), projected on the screen with their penises erect, sing a traditional polyphonic song.

On stage it begins then your head, that recreates a traditional tavern; that is, the social heart of the Balkans, and where Marina Abramović’s mother, Danica, appears again, which is when she finds liberation in a striptease on a table in the tavern. One of the most hypnotic moments began right after, with the chapter Massaging the breasts, in which women of all ages rub their breasts on tombstones and dance with skeletons. It is a mourning ritual in which eroticism becomes a language to communicate with the dead. In the faces of these women you can see that behind them there are husbands or family members lost due to war, illness or time.

Finally, the work concludes with the piece Ancestors, in which, with a winter scene, a series of figures in traditional costumes dance under the snow along with beings that look like scarecrows. They celebrate the departure of winter and honor ancestors, in an image that returns rituals to the flow of time and the seasons.

And so on until the curtain falls, little by little, and Marina Abramovich’s pagan liturgy ends.