MANCHESTER INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL BLOG
Day 4: The Life & Death of Marina Abramovic
I don’t know how I would go about writing anything of any interpretive or reflective capacity as I’m still interpreting and reflecting, and I think everyone who’s seen it will be for a long time. Also, I think doing a ‘write up’ for this would take away from the scattered, surreal yet magisterial mystery and aesthetic magic of the whole thing.
Instead I’ll briefly describe one of my favourite scenes. The second half essentially saw an underlying, tonal narrative brought together through a series of gradual, immersive, ambient ‘scenes’, in which Dafoe seemed to overtly step into Marina’s life portrayal from his primary role as narrator. In one scene, Dafoe (in his somewhat disheveled military green, unbuttoned apparel) swept on stage to sit down in a far corner of the stage, diagonally opposite Ambramovic, cooly strewn out facing away from the audience, her face out of sight. Dafoe held a gun.
It was a comical scene, in so far as Dafoe desperately pretended to understand and empathise with Abramovic’s subsequent explanation of the manner in which her and her then partner parted (incidentally, by walking towards each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China to meet in the middle - a “nice” way to end it); yet the scene carried the transcendent, ethereal and sinister ambience typical of the second half. It was generated through an amazingly powerful combination of ambient minimalism (of the William Basinski kind) and an unusual, but in this case prominent, theatric device. Swathes of surreal, undeveloped characters, clad in costumes ranging from glittering dinosaur suits to live snakes; and featuring a twisted burlesque dancer alongside a hunch-backed, greyed Jew walked as if in slow-motion, gradually, eerily making their way, unblinking from the right to the left of the stage. They seemed weighed down the enveloping ambience and vast aire pressing into their pours. They seemed haunted.
Inescapably, at every other migration across the stage, a man clad in a sharp green suit reached a certain point and burst into a terrified sprint to the other curtain; his pattering footsteps piercing the unstable calm surrounding him, and the audience. The atmospheric impact of this combination of devices is hard to convey. It was harrowing, sinister, and also pervasive, encompassing.
And in the midst of this haze, Abramovic explained her reasoning to a rattled and desperate Dafoe, unphased, a fixture in the tangled atmosphere. Suddenly, Dafoe raised the gun, shaking. Abramovic continued, unphased. Dafoe shook, shouted. Abramovic lay in her position. The curtain came down on the scene, and silmultaneously an explosive, resounding gun shot burst through the air.
In their place, a projected trio of video portraits came to life, displaying three men shaving. The sight of razor of skin made my skin crawl.
