Erotic Epic Discussion
On the heft, the nudity, and the lack of bodily diversity in Marina Abramović’s latest
It’s one of the biggest openings of the autumn: Marina Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic, a four-hour immersive durational performance by over 70 performers, staging folk rituals that the audience can wander through, and a Factory International premiere at Aviva Studios. Abramović predicted the British press would lose their minds over it – there’s a lot of nudity and a field of giant penises – and the show did get a one-star slam in The Telegraph for being a “vacuous piece of schlock, riddled with soft-porn clichés”. The rest of the critical response, however, was notably warmer… and was notably also written by Exeunt regulars, with Natasha Tripney reviewing for The Stage, Catherine Love for The Guardian, Matt Barton for The FT, and myself for The Times.
But I struggled to encapsulate my feelings in a neat 400 words – and the show is one that seems to have really inspired sprawling ongoing discussions afterwards. If you’ve not seen it, Natasha’s in-depth and context-rich review for her Substack Café Europa gives a brilliantly full picture. But when Frank Peschier also approached with some further thoughts, we decided a big old group discussion might be in order… and turns out, we all had a lot to say. Holly Williams
‘I did find the thrusting vulvas continually thrilling’
Holly Williams: This discussion was inspired, in part, because I know that four of us reviewed this show elsewhere – and I think I probably speak for us all when I say it was a tricky thing to condense concisely into a few hundred words for the casual reader! And I was thinking about how durational work does often take you on this kind of journey – where there are stretches of frustration and boredom, but also moments of awe or passages when you feel like you key into its rhythm. So, how did you all find the experience of navigating the work – its length, its repetitiveness, the moving around the space?
I’m also going to start with what I thought was a real strength: I think the heft of Aviva Studios properly came into its own with this work. I loved how the scenes were spread through the gigantic warehouse space, loved wandering around it like I was in someone’s big sexy sleepy brain as it threw up different dreams and visions, loved sprawling on the floor on the squishy fake grass (although please, god, let that be recyclable!) Matt has previously expressed some doubts about Factory International in Exeunt, which I’ve shared – but this felt like a brilliant match of artist and venue, of vision and scale, and I do feel just very pleased to see big, juicy work like this opening in the north.
Matt Barton: I’d both agree and disagree that it’s the most successful or effective use of the space yet. On the one hand, sure, it had undeniable and impressive scale, heft, spectacle (for which I’m a sucker). But as much as I liked wandering around, it did feel like the scenes were arbitrarily scattered. The knife dance and graveyard were cramped down one extremely compact end, and the ancestor’s dance was shunted into a far corner down a corridor (for no real reason). Those smaller, almost vignette scenes (the make-up ritual and shower scene) got slightly swallowed and lost for me.
So there was a slight purposelessness that I’m reluctant to excuse and explain away off the bat. In fact, one of my main misgivings was that I think it would’ve been sharper and landed more of a ‘point’ if she’d organised it more clearly and deliberately.
Natasha Tripney: Interesting. I initially found the ability to go where I wanted when I wanted quite freeing but did end up walking around a bit aimlessly at times and would have appreciated a few more cues. There is apparently a more condensed version of the show designed for less hanger-like spaces when it tours. I’d be intrigued to know how that will work.
Catherine Love: I do get what you mean, Matt, about the scattered nature of the scenes. To begin with I was a little frustrated by how the placement of the scenes in the space meant that they bled into one another in a way that didn’t always feel intentional. I’d be focused on one scene and then have my attention snatched at by a noise or flash of movement from elsewhere.
But I think that as the evening went on, the movement between the different scenes started to feel more purposeful. The use of the musicians was core to this, I think. I loved the way they moved from scene to scene, subtly directing audience attention towards moments of spectacle (I’m a sucker for that too). And as that bleeding between scenes began to seem more deliberate, I was able to trace echoes and resonances across all these little sequences that initially felt quite separate. Which speaks to that dreamlike feeling Holly mentions of being in Abromović’s brain as it makes all these wacky connections.
Matt: I also really liked the band and, more interestingly, the figure of Marina’s mother touring through and looking stonily unimpressed by it all, before she slowly loosened up and got seduced by it herself. But I still can’t say I came away with an abiding sense of what Marina was trying to say or achieve through it all, beyond presenting a lot of very different and sometimes striking interpretations of sexuality. I’d have liked more of a thread and throughline so we could really infer the recurring comments on eroticism – how Marina’s perceptions of her own body have shifted, for instance.
Catherine: I’d also like to dwell a little on durationality and endurance. I’m interested in what performances like this demand of the bodies of performers, as well as the kinds of experiences they open up for audience members. What must it be like to stand and have milk poured over you for four hours? And there’s something about the endurance of simply being watched for that length of time, particularly for performers who are fully or partially naked.
Holly: WHAT a feat of endurance the whole thing is. I did have my worries for the poor blokes face-down humping grass for that long – the chafing, the chafing!
But did you find power or meaning in the endurance aspect? I’m not sure it added much for me, if I’m being really honest. I guess the longer you experience nakedness, the more ‘normal’ it feels – I always appreciate that sense of loosening when you see lots of naked bodies at once, for a while; it makes me wish I lived in countries where it’s more normalised... like, yes, this is what we all are underneath the clothes, vulnerable and wobbly and functional and sexy and heading to the grave. That feels like a key part of what the show wanted you to think about, so I think all the nudity is totally ‘justified’, if such a thing needs to be justified. But was the length justified..? I don’t know.
I felt like I settled into it and had got the measure within an hour, definitely gained more from spending a further hour with it, but I’m not sure I need four hours? Is it a way to force that sense of ‘epicness’ – or is that too cynical an interpretation? Also, the appearance of Marina Abramović dancing with a man at the end felt like a minor ‘ta-da!’ to make everyone stick around for, rather than a revelation (and markedly less moving than when the figure playing her mother danced in the same spot).
Matt: I’m glad you brought up the endurance element as I was pretty conflicted! I think you’re on to something when you wonder if it was just to amplify the epicness of the experience. But I think it numbed the impact and desensitised me over time – there were some definite lulls around two-thirds of the way through where I was longing for the smack of awe I got encountering all the scenes for the first time. For me, it wouldn’t have lost anything from being three hours rather than four.
I also found the finale with Marina’s slow dance a total damp squib, after all that, and would agree with you Holly that it felt like a perfunctory sop for audiences. I think there could’ve been a powerful moment where Marina confronted her mother, since she’d haunted the entire show. But I’m told that Marina’s appearance was only decided very last minute…
Catherine: There was a feeling in the crowd of ‘is that it?’ as we tentatively drifted towards the exit. Other moments – Abramović’s mother finally letting go and dancing on tables in the cafe, for example – felt much more climactic to me. But I wonder if this is to do with the myth of Abramović as an artist: that there’s a sense she must appear to us in some way or we’ll feel sold short.
Frank Peschier: I wondered who would be the first to bring the tone down by talking about genitals and of course it’s me. But come on lads, you can’t invite me to Epic Erotic book club and not talk about the 10ft willies.
I promise I have a segue – it’s about thinking about the body and endurance. I too was worried about the Astro-turf carpet burns on the humpy boys, but I don’t know if I’d describe four hours of close-up nakedness as normalising it. I found it brilliantly abstract, something that contributed to a sense of being outside of time. It’s a bit like when you have to write a word too many times and it suddenly becomes strange; Wednesday ceases to look like Wednesday but a collection of odd shapes. A vulva, repeatedly flashed to the sky with a scream, doesn’t quite cease to be a vulva – but it does seem to shift, so that it encompasses everything it symbolises as well.
Natasha: I also felt the nudity rapidly came to feel unremarkable, and as you say Frank, almost abstract thanks to the repetition and the way the scenes played in a loop. Though I did find the thrusting vulvas continually thrilling, perhaps because of the forceful way in which they presented, as sources of power. But also they wanted to scare the gods, so maybe also a little bit dangerous?
Frank: Abramović has written about how the initial inspiration/background to the making of the show was a long-ago commission where she had to watch a lot of mainstream pornography and was bored shitless by it. I might be TMI-ing here, but I agree with her – dramaturgically much of it is one note, and frankly you’re lucky if the man has a head. Which brings me to my big question: why in a show that is so much about the body and sex and liberation of both, do we only really get to see one type of body?
Whilst there is some racial diversity (the bar is in hell tbh), pretty much all of the naked bodies are thin, stereotypically attractive, able-bodied and young. This amount of perfectly symmetrical boobs just doesn’t realistically represent a cross section of society, unless there’s something about the Balkans, I don’t know…
My question is: is this (a) coincidental/a lack of thinking as to this aspect? (b) an aesthetic choice? (My partner pointed out that a fair amount of the women bore at least a passing resemblance to Abramović) or (c) a by-product of needing performers who can sustain that level of physicality for four hours? I do question that last one as although it’s certainly an athletic feat, athletes come in many, many body types – and I just think it would have been interesting to see some of those in a skeleton orgy. God, that does make me sound a bit of a pervert, doesn’t it? I can live with that.
Holly: I also found myself reflecting on that lack of diversity, especially while watching the women with the skeletons rubbing their breasts very earnestly. I did find my eyes rolling at that particular section (interestingly, the only bit that had seats, I think? Did they anticipate a committed audience for the boob-fondling, by any chance?!) I had the uncharitable feeling, that I sometimes find myself having when watching performance art or experimental theatre with attractive naked people in it, of wondering: is this radical acceptance of the naked body just easier if you also happen to be conventionally attractive, young and fit...? And therefore, not so very radical? But I chase my tail on this, because a person’s body is their body; obviously you can’t tell some young whippersapper, ‘Keep your clothes on, you’re too conventionally attractive to be political!’
But Frank, I think your point here is that with such a huge cast, there was definitely space for it to have been cast in a more interesting way. And, given it is a work exploring bodies and liberation – and also shame and decay! – it does feel like it might have been dramaturgically sharper to cast a more diverse bunch? Let unattractive naked people hump skeletons too! But I wonder if this is self-selecting: that the people who choose to audition for work where there’ll be looked at naked for four hours do like their bodies, and that, heck, there may be some correlation between that and having a ‘conventionally attractive’ physique?
Natasha: One of the things that makes the work of Florentina Holzinger so compelling – and this was entry-level nudity compared to Holzinger’s shows – is the range of bodies, certainly in terms of age, shape and size, though maybe less in terms of race (at least in the work of hers I’ve seen). I agree that would have made this more celebratory and provocative – and I do think Marina wanted to be provocative with this piece.
Having discussed the epic and the erotic elements, I’d be fascinated to know what you thought about the Balkan parts of the performance.
Catherine: Yes, it’s easy for the epic and the erotic to dominate the discussion (and it does feel like that’s where lots of the provocation of the piece comes from), but actually the Balkan element was something that came through just as – if not more – strongly for me. Of course, anything I say about the Balkan parts of the performance is inevitably going to be from an outside perspective, so I’m conscious of my own ignorance here. But it’s striking, I think, that we begin with Tito’s funeral, as this immediately places us in a specific cultural and temporal context. The choice to frame the piece in this way puts the region front and centre.
For those with stronger connections to the Balkans, I’m curious to know how familiar the rituals and aesthetics of the performance felt to you. And I’m also interested in ritual as a central element or structuring principle for the whole thing. Rituals are a kind of performance in themselves, which is obviously something Abramović is playing with here. And so often in the rituals enacted in this performance, sex and death are right there next to each other in a way that I found fascinating. There was lots more death and grief than I was expecting!
Holly: Like Catherine, I felt very aware of my outsider perspective when it came to the Balkan element. I also found all the folklore and ritual stuff just really interesting and compelling (though I was very glad to have the programme notes). But I did wonder, while watching, if it was offering a slightly stereotyped view of people from the region as gloomy and passionate, sex- and death-obsessed etc... Natasha, I know you’ve written a long (and brilliant) review on your Substack, but it would be great to have your perspective...?
Natasha: I still have more to say! My response to the piece was contradictory and also an emotional one. I think it absolutely engages in auto-exoticisation and the idea that the Balkan people are driven by superstition, but at the same time these rituals ARE fascinating, the mingling of sex and death heady and compelling.
Though for me the key scene was the one in the kafana, the taverna-like space with the red checked tablecloths. A kafana is a space of ritual and of congregation and this was particularly true under communism, in the absence of God. Look at how Tito’s photo is illuminated on the wall like an icon. It’s hard to overstate how present he was in people’s lives, and what his death meant on a societal level. It’s interesting we have got this far without talking about Yugoslavia. There is a particular kind of melancholy that comes from coming from a country that no longer exists. Countries can also die and Yugonostalgia is something many people feel – not that this piece is Yugonostalgic exactly, but there’s an element of lament there.
Abramović’s mother fought with the partisans and had a prominent position in Tito’s government. An art historian, she fostered Marina’s interest in art, but was also a strict and domineering parent who viewed sex in a very negative light. So to place her in this space with its cock-forests and abundance of vulvas is a statement. Her mother’s increasing abandon as she gives in to the music and sheds her party uniform is a moving act of imagining: Abramović referred to it as “liberating her mother’s soul.” It hopefully goes without saying that if you stripped off to your slip in a Kafana then or indeed now, the reaction would have been somewhat different – but Balkan Erotic Epic is not a historical document. This is a woman nearing 80 reaching back across time to her mother and releasing her from her inhibitions. I found that moving, and the overt romanticism of the moment excusable.
Balkan Erotic Epic is at Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, 24 to 30 January, with further international touring dates to be announced.
Loved this conversation, I wish I could have experience this piece!
brilliant read.