Life and Death Through the Lenses of Its Creators

The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, the collaborative stage work co-created by performance artist Marina Abramović and avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson made its North American debut in June at the Luminato Festival in Toronto, Canada. Abramović stars in the piece based on her biography alongside Willem Dafoe, with original music by Antony, contemporary crooner for the band Antony and the Johnsons. With this quartet of powerful collaborators, ascribing intention or ownership of the work presents an obstacle to discussing its quality. It can be examined as a piece of theatre, but also as a continuation of Abramović’s work as a performance artist. The unexpected ways in which Abramović succeeds in a performance art context, however, are precisely why she falters in the otherwise flawless Wilsonian landscape. Abramović’s humanity is beautifully shown in Life and Death, unlike most of her work, whose intensity makes her seem superhuman. She often limits herself through deprivation — sleep deprivation, starvation, dehydration. In this piece she remains committed to navigating limitations, though they are not imposed, but exposed by what she must put forth — movement, speech, song. Her imperfections as a stage performer may not have been so easily detected had she not chosen to work with one of the world’s most exacting directors. It is this impulse for challenge, however, that has always been at the foundation of her success. By looking at another event featured at Luminato — Abramović’s MAI: Prototype, which previews the methods that will be taught at the institute she plans to open in Hudson, New York — we can compare Abramović’s starkly different creative practices with Wilson’s as a means of further exploring the nuanced subtext of their collaboration.

Life and Death opens with bones littered across the stage, each lit a blood red that is so bright it seems to translate a scalding hot temperature. Three figures lay on their own coffin-shaped platforms in long black dresses, wearing masks modeled after Abramović’s face. Before the house lights go down in the theatre, live Dobermans begin scouring the stage at a pace that seems just slightly more swift and unnerving than normal. They remain in constant motion, eating bits of food around the coffins. This opening image is one that re-visits Abramović’s past collaborations, and previews a collaboration between her and Wilson that has yet to be fully realized: Abramović’s funeral, which Wilson will design. The same image of the dogs eating around a stage of bones was used in Abramović’s 2004 collaboration with Michael Laub, Biography Remix. Just like this work with Wilson, Biography was a re-telling of Abramović’s life by Laub. Since 1989, Abramović has made six biographical works with other collaborators. The three coffins reference the following demands of Abramović in her last will and testament:

In case of my death I would like to have the following memorial ceremony:

• Three coffins.

• The first coffin with my real body.

• The second coffin with an imitation of my body.

• The third coffin with an imitation of my body.¹

This pair of images speaks to Abramović’s melting of lines between life and art and death and art. She has subverted the ownership of her narrative by allowing other artists to re-interpret her life, and even her funeral is sure to be a masterpiece. Over the course of the next three hours, Abramović’s life is distilled through Wilson’s lens with all of his compelling trademarks: emotionally evocative color and lighting, exaggerated gesture and facial expression, and haunting, abstract tableaux. Adding to this equation are the stunning performances of Willem Dafoe, Antony, and the ensemble, which play a pivotal role in expressing Abramović’s influence on the landscape of contemporary performance.

Dafoe’s performance is a triumph of dynamics and stamina. Appearing as a wild, militant, orange-haired devil, his narrations employ a spectrum of vocal work at a...