Marina Abramovic ‘Balkan Erotic Epic’
Manchester Aviva Studios
Oct 2026
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Marina Abramovic’s newest piece is her most formidable but. A four-hour, theatrical piece of mind-boggling, thought-provoking, continuous erotic cabaret that embraces eroticism, spirituality and the rituals of Balkan mythology and her personal Balkan roots in a surprising spectacle. It unzips tradition and the viewer inside out mentally and bodily, while asking all the important thing everlasting elementary questions, and is in some way additionally complete immersive leisure.
In a world the place most tradition is now commodified, commercialised, redacted and decreased to five-second on-line blips, Marina Abramovic’s newest four-hour epic Balkan erotic is a full-on 5 senses sensual problem that actually blows your thoughts with its potentialities.
The Balkan artist born in Belgrade practically 80 years in the past has by no means compromised her spectacular imaginative and prescient. Her earlier efficiency artwork items pushed the boundaries fromn sitting in silence reverse spectators for greater than seven hundred hours to inviting members of the general public to do no matter they needed to her physique with nails, matches and even a loaded gun. Her no-compromise imaginative and prescient has additionally seen her lie down inside a burning wood star, consuming a kilogram of honey, adopted by a litre of pink wine, earlier than self-mutilating, practically asphyxiating or remaining immobile while an enormous snake slithered over her physique or screaming till she misplaced her voice.
Her newest takes on these narrative jarring concepts and themes is on a grand scale with a solid of over seventy performers, singers, dancers and musicians delivering an exploration of the eroticism, spirituality and traditions of her homeland, drawing on Balkan tradition and pagan rituals. Tonight’s epic is maybe her most deeply difficult and her most private deep diving into the intercourse and loss of life mysticism of the Balkans, mixing its people music imagery and shamanic ritualism into a number of ongoing items which can be confrontational, vibrant, and intriguing. Like her fellow Balkan neighbours Laibach it makes use of artwork as a mirror and a hammer in a provactive and intriguing method on this case Laibach and consider the Balkans slice of erotic physique electrical.
It even deconstructs theatre.
There isn’t any formal seating right here! The viewers is sort of a part of the present, wandering round from stage to stage, free to depart and go to the bar downstairs and are available again for the final hour, or sit on the ground and get misplaced within the beatific bedlam. It’s disturbing and hilarious, vibrant and evocative and erotic and deadpan hilarious.
As you enter the massive corridor of the brand new Aviva constructing in Manchester – the right large-scale house for this type of imaginative and prescient – you might be instantly dislocated by the conflicting noise and pictures and the pretend grass carpeting that makes you semi-stumble into an virtually altered state. You’re surrounded by a number of levels and bamboozled by the imagery that mixes the naked buttock and breast erotica with pubic hair thrust at each route. There’s a choir on a display singing a Balkan chant for Tito’s funeral, deconstructing the marching, cheering, waving flags as some sort of repressed intercourse dance past the formal starch and the veihcle for the discharge of the repressed sexual vitality of the state funeral. On the subsequent stage there’s a troupe of martial army dancers sword combating after which a graveyard filled with bare corpses rolling round with skeletons utilizing their chests to ‘awaken the earth’ in a bit referred to as ‘Massaging the Breast’ and that is simply the entry level.
Flip the nook you wander between the instillations hypnotised by the fleshy shows of scenes which embrace ladies conventional dancers pulling up their skirts exhibiting their vaginas in ‘Scaring the Gods to Cease the Rain’, and 16-foot penises statues for ‘Magic Potions’ subsequent to bare males fucking the bottom after which an extended slender hall with three shamanic figures twitching a mesmeric dance on the finish which is hypnotic in its off kilter imagery. Lastly, subsequent to the pregnant lady being bathed in milk, you discover a stage made to appear to be a seventies Balkan bar the place time ticks slowly and other people stare into the abyss earlier than a sluggish erotic dance sparks into motion between a starched, stern determine and a few the bar locals to wild swirling Balkan people music performed by a deranged oompah band.
It’s a whirling dervish of images and concepts that appear random however sinks into your psyche, twisting, turning, confronting and celebrating ritual, grappling with the primal and turning all of it inside out.
The Bosch like bedlam ultimately recedes because the Balkan brass band lead a Pied Piper dance of the viewers out of the exit. Marina herself emerges within the Balkan bar in an extended and meditative hug accompanied by a lone lament from a Trad people singer in a second of blissful close to silence and stillness within the chaos and cacophony of not simply Marina world however the entire world we inhabit as effectively with its countless noise and sophisticated layers of formality of primal. The second of stillness brings meditative magnificence to the cacaphony, a second of tender humanity within the infernal din which is maybe being the message on this lovely 4 hour insanity.
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