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SATURDAY, JANUARY 18, 2014

Being There: LaDoMA

The Life and Death of Marina Abramović

Directed by Robert WilsonPark Avenue Armory, December 14, 2013

Biography is not a genre that typically ends upgetting played out on the stage. Yet, over thelast year several biographical pieces havefound their way to New York theaters. In early2013, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Lifeand Times: Volumes 1-4 brought to the PublicTheater a 10-hour musical epic, based on theverbatim transcripts of a series of phoneinterviews with an ordinary Williamsburgresident, one Kristin Worrall, that recounts herjourney through youth and young adulthood inminute detail, unabridged of all the likes, umsand ahs of colloquial speech. Over thesummer 2013, biography on the stage came inthe form of a dense and stimulating one-woman show, Sontag: Reborn, based on theearly journals of Susan Sontag, that chroniclesher creative, intellectual and sexual coming-of-age. New York City Opera staged the lives of two salacious female subjects:Margaret Campbell, the dirty Duchess of Argyll in Powder Her Face, late lastwinter; and the notorious centerfold in the eponymous Anna Nicole, thisfall. Finally, by the end of the calendar year, the Park Avenue Armory brought usRobert Wilson’s magisterial The Life and Death of Marina Abramović(LaDoMA), which purports to give us a biographical sketch of its eponymousprotagonist, but, nevertheless, winds up delivering that and so much more.

Billed variously as a free form or “quasi-opera” in the manner of Robert Wilson,under the spell of whose Einstein on the Beach I fell earlier this year as well, TheLife and Death of Marina Abramović (LaDoMA) was most thrilling for its

Marina Abramovic and funeral mask.

Photo credit: BAM

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musical eclecticism. Experiencing it live, I was reminded of the fact that there isno reason why opera has to maintain slavish attitudes towards its traditional roots.Like so many of his theatrical collaborations, Wilson and his collaborators drawon just some of the many musical vernaculars that are available to a contemporaryopera composer. In the case of this avant-opera, the soundscape consists of anintermingling of pop music, the rock ballad, Balkan folk music, electronica,modern minimalism, simulated orchestral music, and an assortment of otherDadaist noise experiments, like the sound of a snare drum rolling through thewoods down a steep hill. As ever, Wilson runs the gamut.

Collaborators on the project are listed as Antony Hegarty (of Antony and theJohnsons); the experimental electronic duo, Matmos; the Balkan folk singerSvetlana Spajić and her group of traditional singers; and three other musiciansperforming live from the orchestra pit; with additional musical elaborationcredited to Nico Muhly, among his myriad projects, of recent Two Boys fame.

Against such a variegated musical texture, Svetlana Spajić’s Balkan folkloristicsinging really stood out. Her exotic Eastern European-tinged chants werephenomenal. The closing number of the first act – Scene A8, “The Green Apple”– featured a seemingly endless repetitive call-and-response arrangement of atraditional Balkan folk song that droned on beautifully with a small chorus ofgypsy-looking women dotting the stage, standing virtually motionless, who sangwith such feeling. I could have listened to them forever. They stood so still withinWilson’s choreography that it was hard to tell if the voices we were hearing wereactually emanating from the bodies adorning the stark minimalist composition ofRobert Wilson’s signature staging.

The Balkan folk singer Svetlana Spajić.

Photo credit: Robert Wilson website

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In classic Robert Wilson fashion, the lighting effects were immaculate from themoment you arrived. As the audience filed in to take their seats the stage wasalready impeccably illuminated and on full view. Three gorgeous long-leggeddogs were seen wandering languidly between a trinity of bodies laid out oncoffins as though at a wake, with their funereal-masked faces brightly lit. Patternsof three, as well as other Christological imagery, run through the show frombeginning to end. Life, Death, Resurrection is the basic trajectory that it follows,as it proceeds in trinities and recurring trios of Marina Abramović figures.

After the show opened with Marina’s funeral times three, it became clear that thiswas not going to be your typical biographical stage show, but rather biographydone Robert Wilson’s idiosyncratic way – the song sung by Antony in the firstKneeplay is, in fact, entitled Your Story, My Way. The life of the greatperformance artist, who also stars in the show, is broken up in his treatment.Rather than a monolithic chronicle of a “great woman,” he gives us the fragmentsof a life with its daily trials, doubts, insecurities, its familial struggles, phases ofyouthful rebellion and tireless search for selfhood amidst the domestic din of alife really lived like any other.

“The Story of the Big Nose,”Scene A2, is just one suchmoment that elevates theparticular to the universal.While Marina Abramović’snose does play a particularlyprominent role in her uniquebeauty, it is precisely this kindof formative memory that mostof us have to carry around withus as part of our baggage. Partof growing up and findingourselves includes an ongoingprocess of recognizing andaccepting the idiosyncraticimperfections that make each of us unique. An intentional head injury is howMarina went about tricking her mother into finally seeking out a medical solution

Robert Wilson's signature staging.

Photo credit: Joan Marcus

A chorus of ghoulish hospital patients.

Photo credit: Lucie Jansch

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LABELS

Abdrazakov Agrippina Alagna Alaimo AlanDornak Aldrich Alessandro CorbelliAlessandro Moreschi Alexander LewisAlice Coote Alison Cheeseman AndrewPulver Anita Rachvelishvili Anna NicoleAntonenko Antonioni Antony HegartyArminio in Armenia Baden-Baden 1927Barbara Dever Bartlett SherBaselitz bel canto Bellini BeniniBertolucci Beth Anne Hatton BezcalaBlythe Boccaccio Boito Bolschoi BorodinBrecht Camarena Carsen CavalliCenerentola Charpentier Cosi' Fan TutteCraig Lucas D'Arcangelo DanielCurran Daniel Montenegro Daniele GattiDante David Crawford de Niese Dell'ArteOpera Ensemble Dessay DiDonato DmitriTcherniakov EinsteinEliogabalo Elisir Enchanted Island ErnaniFalstaff Fanale Farinelli Florez futurismGagnizde Gergiev Germanico in GermaniaGianandrea Noseda Giulio Cesare GlassGlazunov Gogol

Greer Davis Handel Hans TashjanHayden DeWitt Helen Donath Heras-Casado Hvorostovsky Jean-Pierre PonnelleJeff Mattsey Jeffrey Beruan JeffreyMandelbaum Jennifer Rivera John CheekKentridge LADOMALaScala Leonard Levine Luc Bondy Luciadi Lammermoor Luisi Lungu MadMen Maestri Maeve Höglung MagritteMahagonny Songspiel Marina AbramovićMary Zimmerman Matmos Mattei Matthew

Tuell Meade Medea Michael

Mayer Michael Mayes Michele PertusiMikhail Petrenko Monteverdi MozartMuhly Muraro Neal Goren Norma OK Theater OksanaDyka Opera Feroce Opera MissionOropesa Orpheus Park Ave Armory PatriciaRisley Paulo Szot Pavel Smelkov PetrarchPhillips Pietro Spagnoli Pisaroni Pogossov

Poplavskaya Poppea PorporaPowder Her Face Prince Igor PTSD PucciniPushkin Racette Rachelle DurkinRadvanovsky Rat Pack Rimsky-Korsakov Robert Wilson Rodrigo Rossini

to her insecurities, though her plan was foiled. She winds up in an eeriebureaucratic hospital room, which is staged by Wilson as a hauntingly systematicgame of leapfrog over lines of miniature hospital beds played by a gaggle ofghoulish in-patients, but her broken nose never procures the plastic surgery herheart so desired, much to her chagrin. The story is at once devastating,heartwarming and humorous.

There were other moments of humor too, like the firstfull-fledged narrative reminiscence in Scene A1, “TheStory of the Washing Machine.” Narrated by thedemonic Willem Dafoe who played the overlord andMC for the entire evening, the scene was acted out withthe exaggerated gestural visual language of mime, likemany of the rest of the acting performances – that is,anytime the actors were not just standing still, or rollingdown the stairs naked, backwards, and in slow motion,the dominant acting style was mime. In “The Story ofthe Washing Machine,” we are given a glimpse of asurreal domestic world from the point of view a child

who is intrigued by the magical activity of the one big household appliance thatspins and spins. She loves watching it spin until one day she gets stuck in it.Beyond the initial shock of the adults who were present for the accident, she onlyreally seems to remember how her mother scolded her for her carelessness – a bigtheme in this portrait of an artist is the problematic and tension-driven relationshipshe had with her mother.

Much of the show has an artifice heavy self-consciousness to it, a signature BobWilson stiffness to it that bespeaks the great master’s attention to detail, hisperfectionism, his indulgence in the illusion of theatrical experience. There aremoments where Mr. Wilson’s theater of endurance for his actors comes vividlyinto contact with the Abramović method – in one incarnation or another. At leastthat’s what I made of the highly meditative, though physically exhausting exerciseWillem Dafoe put himself through in Scene B3, the disintegration loop, as he runsback and forth at an angle on the stage while counting out the rhythm of hisactions, referring to himself in the third person. It was intense though uniquely

The devilish MC.

Photo credit: Lucie Jansch

Close encounters with a washing machine.

Photo credit: Robert Wilson website

Verdi

Satyagraha Schenk Schrott SemiramideRiconosciuta Sergey Semishkur SergeySkorokhodov Shakespeare ShostakovichSleepwalker Sonnambula Sontag: RebornSteven Schwartz Surrealism Svetlana SpajićSéance on a Wet Afternoon TannhäuserTaylor Stayton Tchaikovsky ToscaTraviata Two Boys Vargas Vertical Player Repertory Villazón WagnerWeill Willem Dafoe Ying Fang YonchevaZeffirelli

imprecise in its choreography and so the fatigue of the human body shinedthrough, the fallibility of the flesh. This seems to be an approximation of justsome of what Abramović has put herself and her pupils through over the lastseveral decades in order to achieve the incredible feats of endurance she hasaccomplished.

This brief repetitive runninginterlude then served as atransition into the series ofscenes that set up for herdeath. What came next – inthis my experiment in “beingthere,” namely, my attempt atconjuring in writing anexperience I lived in the flesh– was the scene in whichMarina was rolled out on herpedestal, lying recumbent onsomething like an elevatedRoman triclinium. As she reached the center of the stage, a glorious low-lyinglayer of smoke seeped majestically out from either side of the proscenium. At firstthe layer of smoke looked like the sea flowing violently with all the force ofMother Ocean onto the stage to engulf our fearless freak of a narrator, WillemDafoe. Then as the two sides of the fog cover collided and combined into oneuniform but still dynamic undulating body of smoke, it looked like a view of theclouds from above, as though we had somehow ascended with Marina up aboveinto some level of the heavens. The effect seemed so simple yet it was soprofoundly perfect, so neat, so clean, so beautiful. It was a glorious moment ofrepose, despite the slightly grating off-key singing of our narrator. This is his bigmusical number, where he gets to sing Willem’s Song. Needless to say, he’s not agreat singer, though it too does have a haunting off-kilter beauty to it.

And then there’s the seeming non-sequitur interlude about the Wolf Rat.

The cold detachment of the surreal surface of Robert Wilson’s abstraction cracksdramatically when Antony comes out in the show’s emotional climax, and singswith such feeling: “My skin is a surface to push to extremes... But when will Iturn and cut the world.” The sensation is a tingle that pierces the soles of yourfeet, runs through the body and up the spine leaving in its wake a trail of goosebumps on your arms and down your neck.

Willem Dafoe singing Willem's Song.

Photo credit: Robert Wilson website

The narrative thrust of the fragmentary piece, which builds in fits and startsaccording to the familiar Wilsonian alternation of “Scenes” and what he calls“Kneeplays,” slowly falls apart over the course of its nearly three-hour run time.Dates and facts are eventually presented out of order as Willem Dafoe’s surrealnarrator figure begins to give up even trying to keep things in order by the end.Death and resurrection take over, universal biography is subsumed by thehagiographic impulse, and everything is swept away by the transcendent musicalimage of a volcano of snow. Antony’s angelic voice taking us into the snowyether, as those three familiar Abramović figures hover over his head, like a trinityof transubstantiated Virgin Mary statuettes, and he sings: “I want white breath. Iwon’t ever rest. I’ve become a volcano of snow.”

Sorting through the scattered fragments of a life.

Photo credit: Robert Wilson website

Marina's funeral prologue (times three).

Photo credit: Park Ave. Armory

Posted by Masetto at Saturday, January 18, 2014

Labels: Anna Nicole, Antony Hegarty, Einstein, LADOMA, Marina Abramović, Matmos,Muhly, NYC Opera, OK Theater, Park Ave Armory, Powder Her Face, Robert Wilson,Sontag: Reborn, Svetlana Spajić, Two Boys, Willem Dafoe

It was a cold and blustery night when we were released from the show’s spell.Back out on streets of the city the gorgeous volcano of snow that had beenerupting all afternoon to the tune of some six inches of accumulation had givenway to a more unpleasant sleety rain that was threatening to transformprematurely all that snowy white crystal powder into big puddles of messy, wetslush. Fortunately we had the depth of vision and perfectionism of RobertWilson’s genius to keep us warm even as we struggled to keep dry. The Life andDeath of Marina Abramović, if nothing else, is a reminder of the variety ofmusical vernaculars available to the composer of contemporary opera: folkloristicsinging, pop music, minimalist modernism. And that is a lesson that I cannotemphasize enough. Robert Wilson and his variegated team of collaborators toldher story, his way.

– Lui

The assumption of a trinity of Marinas.

Photo credit: Joan Marcus

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