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THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MARINA ABRAMOVIC. Created by Marina Abramovíc and Robert Wilson. Directed by Robert Wilson. Manchester International Festival and Teatro Real, Madrid, Lowry Theatre, Manchester. 15 July 2011.
It sounds like the beginning of a joke aimed at a coterie audience for contemporary performance: "Robert Wilson, Marina Abramovic, Willem Dafoe, and Antony Hegarty walk into a show . . .," or perhaps "How many 'stars' of the avant-garde does it take to . . . ." The combination of talents assembled for the Manchester International Festival centerpiece, The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, was both overwhelming and a bit daunting. While the dominant individual styles of these artists might not blend together as obviously as previous pairings of Wilson and Glass, Abramovic and Ulay, Dafoe and Vawter, or "Antony and the Johnsons," the production offered a provocative challenge to notions of representation through the collaboration of artists whose work engages with differing modes of bodily presence.
The evening appeared above all to be a Wilson piece, with Abramovic's presence onstage in this biography somewhat disturbing, as if Einstein, Stalin, or Queen Victoria were to have appeared onstage in Wilson's early work. Beautifully languorous, the performance's temporality was fundamentally Wilsonian theatre rather than performance art's durationality. Although an oversimplification, theatre bends time to fit structure, while performance art allows real time to produce structure. In an online interview with Robert Ayers, prior to her 2010 MoMA exhibition, Abramovic categorized theatre and performance art as vastly different art forms: "To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake. . . . The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance...