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Marina Abramović is an art world superstar well known for challenging visitors’ awkwardness at sex and nudity by, for example, asking them to squeeze through a doorway between a naked couple.
This year, she will take it to a new level in what she is calling the most ambitious work of her long career – an immersive erotic epic featuring performers re-enacting ancient and unashamedly sexual rituals.
Manchester will be the venue for the world premiere of Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic. It is, Abramović says, a reflection on how “in our culture today, we label anything erotic as pornography”.
There will be a cast of 70, including dancers, musicians and singers, with the production unfolding across 13 scenes.
Anyone flustered by the closeup sight of breasts, bottoms, vaginas and penises should probably start drawing up alternative plans for October.
The scenes will include Scaring the Gods, a recreation of a centuries-old ritual in which Balkan village women would try to keep the rain away by running to the fields, lifting their skirts up and baring themselves to the heavens.
Fertility Rite will re-enact a fevered ritual where naked bodies writhe against the ground in “a desperate call for fertility”.
Massaging the Breast explores a ritual where women do just that, gesticulating over graves to awaken the earth.
Abramović has described the work as the fulfilment of a long-term dream. “Balkan Erotic Epic is the most ambitious work in my career,” she said. “This gives me a chance to go back to my Slavic roots and culture, look back to ancient rituals and deal with sexuality in relation to the universe and the unanswered questions of our existence.
“Through this project I would like to show poetry, desperation, pain, hope, suffering and reflect our own mortality.”
Belgrade-born Abramović, 78, is one of the world’s most distinguished artists with a career spanning five decades. She is seen as a boundary pushing pioneer of performance who has regularly used her own body to test the limits of physical and mental endurance, often having to be rescued from peril by audience members.
She has explored Balkan erotic rituals in film before, but the project premiering in Manchester is a new, much more ambitious work.
In an interview last year, Abramović acknowledged that British people have a peculiar sensibility about certain things. “You’re so puritan about everything, about nudity, about sexual organs,” she said.
She revels in challenging that. At her blockbuster retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2023 she re-staged a work called Imponderabilia featuring a naked couple in a doorway it would have been rude for visitors not to squeeze through.
The question for many was whether to face the naked man or the naked woman. Some went through, apologising. Others were nonchalant, as if it was something they did all the time.
Balkan Erotic Epic is produced by Factory International and will be staged at Aviva Studios. The artistic director and chief executive, John McGrath, said it was an honour, describing Abramović as “one of the most influential artists of our time”.
He added: “This new performance work offers an unmissable opportunity for audiences to experience the next chapter of her creative life – bold, immersive and on a scale that’s totally unprecedented.”
Audiences will be invited to navigate the performance as they wish with the possibility of “pop-up encounters” of “intimate performances, feverish dances and haunting songs”.
It is based on folklore and ancestral traditions from regions taking in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Montenegro as well as Roma and Traveller cultures.
The idea is that “erotic” is not something that should be seen as taboo, but more as “a vital spiritual and life force”.
After Manchester, the production will be seen in Barcelona, Berlin, New York and Hong Kong.
