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I’ve just texted my mum to ask why, on the morning of my wedding, she didn’t advise me to drill a hole in a wooden bridge and put my penis in it. No reply from her as yet.
This is the morning after I was lucky enough to be at the world premiere of Marina Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic at Aviva Studios in Manchester. It is said of Ms Abramović, formidable as ever at 78, that she is the “grandmother of performance art”. Addressing us beforehand, visibly nervous, she spoke of this work as perhaps her most ambitious, her magnum opus. In the programme she writes: “This gives me the 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.” Having Slavic roots myself, I wasn’t going to miss this one. And fully acknowledging – as a friend of mine from Stourbridge would put it – that what I know about performance art and a five-pound note wouldn’t get my hair cut, here is my review.
The show – that word feels inadequate – isn’t a play or a musical or a static exhibition. It’s kind of all three. It begins at the funeral of President Tito of Yugoslavia. The audience falls in behind a slow-moving, dirge-playing band to be led into the huge performance space. For me, this was most affecting, as I was brought up well aware of Tito’s cultural weight.
The performance, or rather performances, are delivered simultaneously in 13 acts on as many stages. There is an awful lot to take in, even before you start trying to get your head around the erotic – or, rather, explicit – content. The first thing I clapped eyes on was a hairy bottom going up and down on a giant screen. Before this screen, on a representation of a grassy field, five performers were to be seen, face down, erm, humping the ground. This, we’re told, being based on a ritual performed when the crops were failing. My leeks are struggling a bit: might give it a try. As the evening progressed, these blokes humped relentlessly on. No one paid them much attention. I felt a bit sorry for them.
Across from them, a group of female performers were in action, repeatedly exposing their vulvas to the ground and sky, invoking an ancient ritual aimed at scaring the gods into stopping the rain. In another corner, a group of naked women in a graveyard were busy massaging their breasts and dancing with skeletons. Away on the far side, at tables like those in a typical Yugoslav town cafe, three women, dressed as Tito’s grieving widow, sat there, austere, motionless, unmoved and unmoving, staring straight ahead. At one point Abramović herself wandered on to this cafe set and took a seat at an empty table. A crowd gathered in the expectation of her doing something significant. But she just stood up, did some vague dancing movement for a bit and sat back down again. We all stared at her until she got to her feet and wandered off. And that was that.
Meanwhile, in the middle of the room a Belgian (no idea) woman in a white coat periodically stood up and related a series of folk tales. In one, sourced to 14th-century southern Dalmatia, a woman wants to make her man love her more. So she inserts a small fish into her person and leaves it there overnight. Come morning, she fishes the fish out, makes a powder of it and stirs it into the chap’s coffee. Don’t try this at home, obvs. Also, from 14th-century Bosnia, the means by which a groom might ward off impotence on his wedding night: go to a bridge, make three holes, and penetrate each of them while reciting a mantra I’ll not repeat here. And there was more where this came from.
Was my mum aware of any of this stuff, I found myself wondering. And, if so, why hadn’t she told me? Hence the text to her. And now the reply. No, she knew nothing of these things, and thank God for that because they sound stupid.
I’ll probably not treat her to an evening out at the Aviva. Obviously not her thing. It might not be yours either, but go along anyway. I’m glad I did.
Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist
