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Duisburg
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on tour

Marina Abramović
Balkan Erotic Epic

by Omar Khan

Balkan Erotic Epic, Marina Abramović’s latest large-scale stage production, signals a decisive shift in the Serbian artist’s trajectory. Far removed from the stripped-down, radical actions with which she revolutionised performance art in the 1970s and 1980s, this work unfolds as an expansive theatrical creation bringing together more than seventy performers—musicians, singers, dancers, actors and performance artists. The result is a hybrid spectacle where performance, contemporary and folk dance, opera and theatre converge within a distinctly Balkan rural imaginary.

Structured in ten tableaux, the piece revisits rituals and beliefs related to sexuality, some dating from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. After years of research into Balkan folklore, Abramović proposes a vision that separates eroticism from pornography. There is explicit nudity and striking imagery, even references to extreme practices, yet everything is shaped through a ceremonial poetics that evokes the ancestral and the symbolic dimension of the body rather than provocation for its own sake. Scenes of powerful ritual intensity—women exposing themselves to the sky to calm storms, posthumous weddings for unmarried dead men, dances with skeletons—coexist with dark humour and a strong live musical presence that lends the work an almost operatic resonance. The recurring figure of her mother, Danica, embodies tradition, religion and Yugoslav memory, threading personal history through collective myth.

For those who recall the artist who once rejected theatrical artifice, the transformation is evident. Where the body was formerly her sole territory of endurance and confrontation, she now embraces dramaturgy, visual composition, lighting and choreography. Stillness, duration and the potency of the image—long central to her practice—remain, but are integrated into a large-scale theatrical structure. Balkan Erotic Epic does not renounce her past; it expands it. In this artist approaching eighty, little remains of the ascetic provocateur who challenged audiences through unmediated exposure, yet the experience endures. Abramović no longer resists theatre, she inhabits it, transforming her performative legacy into an ambitious collective ceremony.

Duisburg, Ruhrtriennale, Kraftzentrale, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, 3–11 Sept.;
www.ruhrtriennale.de

Berlin, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, 13–17 Oct.; www.berlinerfestspiele.de