Slowly, deliberately, a figure dressed in black poured milk over the breasts and swollen belly of a pregnant woman, who undulated sensuously on a chair. To the side, a bride lay immobile on a bed as her face was laboriously painted with multicolored circles. Nearby, dancers swayed together to a heightened song, then dressed a man lying naked in a coffin.
“This is the most demanding, difficult, insane project I have ever done,” Marina Abramovic whispered from the sidelines. She smiled happily.
Abramovic is no stranger to demanding, difficult or insane projects: Among other things, the Serbian performance artist has screamed until she lost her voice; lain on giant blocks of ice for hours; invited audience members to do whatever they wanted to her body, using nails, matches, a saw and a gun; and sat immobile, staring into the eyes of strangers, for seven hours a day over three months in “The Artist is Present,” the 2010 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that catapulted her to international renown.
The project that she says outdoes them is “Balkan Erotic Epic, which opens Thursday at Aviva Studios in Manchester, England. Next year, it will tour internationally, with a stop at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.
The piece features more than 70 performers, including performance artists, dancers, musicians and singers who will appear in 13 scenes drawn from Balkan folklore and ritual. Inspired by the erotic as a source of life, fertility and power, the scenes have titles like “Scaring the Gods to Stop the Rain” (women baring their vaginas to the heavens), “Massaging the Breast” (what it says) and “Magic Potions” (a singer flanked by 16-foot projections of phalluses).
“In Balkan culture, genitals were used in rituals to connect to the spirits and the gods,” Abramovic said in an interview before a rehearsal. “It will be completely misunderstood in Britain, it’s so puritan here. I can’t wait.”
“Balkan Erotic Epic” is a new turn for Abramovic: a work of performance art, in which the audience is free to wander around at will, that also features film, animation and theater elements like choreography, elaborate costumes, scenography, music and lighting design.
Performance art is different from theater, Abramovic said: “Performance is the real deal; life is life, blood is blood.” But she added that when she had branched out to into the theater — to create Robert Willson’s “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic” and her own opera, “7 Deaths of Maria Callas” — she realized that she could “go just as deep as a character, tap into the same vulnerability, unanswered questions or pain. I want to do this in ‘Balkan Erotic’ — not invent anything.”
The first scene the audience will encounter, Abramovic said, is “Tito’s Funeral,” a chest-beating, sung lament for the leader of communist Yugoslavia, where Abramovic grew up as the daughter of fervent party supporters.
Her mother, Danica Abramovic, is there, too, she said, played by Maria Stamenkovic Herranz, the only performer who moves between the scenes. “My mother never kissed me, never touched me,” Abramovic said. “In this piece, something emotional starts happening with her; I can liberate her in a way she couldn’t be in life.”
Abramovic, who turns 80 next year, has drawn frequently on her Balkan origins throughout her career. In 1997, when she was still little known outside the rarefied spheres of performance art, she spent four days scrubbing bloody cow bones and singing folk songs in a dank basement at the Venice Biennale for “Balkan Baroque,” an expression of ambivalence about her homeland that won her the Golden Lion, the Biennale’s top award. After making a film, “Balkan Erotic,” in 2005, showing folkloric rituals involving breasts and genitals, she kept reading and thinking about the subject, she said.
“I wanted to do something very large-scale,” she said, citing her experience at the 2024 Glastonbury music festival, where, dressed like a white-robed priestess, she led 250,000 people in a seven-minute silence.
“It was unbelievable, to feel that kind of energy from the public,” she said. “After that, I wanted a larger audience.” She added, “I am ready to show something surprising, disturbing, painful, melancholic, humorous, happy.”
Bettina Busse, the curator of a new exhibition about Abramovic that opens this week at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, said that the artist’s preoccupation with her heritage was “consistent, but she doesn’t do the same things. She can’t perform like she did when she was 65 — you need a lot of physical strength — and she needs challenges.” She added, “I think for her this is a new start and a new part of her work.”
Initially, the work was closer to a conventional theater piece, said John McGrath, the artistic director of Factory International, an arts organization based in Aviva Studios that is coproducing the work with the Park Avenue Armory and other partners.
“Marina came to do a workshop here, and within about 10 days had come up with a whole series of scenes” conceived for the stage, he said. Then she decided to use the entirety of Aviva Studio’s 28,000-square-foot warehouse space. It’s expensive and technically challenging, he said. “But the capacity to make this kind of work is vanishingly rare these days, and our whole purpose is to show artists who take risks.”
Abramovic said that she had started “with maybe around 300 rituals,” eventually paring back to 13, drawn from all over the Balkans. Once there was a concept for each scene, rehearsals were overseen by Billy Zhao, a curator from the Marina Abramovic Institute who specializes in long-duration performances. “Most of the time, Marina leaves us to develop things,” he said. “Then she will come in, and push things and edit.”
For the dancers, this was a new way of working, said Blenard Azizaj, an Albanian choreographer, who has created long passages that repeat on a loop over the four hours.
“Dancers are used to having a structured time of performance,” he said. “Here, they have a different reality, and it’s super-beautiful, this sense of infinite time.”
The rehearsals have been both exhausting and thrilling, said Alison Matthews, one of the performers in the “Scaring the Gods scene. “The process is just doing the action repeatedly — in this case, lifting your skirt. But how fast, how fierce, how gentle?” she said. “These are all ways Marina and Billy have invited us to try.”
Abramovic, Matthews added, is “really determined to show the erotic as a portal into cycles of life, not as commercially sexual.” In a sense, she said, Abramovic was working like a theater director, though in that scene, it felt “more like being in a painting. She knows what she wants aesthetically.”
As the premiere drew closer, Abramovic said she was “kind of happy-panicking.” “I have done everything I could possibly do,” she added: Now it was time to “leave it to other performers.”
“In my own work, I know everything in detail,” she said. “Here I don’t. But this is why it is so special.”
She said she planned to continue performing, however — “I already have an idea about something for my 80th” — and teased that she might even make an appearance in “Balkan Erotic Epic”
“I love old age,” she said. “I suffered so much when I was young. Now, every day is like a miracle.”
Balkan Erotic Epic
Oct. 9-19 at Aviva Studios in Manchester, England; factoryinternational.org.
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