STAGING STRANGENESS
I’ve probably seen a hundred plays in New York City – Broadway, off-Broadway, and amateur. But I’ve never seen a level of stagecraft as high as at that in Robert Wilson’s opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramowic at the Armory. This piece is essentially a vanity production that stars the artist as herself. It’s more biographical than philosophical, and locates the roots of her complex body-centric art in predictable traumas including a wicked mother, a feeling of not being pretty enough, and a lover’s abandonment. The show mixes forms: music, film, fashion, poetry and dance. But it’s most remarkable for its stage sets and lighting, which plunge us into a series of worlds that are, as my friend described, “painfully gorgeous." The narrative recreates episodes from the artist’s life, and each unfolds onstage in a tableau as cunningly crafted as a fashion editorial. Actors are positioned on the broad, high black stage with geometric clarity, and brushed with cool white neon light that accentuates their acrid-colored costumes and stark kabuki-like make-up.
I’ve never seen scenes as archly beautiful as these. There is a man in yellow pajamas in bed under a sky full of pie-sized foil stars. There is a lady in a red feather-tipped gown on a chaise lounge who floats, carelessly, to sea. And there is, most thrillingly, a kind of surrealist playground, with four isolated, mime-type figures on stage at once: a man perched a swing, a lady spinning from a rope clenched in her mouth, a naked girl rolling down a staircase, and a clown anxiously dancing in place. Each scene in the play is brilliantly composed and, ultimately, empty, because it conveys no narrative or emotion. A whole lot of strange things happen on stage (figures run back and forth at back, drop down on harnesses, and join up in a parade to march away) and we don’t ask ourselves why. This strangeness isn’t like that in a David Lynch movie, which, similarly ravishing visually, erupts from puckers in ordinary life. And this strangeness isn’t like that in a Pina Bausch dance, which emerges from fevered concentration on a single action. Wilson here seems to be to producing strangeness for its own sake. Nothing in this production really gets at life and death of Marina Abramowic, or at the deep themes in her art. It’s all very pretty decoration.
Photograph © Lucie Jansch, courtesy of The Armory.