Balkan Erotic Epic

3tpt, 3tubas, 2perc, 1acc, female singer (folk music), female voice, counter tenor, performer, pre-recorded choir

Balkan Erotic Epic is the title Marina Abramovic has given her latest performance work, conceived especially for the Aviva Studios in Manchester. Comprising fourteen scenes, the installation sees the artist engage with the spirituality and eroticism of traditional fertility rites – not only those of her Serbian homeland, but of the entire Balkan region. Intimately interwoven with the music of Marko Nikodijevic and Luka Kozlovacki – which, alongside newly composed sections, draws extensively upon the montage and arrangement of Balkan folk traditions – the performance acquires the character of a primordial ritual. Seventy performers – dancers, musicians and singers – conjure through song and movement invocations that hark back to ancient myth. At the very heart of Abramovic’s striking performance lies the human body itself – with eroticism, sexuality and corporeal interconnectedness escalating into imagery that is, at times, profoundly disquieting.
This provocative and sensual work stands seamlessly within the continuum of the legendary artist’s oeuvre, in which she persistently explores the boundaries of human experience, sexuality, violence and inherited behavioural codes – always in dialogue with political and societal realities, as well as with notions of liberation and transformation. Marko Nikodijevic, together with sound designer Luka Kozlovacki, has created a score that, as an integral element, deepens and intensifies the power of the visual images. The live music, interlaced with electronic sound layers, generates through its resonant overlays an extraordinary expansion of perspectives and interpretative possibilities within this remarkable work – a performance that unfurls like a vast labyrinth throughout the expansive Aviva Studios in Manchester.
Balkan Erotic Epic is being produced in two formats: as an installation (the Warehouse Version), lasting approximately four hours, and as a theatre version, conceived for the opera stage, with a performance length of one hundred minutes.