Marina Abramović's entertaining ode to nudity at the Liceu

There aren't many artists from the performance who have exhibited their work at MoMA in New York (The artist is presentAnd surely Marina Abramović is the first to have filled the stage of the Gran Teatre del Liceu with naked bodies with a proposal entitled Balkan Erotic Epic (Balkan erotic epic) which the audience applauded generously on their feet. The importance of nudity in this production was confirmed in the final glories when Marina Abramović emerged hand in hand with the choreographer (his is the most outstanding work) and a performer In the buff, as it's commonly called. And we ask ourselves: "Is this nudity the provocative or disconcerting element at the heart of the performance?" Has the creator taken a leap into a more accessible visual spectacle, replacing the strange, the inexplicable, with the obvious?

In any case, the show, which premiered last October in a Manchester warehouse and which the artist has revised for the Italian version at the Liceu, is less of an epic and more akin to a light anthropological treatise (there's a scientist who explains it) on the customs and spells of animate beings. However, it's not all nudity, as there are some less carnal additions, such as the knife dance or the cheerful and charming soiree in the village bar (Kafana) where the good Balkan music (which provided the only spontaneous applause of the performance for the singer Aleksandar Timotic) accompanies the dreamed-of liberation of the director's mother in a very decorous striptease; or the final scene (Ancestors) with a traditional dance under the winter snow that closes with the creator's sole intervention.

The music, along with the choreography, is one of the cornerstones of the production. The performance opens with a wedding and funeral band entering through the Liceu's central aisle in a funeral tribute by Abramović to General Tito, the architect of Yugoslavia, so longed for by the director, and with the hermetic and hieratic presence of the rigorously uniformed mother. A presence that is maintained throughout the three-hour performance. Murmurs among the audience arise as the curtain rises, revealing a forest of gigantic phalluses that give way to the explanation of the rituals (scaring the gods to stop the rain by displaying vaginas on the ground and in the air), magic potions (with pubic hair and menstrual blood), and concoctions—not a few laughs. There's also the funeral of a bachelor (naked, obviously) and the long, beautiful lovemaking between women, and a few men, with the skeletons of their loved ones in a cemetery. But in the end, where's the promised eroticism? Good entertainment. Big applause.