Marina Abramović is regarded as the world’s most influential performance artist and has created transformative work at the Armory that has captivated audiences and critics alike including The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (2013) and Goldberg (2015), which both beautifully documented her upbringing and her artistic practice. She returns with the highly anticipated North American premiere of her largest-scale performance work to date, combining dance, song, and ritual to explore desire, spirituality, cultural tradition, and our connection to nature. Born in the Balkans and deeply influenced by its sacred practices, Abramović revisits ancient mythologies and folklore related to the erotic rituals of the region, rediscovering the past and presenting it in a new light. Brought to life by a cast of nearly 50 performers including dancers, musicians, and singers, the bold, new Armory commission unfolds across thirteen visceral scenes, each drawing on ancestral traditions, legends, and beliefs focusing on the erotic not as mere provocation, but as a vital spiritual and life force. Audiences are invited to navigate the Wade Thompson Drill Hall freely, encountering intimate performances, feverish dances, and haunting songs. The resulting durational performance work merges elements of performative tradition with sensuality and eroticism, removing the modern associations with pornography or taboo to highlight the limits of human experience and reclaim the body as a site of power, mystery, and transformation.
Audience Role
Viewer.
Ages: 18 +
This production is 18+ only, and contains full nudity and graphic sexual scenes.
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6
Events
3
Years on EI
About Park Avenue Armory
Part palace, part industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory fills a critical void in the cultural ecology of New York, supporting unconventional works in the performing and visual arts that cannot be fully realized in a traditional proscenium theater, concert hall, or white wall gallery. With its soaring 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall and an array of exuberant period rooms, the Armory enables a diverse range of artists to create, students to explore, and audiences to experience epic, adventurous, relevant work that cannot be done elsewhere in New York.