Marina Abramovic ‘Balkan Erotic Epic’

Manchester Aviva Studios

Oct 2026

Live review

Marina Abramovic’s latest piece is her most ambitious yet. A four-hour, theatrical piece of mind-boggling, thought-provoking, non-stop erotic cabaret that embraces eroticism, spirituality and the rituals of Balkan mythology and her own Balkan roots in a stunning spectacle. It unzips culture and the viewer inside out mentally and physically, whilst asking all the key eternal fundamental questions, and is somehow also total immersive entertainment.

In a world where most culture is now commodified, commercialised, redacted and reduced to five-second online blips, Marina Abramovic’s latest four-hour epic Balkan erotic is a full-on five senses sensual challenge that literally blows your mind with its possibilities. 

The Balkan artist born in Belgrade nearly 80 years ago has never compromised her spectacular vision. Her earlier performance art pieces pushed the barriers fromn sitting in silence opposite spectators for more than seven hundred hours to inviting members of the public to do whatever they wanted to her body with nails, matches and even a loaded gun. Her no-compromise vision has also seen her lie down inside a burning wooden star, consuming a kilogram of honey, followed by a litre of red wine, before self-mutilating, nearly asphyxiating or remaining motionless whilst a huge snake slithered over her body or screaming until she lost her voice. 

Her latest takes on these narrative jarring ideas and themes is on a grand scale with a cast of over seventy performers, singers, dancers and musicians delivering an exploration of the eroticism, spirituality and traditions of her homeland, drawing on Balkan culture and pagan rituals. Tonight’s epic is perhaps her most deeply challenging and her most personal deep diving into the sex and death mysticism of the Balkans, mixing its folk music imagery and shamanic ritualism into several ongoing pieces that are confrontational, colourful, and intriguing. Like her fellow Balkan neighbours Laibach it uses art as a mirror and a hammer in a provactive and intriguing manner in this case Laibach and think of the Balkans slice of erotic body electric.

It even deconstructs theatre.

There is no formal seating here! The audience is almost part of the show, wandering around from stage to stage, free to leave and go to the bar downstairs and come back for the last hour, or sit on the floor and get lost in the beatific bedlam. It’s disturbing and hilarious, colourful and evocative and erotic and deadpan hilarious.

As you enter the huge hall of the new Aviva building in Manchester – the perfect large-scale space for this kind of vision – you are immediately dislocated by the conflicting noise and images and the fake grass carpeting that makes you semi-stumble into an almost altered state. You are surrounded by several stages and bamboozled by the imagery that mixes the bare buttock and breast erotica with pubic hair thrust at every direction. There is a choir on a screen singing a Balkan chant for Tito’s funeral, deconstructing the marching, cheering, waving flags as some kind of repressed sex dance beyond the formal starch and the veihcle for the release of the repressed sexual energy of the state funeral. On the next stage there is a troupe of martial military dancers sword fighting and then a graveyard full of naked corpses rolling around with skeletons using their chests to ‘awaken the earth’ in a piece called ‘Massaging the Breast’ and this is just the entry point. 

Turn the corner you wander between the instillations hypnotised by the fleshy displays of scenes which include women traditional dancers pulling up their skirts showing their vaginas in ‘Scaring the Gods to Stop the Rain’, and 16-foot penises statues for ‘Magic Potions’   next to naked men fucking the ground and then a long narrow corridor with three shamanic figures twitching a mesmeric dance at the end which is hypnotic in its off kilter imagery. Finally, next to the pregnant woman being bathed in milk, you find a stage made to look like a seventies Balkan bar where time ticks slowly and people stare into the abyss before a slow erotic dance sparks into action between a starched, stern figure and a couple of the bar locals to wild swirling Balkan folk music played by a deranged oompah band.

It’s a whirling dervish of imagery and ideas that seem random but sinks into your psyche, twisting, turning, confronting and celebrating ritual, grappling with the primal and turning it all inside out.

The Bosch like bedlam eventually recedes as the Balkan brass band lead a Pied Piper dance of the audience out of the exit. Marina herself emerges in the Balkan bar in a long and meditative hug accompanied by a lone lament from a Trad folk singer in a moment of blissful near silence and stillness in the chaos and cacophony of not just Marina world but the whole world we inhabit as well with its endless noise and complex layers of ritual of primal. The moment of stillness brings meditative beauty to the cacaphony, a moment of tender humanity in the infernal din which is perhaps being the message in this beautiful four hour madness.