Yesterday I took the train to Manchester to see Marina Abramovićs Balkan Erotic Epic, which I feel is incredibly fitting for my research paper. Although I’m not directly using her work, her use of ritual helps to enhance my view of art and ritual as a whole. I’m mainly looking at artworks that don’t explicitly call themselves rituals, or aren’t taking traditional ritual and bringing them into an art space like Abramovic has done. However the whole experience showed me the power of combining the two.

The entire piece had me lost in time and space. I remember as a child I had a habit of clock watching, I’d absent mindly check for the time almost to ground myself. Otherwise I’d have no concept of it, something that is apparently quite common in ADHD. Whilst in Aviva studios, I not only didn’t have access to the time or my phone, but I also didn’t get the urge to check. When ever my brain got slightly frustrated one of the nine performances that had begun around 20 minutes ago would start up again and I would feel like I was back to the beginning and had only been there for a couple of minutes.

Going off Van Genneps structure of Separation, liminality and integration that I’m using in my research paper, I wrote on my way to the performance, wrote immediately after to describe my liminal experience within the studios and now I will write my ‘integration’ section.

Here are the notes from my Journal:

Separation

I’m on a rainy train journey to Manchester. leaving from Birmingham New Street where I visit my partner. Already separate from my family home in Llanymynech, I separate further, alone, with neither my family or my boyfriend. I have never been to Manchester before. Actually I may have when I was a teenager for a concert once.

Disconnected from friends, family, lover and place. The train ripping me out of familiarity. Transporting me out of connection and into the unknown. I feel anxious, being alone. But it erases identity and throws me into liminal space to truly experience Abramovićs work.

I will be locking away my phone, another step away from identity, I will record my experience after it has happened.

Currently sitting in the atrium. Listening to Balkan folk song. It’s rhythmic, its sending me into a trance already. I’m surrounded by people I do not know. Sitting at a table with five people I have never met before in my life. I am both myself and not. I am cocooned in the unknown space. The only thing that reminds me of myself is my choice to eat a packet of crisps for dinner and the ‘Balkanberry Sour’ cocktail I’ve chosen to drink.

Liminoid Space/ Transition– Performance (written directly after on the train home)

How did I feel?

I felt free, unfiltered, unknown, immersed, part of the show, mesmerised, hypnotised. Time wasn’t being watched and time wasn’t watching me. It stopped being. Repeated plays made time feel cyclic, I would get impatient after an hour of performance and then I would hear them begin again. I’d be brought back in time, hooked, no one was stealing time from me.

Nudity became normal. Screeches became mine. An elderly woman screeched with the actresses from the audience and a young man told her to stop. He could handle the performance of women but not women in reality. The screeches were guttural. The shaking I have done in private thinking it to be illness, yet these women were practicing ritual and shaking just the same. I learnt how to dress a dead body. I felt sad for the loss of a man who is still here. Bodies intimately gyrating against skeletons in a grave yard. Massaging breasts. Ethereal.

Men penetrating the ground in fertility ritual, ignored, can’t look. Everyone could only look at the women.

Beating chest, singing over and over. Multiple songs all around. Sex with a gravestone cross.

Fierce women, fighting women, celibate women. Beautiful music, live music. I followed. I floated. I ended up just where I was meant to be