Bob Wilson´s Life & Death of Marina Abramovic follows the coming together of director Robert Wilson, performance artist Marina Abramovic, singer and composer Antony Hegarty and performer Willem Dafoe, to create the experimental opera based on Marina Abramovic´s biography. Through rehearsal footage and interviews with the artists as they are making the piece, we get an insight into this unique collaboration: an intimate portrait that reveals the dynamics, excitement and insecurities of making such a poetic and visually stunning theatre work.
"When I heard that Robert Wilson was going to make an opera on Marina Abramovic´s biography, I wondered 'where will the master of artifice meet the mother of reality? Will they marry theatre with performance art or will it be a fight between titans?' Two years later, I realize that what happened is much more mysterious and magic than any answer to my questions. The terrain where Bob Wilson, Marina Abramovic, Antony Hegarty and Willem Dafoe met is a proscenium populated with Abramovic´s life, its characters and ghosts, but also with the lives, characters and ghosts of all the people who worked on it. A chorus of extraordinary artists and musicians contributed in a variety of ways, from epic Balkan chants to electronic music, from dance to vaudeville, to durational performance. The result is so sublime that every time that The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic plays somewhere, even the public sees their life and death on the stage: Marina is the landscape, Bob the mind, Antony the heart, Willem the body. I had the great fortune to closely observe and film this extremely intense artistic collaboration, in which I think all the participants were intimately transformed." (Giada Colagrande)
Giada Colagrande (Pescara, Italy, 1975) studied in Italy, Switzerland and Australia. In 1995 she moved to Rome where she began making videoart and documentaries on contemporary art. From 1997 to 2000 she joined the art project "Volume", making a series of video portraits of seven contemporary artists. After three short films, in 2002 she wrote, directed and starred in her first feature film Open my Heart, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, was in competition at the Tribeca Film Festival. In 2005 she directed Before It Had a Name, which she co-wrote and co-starred in with Willem Dafoe. The film opened at the Venice Days, was then showed in San Sebastian Film Festival. In 2010 she wrote and directed A Woman. It also premiered at the Venice Film Festival. In 2012 she made The Woman Dress, the third short film of the Prada series "The Miu Miu Women's Tales", and completed the feature length film Bob Wilson's Life and Death of Marina Abramovic. She is currently working on the film "The Abramovic Method".
