by A long time ago, Marina Otero decided that she would film her life until she dies as part of an attempt, her pain and her preoccupation with death. “I was sure that redemption was in art,” she says. When she suffered a mental breakdown in 2022, the Argentine choreographer decided to record.
“It seemed interesting to me and taking up the darkest parts of a person,” says Otero Guardian about Zoom from Madrid, where she is.
Her collapse had several causes, she says: “The cliché of the Midlife crisis, paired with unstable trips and a relationship with a narcissistic man who intensifies my longstanding dependence on men and the fear of loneliness.” After that, a border personality disorder was diagnosed with her.
Otero created her breakdown material to create me, her show about “Madness for Love” (or, as she puts it, “Locura Por Amor”) came to Australia as part of the Rising Festival from Melbourne in June.
In it and four female dancer jewels with their own experiences with mental diseases-they stories and have painful experiences, which Otero describes as “attempt to end up with psychological disorders”. Otero has also installed biographical details about the love and mental illnesses of other women, which she knows.
It is more playful than it sounds: there are naked dance numbers, roller skating and a versatile soundtrack that extends from stream to Miley Cyrus. In one sequence, the four dancers struts the stage naked with the exception of white boots and knee switches with plastic guns: on a mission to kill romantic love before killing them.
According to Otero, the decision to fill four women was an ironic comment on the “crazy woman”. In real life, every woman had to have a “relationship” to a personality disorder. Some have their own psychiatric diagnoses. In the show, Otero jokes that she and the dancers together to embody the DSM (the diagnostic and statistical manual for mental disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association).
In the meantime, a male dancer channel the spirit of the Russian ballet virtualuoso Vaslav Nijinsky, who had schizophrenia. “His megalomania, who has to do with someone who believes that they are something special who is God and speaks to God, fascinated this relationship,” says Otero. “I reinvent Nijinsky in the play that his problem was a surplus of love and that the surplus led to death.”
Kill Me, which was premiered in France in 2024, is part of Otero’s ongoing autobiographical art project Recordar Para Vivir (remember to live), which you described as a “endless work about my life in which I am my own object of research”. The 2012 with Andrea, the history of a woman who “danced all her whole life to talk about certain things”, often laid out on Otero’s personal archive of the film material when the dancer worked out her traumas and neuroses on stage.
In the memory -Live cycle, Kill Me is the last episode of a trilogy of works that examine personal transformation, Fuck Me (2020) and Love Me (2022).
“Every work somehow confronts me with a kind of self -destruction,” says Otero.
In Fuck Me, Otero dealt with the connection between her family history and the military dictatorship of the Argentina in the 70s and 80s. Otero’s grandfather, who died at the age of 15, had been a marine secret service officer during this time. “He had told me that” secrets that are held until death “, a phrase that he often repeated me and that the expression of the seeds of the piece was,” she says.
While she developed fuck me, Otero was subjected to a spine surgery that made her unable to move, and made her to occupy five male dancers to take her place – all of them played military seafarers and completely naked.
Experience also impressed the work in a deeper way: “[In the show] I have a connection between my grandfather’s secrets, what was hidden in my family and the paralysis of the body, ”she says.
In her solo work, I love what was premiered in Buenos Aires “as a farewell to the country” and returned to the stage and spoke about the effects of spine surgery on her sex and love life.
In Kill Me the dancer became a choreographer and director an middle way, appears on the stage, but has also used the help of other dancers.
After trying to walk a few years ago, says Otero, now 41, says she feels fit again. Although they have not yet danced again, she does boxing training every day to prepare for her next “very ambitious and very complex project” (for now under closure). Not sure at this stage whether she can dance at work, she says: “I will bring my body to work in any way.”
After leaving Argentina to search for new adventures and meet new people, she is also not sure whether she will ever return if she attacked attacks on the freedom of speech by right -wing extremist President Javier Milei. “[He’s] A horror … he destroys everything, ”she says.
In the meantime, Otero continues to accept the artistic possibilities of doubt: “Whatever happens to me, I will question everything,” she says.
“The most important thing for me is that the pieces transform me and bring me to another place, another life experience.”
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Kill Me will play from June 5th to June 8th as part of the Rising Festival in Sumner Southbank Theater in Melbourne
