‘I was sure salvation lay in art’: Marina Otero on loss of life, dance and psychological sickness

Long in the past, Marina Otero made up our minds she would movie her existence till she dies, as a part of an try to perceive her ache and her preoccupation with loss of life. “I was sure that salvation lay in art,” she says. So when she suffered a psychological breakdown in 2022, the Argentinian choreographer made up our minds to stay recording.

“It seemed interesting to me, recording the darkest parts of a person,” Otero tells Guardian over Zoom from Madrid, the place she is based totally.

Her breakdown had a number of reasons, she says: “The cliche of the midlife crisis, coupled with unstable travel and a relationship with a narcissistic man, which exacerbated my longstanding dependence on men and fear of loneliness.” Afterwards, she used to be recognized with borderline persona dysfunction.

Otero drew on her breakdown pictures to create Kill Me, her display about “madness for love” (or, as she places it, “locura por amor”), coming to Australia in June as a part of Melbourne’s Rising competition.

In it, she and 4 feminine dancers – each and every with their very own reviews of psychological sickness – proportion tales and re-enact painful reviews, in what Otero describes as an “attempt to poetise mental disorder”. Otero has additionally integrated biographical information about love and psychological sickness from different girls she is aware of.

It’s extra playful than it sounds: there’s nude dance numbers, rollerskating and an eclectic soundtrack that levels from Bach to Miley Cyrus. In one series, the 4 dancers strut the degree nude with the exception of for white boots and knee pads, wielding plastic pistols: on a undertaking to kill romantic love earlier than it kills them.

Otero says the verdict to forged 4 girls used to be an ironic remark at the “mad woman” cultural trope. Each lady used to be required to have a “relationship” with a character dysfunction in actual existence; some have their very own psychiatric diagnoses. In the display, Otero jokes that she and the dancers in combination embrace the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, revealed by means of the American Psychiatric Association).

Meanwhile, a male dancer channels the spirit of the Russian ballet virtuoso Vaslav Nijinsky, who had schizophrenia. “His megalomania, which has to do with someone who believes they’re special, who is God and speaks to God, that relationship fascinated me,” Otero says. “I reinvent Nijinsky in the play, that his problem was an excess of love, and excess led to death.”

Kill Me, which premiered in France in 2024, is a part of Otero’s ongoing autobiographical artwork venture Recordar para vivir (Remember to Live), which she has described as “an endless work about my life in which I am my own object of research”. Kicking off in 2012 with Andrea, the tale of a girl who “danced her whole life to avoid talking about certain things”, the frame of labor has ceaselessly drawn on Otero’s private archive of pictures, because the dancer labored out her traumas and neuroses on degree.

Within the Remember to Live cycle, Kill Me is the general instalment of a trilogy of works exploring private transformation, following Fuck Me (2020) and Love Me (2022).

“Each work somehow confronts me with a way of self-destruction,” Otero says.

In Fuck Me, Otero delved into the relationship between her circle of relatives historical past and Argentina’s army dictatorship within the 70s and 80s. Otero’s grandfather, who died when she used to be 15, have been a naval intelligence officer throughout that technology. “He had told me that there are ‘secrets that are kept until death’, a phrase he repeated to me many times, and that phrase was the seed of the play,” she says.

While she used to be creating Fuck Me, Otero underwent spinal surgical treatment that left her not able to transport, main her to forged 5 male dancers to take her position – all enjoying army seamen and entirely nude.

The enjoy inflected the paintings in additional profound techniques, too: “[In the show] I make a link between my grandfather’s secrets, what was hidden in my family, and the paralysis of the body,” she says.

In her solo paintings Love Me, which premiered in Buenos Aires “as a farewell to the country”, Otero returned to the degree, talking concerning the have an effect on of the spinal operation on her intercourse and love existence.

In Kill Me, the dancer grew to become choreographer and director cuts a center trail, showing on degree but in addition enlisting the assistance of different dancers.

Having struggled to stroll only a few years in the past, Otero, now 41, says she is feeling are compatible once more; whilst she will be able to’t but dance once more, she is doing boxing coaching on a daily basis in preparation for her subsequent “very ambitious and very complex project” (beneath wraps for now). Unsure at this degree whether or not she’s going to be capable to dance within the paintings, she says, “I will be putting my body to work in some way”.

Having left Argentina to hunt new adventures and meet new folks, she may be undecided if she’s going to ever go back, given assaults on freedom of speech by means of far-right president Javier Milei. “[He’s] a horror … he’s destroying everything,” she says.

In the intervening time, Otero continues to embody the creative chances of doubt: “Whatever happens to me, I’m going to question everything,” she says.

“The most important thing for me is that the pieces transform me and take me to another place, to another life experience.”

• Kill Me is enjoying on the Sumner Southbank theatre, Melbourne, from 5-8 June as a part of the Rising competition