Long ago, Marina Otero decided she would film her life until she dies, as part of an attempt to understand her pain and her preoccupation with death. “I was sure that salvation lay in art,” she says. So when she suffered a mental breakdown in 2022, the Argentinian choreographer decided to keep recording.
“It seemed interesting to me, recording the darkest parts of a person,” Otero tells Guardian over Zoom from Madrid, where she is based.
Her breakdown had several causes, 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 was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
Otero drew on her breakdown footage to create Kill Me, her show about “madness for love” (or, as she puts it, “locura por amor”), coming to Australia in June as part of Melbourne’sRising festival.
In it, she and four female dancers – each with their own experiences of mental illness – share stories and re-enact painful experiences, in what Otero describes as an “attempt to poetise mental disorder”. Otero has also incorporated biographical details about love and mental illness from other women she knows.
It’s more playful than it sounds: there’s nude dance numbers, rollerskating and an eclectic soundtrack that ranges from Bach to Miley Cyrus. In one sequence, the four dancers strut the stage nude except for white boots and knee pads, wielding plastic pistols: on a mission to kill romantic love before it kills them.
Otero says the decision to cast four women was an ironic comment on the “mad woman” cultural trope. Each woman was required to have a “relationship” with a personality disorder in real life; some have their own psychiatric diagnoses. In the show, Otero jokes that she and the dancers together embody the DSM (theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by 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 part of Otero’s ongoing autobiographical art project 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 story of a woman who “danced her whole life to avoid talking about certain things”, the body of work has often drawn on Otero’s personal archive of footage, as the dancer worked out her traumas and neuroses on stage.
Within the Remember to Live cycle, Kill Me is the final instalment of a trilogy of works exploring personal 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 connection between her family history and Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 70s and 80s. Otero’s grandfather, who died when she was 15, had been a naval intelligence officer during that era. “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 was developing Fuck Me, Otero underwent spinal surgery that left her unable to move, leading her to cast five male dancers to take her place – all playing military seamen and completely nude.
The experience inflected the work in more profound ways, 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 work Love Me, which premiered in Buenos Aires “as a farewell to the country”, Otero returned to the stage, speaking about the impact of the spinal operation on her sex and love life.
In Kill Me, the dancer turned choreographer and director cuts a middle path, appearing on stage but also enlisting the help of other dancers.
Having struggled to walk just a few years ago, Otero, now 41, says she is feeling fit again; while she can’t yet dance again, she is doing boxing training each day in preparation for her next “very ambitious and very complex project” (under wraps for now). Unsure at this stage whether she will be able to dance in the work, she says, “I will be putting my body to work in some way”.
Having left Argentina to seek new adventures and meet new people, she is also unsure if she will ever return, given attacks on freedom of speech by far-right president Javier Milei. “[He’s] a horror … he’s destroying everything,” she says.
In the meantime, Otero continues to embrace the artistic possibilities 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 Meis playing at the Sumner Southbank theatre, Melbourne, from 5-8 June as part of the Rising festival