Marina Abramovic dies on stage

Marina Abramovic is due to stage her own funeral next month—ten nights in a row. The ceremony is part of the US debut of “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic” (Park Avenue Armory, 12-21 December), an opera that chronicles the performance artist’s childhood in communist Serbia, her difficult relationship with her mother and her own imagined death. The show’s director Robert Wilson restaged the elaborate production, which debuted in Manchester in 2011, to fill the Armory’s cavernous drill hall. The cast includes the actor Willem Dafoe, the singer Antony Hegerty (of Antony and the Johnsons) and, of course, Abramovic, who plays both herself and her mother.