“Later on, I knew everything about her,” Ms. Abramovic said. “I read eight biographies, all of them, and there was so much similarity that I see in myself. We are Sagittarius, the same; we had bad mothers. And then, also, this incredible intensity in the emotions, that she can be fragile, and strong at the same time.”

For “7 Deaths of Maria Callas,” Ms. Abramovic selected the arias, beginning with “Addio del passato” from “La Traviata” and reaching a climax with “Casta Diva” from “Norma,” to reflect those emotional states, and she worked with the music video director Nabil Elderkin to develop the short films, which play onstage while the singers perform live. Last November, she flew to Los Angeles to record the films with Mr. Dafoe.

In an interview, Mr. Dafoe said he had gotten to know Ms. Abramovic when he was acting with the Wooster Group, the experimental New York theater company. In the early 2000s, Ms. Abramovic was living in a co-op in the same downtown building as the theater, and she would come to see its shows. The two became friends and later collaborated on “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic,” a stage work by the avant-garde director Robert Wilson.

In six of the videos, Mr. Dafoe plays Ms. Abramovic’s lover or assassin; in all of them, Ms. Abramovic dies. In one, Mr. Dafoe handles a python that strangles Ms. Abramovic, to the strains of the “Ave Maria” Desdemona sings shortly before being throttled by the title character in Verdi’s “Otello.”

“I’ve known her for years, and I like being part of her work,” Mr. Dafoe said. “If she wants me to kill her, well, that’s quite an honor.”

In another video, Mr. Dafoe stabs Ms. Abramovic to the Habanera from “Carmen.” Susan McClary, a professor of musicology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said in an interview that Bizet’s opera had established the trope of the tragic heroine who gets murdered onstage. Women had died in opera from the art form’s beginnings, she said, but the audience didn’t see it until the 19th century.