poster

Pierrot Lunaire

58% | Feb 09, 2014
Music Drama

Invited by the conductor Premil Petrovic to stage Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a musical theater work from 1912 based on the poems of Albert Giraud, LaBruce transposed a strange and tragic episode of true crime onto the composition. Complementing the original atonal score is a narrative about a trans man who is outed by his girlfriend’s father and forbidden from seeing the young woman again. Crestfallen, the protagonist decides to prove the fact of his manhood by castrating a taxi driver and then revealing his newly transplanted member to the two of them. This story, which for LaBruce “serves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order,” is rendered in a visual style that nods to the era of Schoenberg’s melodrama. LaBruce cheekily appropriates the formal vocabulary of silent cinema with black-and-white photography, irises, and intertitles like “A cock, a cock, my kingdom for a cock!”

Featured Crew

crew
Bruce LaBruce
Director
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Tomas Liska
Producer
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Arnold Schönberg
Original Music Composer
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Anna Mülter
Producer
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Claus Matthes
Producer
crew
Albert Giraud
Poem
crew
Tomas Liska
Director of Photography
crew
Ismail Necmi
Director of Photography
crew
Jürgen Brüning
Producer
crew
Bruce LaBruce
Writer
crew
Bruce LaBruce
Producer

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