Pierrot Lunaire

Sun. Apr 26, 2015 at 5:00pm EDT
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Pierrot Lunaire

2014. Germany. Directed by Bruce LaBruce. With Susanne Sachsse, Maria Ivanenko, Boris Lisowski, Krishna Kumar Krishnan. 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!” 51 min.

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Venue Details
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The Museum of Modern Art Theater 2 11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019