Frank Wedekind’s turn-of-the-century Lulu plays are among the most produced and researched dramas in the German theatre canon. Despite the lead role’s predominance in the text and the resulting ...centrality of the actress in performances, criticism and scholarship regularly attribute primary significance in the production and reception of the Lulu plays, and even of the character Lulu, to Wedekind and given male directors. The association of famous directors like G.W. Pabst and Robert Wilson with influential theatre and film productions has only exaggerated the tendency. This essay argues that in the 2004 Lulu at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, director Michael Thalheimer and lead actress Fritzi Haberlandt engaged a dramaturgy of excess that challenged such conventions of attributed authority. It analyzes Haberlandt and Thalheimer’s work together with prominent Lulus from 2011 and 2019, which also deployed excess in their production and performance practices but in very different ways and with very different effects. Each production comprised a notable director/actress pairing (Thalheimer and Haberlandt; Wilson and Angela Winkler; and Stefan Pucher and Lilith Stangenberg, respectively) and attained a significant degree of public and critical attention. Through these Lulus and Lulus, the essay examines how dramaturgies of excess can advance or hinder an actress’s individual performance interventions with significant impact on the overall aesthetic and political efficacy of a theatre production.
The dance performance of Hans Henning Paar's Lulu—Eine Monstretragödie (Lulu—A monster tragedy) in Münster in 2014 joined a long legacy of adaptations of Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays (1895/1904). ...Paar's casting and staging choices, which include having multiple dancers in the role of Lulu as well as incorporating the technologies of projection and the mirror, stage an embodied intervention into the long-held interpretation of Lulu as a projection of male fantasy. They open the possibility of instead apprehending Lulu, the person and the literary work, as a multiplicity. I bring Paar's choreography into conversation with other dance adaptations, the legacy of casting the role of Lulu, and prior Lulu scholarship and argue for conceiving of Paar's Lulu as a Braidottian nomadic subject that is nonunitary, dynamic, and in-process. This performance and its particular conception of Lulu complicate traditional readings, inviting audiences to critically reflect on dynamics of gender, sexuality, class, and power raised in the plays and their adaptations.
Neste artigo, levantamos as vicissitudes no processo de tornar-se mulher, tomando como pressuposto a aposta psicanalítica de que é na puberdade que haverá a escansão sexual. Abordamos a adolescência ...como um processo de sexuação decorrente do Édipo. Se, no caso dos meninos, a identificação ao pai é suficiente, as meninas precisam de um trabalho a mais. Partiremos das personagens adolescentes Wendla e Ilse, na peça O despertar da Primavera de Frank Wedekind, para examinar os impasses e as saídas próprios à construção da feminilidade, inventados por cada uma diante do real pulsional.
Drafting words into sentences into paragraphs into pages is for many scholars a solitary task, but I tend to dwell on the social aspects of this process: collective generation of ideas, debate with ...interlocutors, citation, and revision with audiences and co-creators both real and imagined. ...I come to Theatre Journal as coeditor energized by the possibilities of collaboration. The author identifies these techniques with the writer as well as the rest of the production team. ...thanks to Brian Kite and the UCLA theatre department for recognizing the importance of editorial work and their material support of Theatre Journal.
...that we have nothing but his works, will we not recognize in them a river of fire? —Jacques Lacan1 In “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren” (Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, 1907), one of the few ...talks Sigmund Freud ever gave to a literary audience, the psychoanalyst explored the nature of literary imagination and aesthetic pleasure.2 It took Freud only about twenty minutes to get his message across to the ninety or so listeners present, in terms the local press the day after reported to have been “subtle and at times clairvoyant”: the poet resembling a selfish fantasist and creative writing analogous to the act of daydreaming, literature’s power lies above all in its ability to allow adult readers an orderly, yet shameless and pleasurable, experience of otherwise repressed wishes and memories of childhood play.3 Freud had begun developing this thesis earlier and would remain interested in it well after his 1907 talk, for his assessment of the function of literature formed part of his more general conviction that modern culture is the product of a renunciation of deep-seated psychological drives.4 This assertion and the heuristic tools psychoanalysis offered to unearth such drives attracted a wide variety of modernist authors and artists to Freud. Along with Adolf Josef Storfer, to whom we will return, Heller is largely forgotten in the histories of both modernism and psychoanalysis.9 In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, Heller was known throughout the German-speaking art and literary world. Running a shop which had opened in 1905 on the Bauernmarkt in Vienna and which distributed books and periodicals on art, literature, and culture intended for children, women, and men, Heller catered mostly to bibliophiles and graphic art buffs through his journal Neue Blätter für Literatur und Kunst (later named Wiener Kunst-und Buchschau), which set out to fight against “kitsch in art and literature, against clichés and mass production.” 11 To distinguish his establishment from the roughly 2,000 bookshops in Austria around the turn of the century, Heller set up many initiatives.12 In the summer of 1906, Heller reached out to the Viennese intellectual and literary crowd with a survey asking to recommend ten good books, the responses to which were published in 1907 in a volume introduced by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.13 The thirty-two respondents included Hermann Bahr, spokesman of the avant-garde Young Vienna group, Schnitzler, Rilke, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse, and physicist Ernst Mach, among others.
This document, A TD’s Awakening: A Technical Direction Thesis on Spring Awakening, is a detailed description of the technical direction process for Southern Illinois University Department of ...Theater’s Fall 2017 production of Spring Awakening: A New Musical. Chapter One dives into script analysis and includes a scene breakdown and technical requirements for the production as well as a discussion of the goals I wished to accomplish with this project. Chapter Two details the development of the design for the production and examines the monetary and time budgets for the scenic units. Chapter 3 is a detailed account of the production process, including any challenges that arose and how they were resolved. Chapter 4 reflects on the goals mentioned in the first chapter and what aspects of the production I would have done differently. Also included in this document are appendices that include the build schedule, the budget sheets, scenic designer’s drafting, construction and assembly drawings, and production photos.
The article analyses the literary and cultural layers of Lulu, the album published by Lou Reed in collaboration with Metallica, based on Frank Wedekind’s two modernist dramas: Earth Spirit (1895) and ...Pandora’s Box (1904). In Reed’s reinterpretation, the two plays become his means through which he enters the area of disturbing perversion and graphic pornography. Consequently, Reeds seems to follow Susan Sontag’s diagnosis according to which the goal of pornographic literature is to disorient and to disturb mental balance. In the case of Lulu, it demonstrates Reed’s strategies of crossing the borders between what is commonly accepted and what is rejected because of its non-normative quality. It results in multilayered kinkiness that outreaches the literary frames of the project and makes it possible to view Lulu as a piece of art that is both uncompromising and visionary.
Formations such as gangs stand in a complex relationship to other, more conventional or socially normative groupings and collectives, such as the family. This article probes the gang’s function as a ...kind of alternative family and as a lens through which to view the relationship between family and non-family groupings. The tension between family and non-family is examined at the intersection between utopian order and Dionysian disorder as the gang incorporates elements of both. Drawing primarily on the utopian/dystopian fantasy of the German fin-de-siècle author Frank Wedekind, with reference also to other texts of the period (Thomas Mann, Alfred Kubin), and to 21st century cinematic reworkings of Wedekind (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, John Irvin), the article studies the Dionysian/utopian interface through the gang while conversely thinking the gang as a kind of Dionysian utopia, a in which family structures are undone in the name of an alternative erotic collective.
Lulu geht Petersen, Peter
Archiv für Musikwissenschaft,
07/2015, Volume:
72, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
"Lulu" can be considered a mythological sister of "Undine." In the same way that the mermaid in Ingeborg Bachmann's story "Undine Goes" (Undine geht) denies herself to the human world, the abused and ...mentally tortured Lulu in Peter Konwitschny's interpretation of Alban Berg is allowed to walk off at the end—contrary to Frank Wedekind's original intention. In his 2003 production of the two-act version in Hamburg, Konwitschny implements inventive staging to obfuscate the work's fragmentary character. Providing a correspondence to Berg's oscillation between coarse and refined musical idioms, he juxtaposes bawdy, even vulgar, streetwalking scenes and formal social settings in evening and concert dress.
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