Nummer 99-1
Mieke Kolk
Historicity, Time, Space and the Other.
In case of postmodern theater: Berghaus versus Berg
"Where the historian reveals the ineffable dimensions of social order that the past could not control, the modern artist invests them in conscious designs that are not a product of change- in webbings of contradiction, ambivalence, and equivocation of language". (1988, XI)Quoted from the introduction to Michel de Certeau's The Writing of History , I want to explore these "quasi -identical" strategies for (post)modern European theatre in its slightly obsessive preoccupation with its classical heritage of drama texts. For me, the theatre-director is both a historian and an artist. In an endless stream of re-interpretations and rewritings of drama texts into performance texts, in and between different national traditions, a specific connection between the formalized historicity of a text and developments in historiography can in general be detected. Theatre history of the last century describes them as diachronic and synchronic interpreting positions of the theatre makers.
1. A positivist realistic tradition looks for universal analogies, what we share, often ending into a process of what Barthes calls "mythologizing", making natural what is historical.
2. A critical tradition accepts historical distance and differences between human beings in a (post)Brechtian sense, while trying to explain what still survives of political, cultural and socio-economic power relations.
3. An acknowledgement of a fundamental complexity and undecidability of the classical text appears in the broken forms of postmodern theater. Its program is twofold: to trace the unthinkable as the unsayable of the historical text, its 'ineffable dimensions of social order', and to present historicity as the effect of the past in the present. As Antoine Vitez says, "What we read is a kind of memory; this consists of making distorted elements reappear in our present life - in fact the correspondence between the individual and the social body". (Pavis,1992, 53) Instead of 'dusting off' a classical text, theatre theorist Patrice Pavis suggests that we analyse the historical dust itself, shifting from an idealistic notion of the permanence of men to the assumption of a historical displacement expressing the different worldviews that have been organizing the historical text.
It is also De Certeau who offers an insight into how to analyse and represent this historical dust when he writes about the process of historiography as "a perpetual dividing and suturing of past and present" in search of the unknown other -- an other unknown not only by geographical distance but also by an unretrievable past; a textual other as a necessary but silent unknown space changing in the progress of time. De Certeau mentions as silent others in European historiography: the Indian, the past, the people, the mad, the child, the third world.( Certeau, 1988,p 3) As absences in the text, they help to construct the intelligibility of what can be known. For the historical drama text, we have to reformulate this textual other. Since most classical drama deals with a confrontation between the individual and the social body, the (unknown) other is thematizised in the text just in its ungraspable difference crossing the legible boundaries of the text (Othello the Moor, Berenice the Palestinian, Woyzeck the poor soldier): the body of the other. The body as the other is inherent in every dramatic text since every text is meant to be represented by the bodies of the actors. These bodies, historically transformed from a seen body into a known body in a process of medical discursivity analysed by Michel Foucault, signal a return of the historical repressed. Twice repressed. In the historical acting-theories we read more than an ongoing process of 'civilization' as advisable conduct. The manuals offer also an artistic idealized behaviour-pattern, models of 'being' stretching as far as a strict inventorization of possible human passions and their prescription of expression, of representation. It is only in the 20th century that this highly artificial construction of the actor's body starts splitting up in an inner-psychological (Stanislavski), an outer-socialized (Brecht, Meyerhold) space, even a cultural liberated and holy space (Artaud, Grotowski), ending in the postmodern body as an abyss of historical, cultural and psycho-analytical discourses.
It is this abyss which leads to a process of fragmentation of subjectivity and a de-semantization of the intelligible body. Not only is this body separated from the text in a dialectical process of showing and telling, it is also lost in a non-mimetic, non-unifying space constructed by intertexts, or what Pavis formulates as a memory bank, a store of cultural references which no longer helps to construct the text as an intelligible historical event but functions as a practice of deconstruction of that intelligibility. In a shift from a unified artistic enunciated to an apparent incoherence of the postmodern theatre object, historicity is shown as a possible effect of the reception of the work of art, in its effect for the public. It is the public that has to find a coherence in the mode of construction and the enunciation of the theatre object, be it emotionally - rage/pleasure/incomprehension - or be it intellectually. Pavis uses the term 'theoretically' to point to the reflexive theatrical discourse in which theatre makers nowadays are involved.
In accepting these 'ineffable dimensions' of an historical social order as reflected in the drama texts and in a performative showing of contradictions and ambivalences in and between past and present, the postmodern theatre maker refuses to accept the further exclusion of the other, marked by De Certeau as 'the unthought', the unimaginable, which creates a unified subject - or in the sense of Lyotard a dominant 'we' against a not-we, a 'them'.
The analysis of this postmodern project has thus to fulfil certain conditions. Both the dramatic and the performance text must be considered as texts embedded in their cultural context, as products of ideological and strategic interventions of the author and director. The differences between these two systems of ordering signal the cultural and/or historical displacement between the two texts. In order to compare both organizing systems we need a theory which allows us to discover the ideological point of view of the makers in the structuring of different semantic spaces connected with the characters/actors in accordance with norms and values both reflecting the cultural/historical text and the artistic text. The cultural theory of structuralist/ semiotician Yuri Lotman prepares such a model. Although his theory works on a synchronic level, it is sufficiently abstract to analyse the displacement between the texts on the different levels. From his methodological paradigm, I have selected ideas about the construction of space and time in the plot structure. He describes two text mechanisms which both structure a plot: a mythical mechanism which reflects a classifying and normative aspect and a linear mechanism representing the chaotic disruption of it by historical chance. The first mechanism constructs semantic spaces through oppositions: high-low, right-left, etc. which can also be read metaphorically: rich- poor, husband-wife, old-young, clustering in the end into a dominant 'we' and a peripheral 'they'. Through these asymmetrical and hierarchical fields divided by boundaries, the characters are positioned in a set of differential features, "a set of all binary oppositions between him and other personae (other groups) as given in the text" (Lotman, 1977,p.256). Only the hero can transgress the boundary, an event which is closely connected with the telos. Time for Lotman is not simple historical time or the passing of time. With a beginning as a cause and an ending as telos, the last image of the artistic text offers the solution between the conflicting normative semantic spaces showing the ideological choice of the author. It is literally the Werdegang of the hero that does or undoes norm and values of the artistic text reflecting the cultural context. This structural text model loses its possible inherent rigidity in the transposition from text to theatre. Instrumental for the construction of signifying spaces and its restructuring, it is opposed by the present body of the actor. The absent body in the drama text as an implicated part of character construction, as far as it is hidden behind accepted, normative semantic spaces, can show itself in the postmodern performance text as a point where deconstruction as a process of dehierarchization and neutralization of the binary oppositions begins. An undisciplined body, a different body, a split-up body, an opacity, the abyss of its intertexts.
With this model, that is Lotman's modelling and remodelling-function between the different texts, I want to analyse a production of the opera "Lulu" by Alban Berg, directed by the former intendant of Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, Ruth Berghaus, in 1988 in Brussels.
Alban Berg based his libretto on the drama texts of Wedekind (1895-1902). Nearly finished in 1936, the composition of the music for the last part was reconstructed in 1978.
In a sense, Berghaus had thus to deal with three historical moments: the origins of the libretto, the thirties in which the libretto was written and the musical score composed, and our own time. Three social-cultural contexts, three points of view and, not to forget, three artistic idioms: text, music, theatre. In her direction she retraces the history of the text in its cultural contexts: from Wedekind's wild phantasmagoria about free female sexuality and lust at the end of the 19th century to Berg's revengeful rewriting of Lulu's story during the Weimar Republic, in which her sexual promiscuity is connected with an aggressive and murderous instinct. As a product of different male fantasies, the first author robs his heroine of a human and social identity while the second punishes her for the amorality which the original text took as an anchor point. Positive or negative, in both cases the female body was made into an object and as such the character Lulu started her career as a fascinating icon of dangerous sexuality in modern western culture. It is exactly at this point that Berghaus starts an uncommonly vicious attack on the historical reception of the Lulu figure as the memory-bank of public (male) desires. Suturing past and present, she shows in a series of images, quoted from film and art of the period of the texts, the ongoing history of fragmentation and mechanization of the female body, juxtaposing them on stage with a splitting of the Lulu-character in a stylized female silhouette as the real object of desire and a Lulu-figure who in a complex characterization recaptures her position as the subject of an own and all too human story. Berghaus' insertion of 'the other' of the original Wedekind text leads her to a new vision on the guilt-ridden tragedy of the operatic heroine of Alban Berg. When Berg condemns Lulu for betraying and killing her 'one and only love', Dr Schön, and has her murdered by Schön's vocal double, Jack the Ripper, Berghaus reconsiders this heterosexual possessive 'love' and offers instead the possibility of love for and from the lesbian Gräfin Geschwitz as the only caring lover in the drama. With the implication of this Bergsian 'other', the director also rejects the equivalence of lust and love and unravels the frustrated male desire as the legitimisation of Lulu's end.
Berghaus' reading with and against the texts is deeply influenced by the Brechtian theory of the discursive quality of the plot centering on the contradictions within the text and the dialectical tension between text and context. Closely following the structuring aspects of libretto and musical score, she exposes the rhetorical devices by transforming them into critical tools in her performance text. In order to follow this intricate process, I will concentrate on Berg's libretto, his semantization of the different locations, and the reconstruction of narrative space with its farfetching consequences for the Werdegang of our heroine. The point of view in the libretto is underlined in the construction of the musical score. Normative musical forms constructs a history for the two main male characters against an atonal hysterical space for Lulu and her irresistible body. In the theatrical, visual remodelling of the semantic spaces we will find only one staged space; time will be invested in the histories of the bodies constructed and deconstructed in and by the different intertexts.
In my conclusion, I read Berghaus' position in her confrontational re-interpretation of the structuring aspects of text and music leading to an unexpected but vital cultural question mark. By implicating the hidden other of the Lulu-construction, the director also deconstructs the apparent otherness of the characters who share Lulu's guilt by association in Berg's opera.
Libretto modelling
Bergs rewriting of the Wedekind drama seems at first innocent. He follows the epic structure of the texts describing rise and fall of Lulu in her journey from Berlin to Paris to London. These localities become semantisized by the people who live in them. Berlin is a place of 'zu Heim', overwhelmingly German, affluent and rich, open to cultural and sexual adventures which only in the end lead to sexual promiscuity. A dominant male bourgeoisie is reigning over a periphery of a-socials - vagabonds- and the women: Lulu coming from nowhere and the lesbian Gräfin Geschwitz who has left home. Berlin is also 'Heim', the hidden place for a highly exciting oedipal scenario between father (Dr Schön) his son Alwa and stepmother Lulu. The marriage does not work out. An exasperated husband forces Lulu to kill herself and is accidentally shot by her. His son runs for the police. Escaped from prison, Lulu and her company of lovers arrive in Paris. The action starts at the moment that after ten happy years the money has run out. Again, place and characters signify a narrative space which is now semi-public, the combination of a sort of bordello with a gambling room, peopled by a demi-monde of sellers and buyers, an international setting with stolen titels and stereotyped ethnic identities. Sex and money are in the open, matters of social survival. Again betrayed, Lulu flies to London with her little family: Alwa, her so-called father, Schigolch, and the ardent lover, Geschwitz. London is still the city of Dickens: foggy, rainy, dark and cold, the standard romantic localization of the prostitute, the streets and the attic-room. Her successive clients: a mute English professor, a highly potent and fantasizing Negro, and the historical killer, Jack the Ripper, represent another social shift and outspoken forms of sexual perversion that predict the authorial necessity of ending Lulu's journey a long way from home.
This overwhelming sentiment of the libretto-author is sustained by his choice of textual material. Berlin dominates two thirds and two acts of his text. Paris and London are shortened into one act. Even more interesting is his division of the opera into two parts: before and after the death of Dr Schön. In the interval, he prescribes a filmic sequence of events in which Lulu's trial and imprisonment, her illness and liberation by Geschwitz, are shown in a row of images which are to be built up in a strict congruity between the process of her momentary social fall and rise.
It is a formal procedure which stops narrative time, going forwards means also going back, as a retrogression, lobster-style. We should therefore not be surprised that the last of her lovers -Jack the Ripper, an historical coincidence as an deus ex machina in the Wedekind text, is now impersonated by her first lover, the one who took her from the gutter, Dr Schön. It is his ultimate revenge and with him, that of all her lovers, which takes Lulu, as Don Juan was taken into hell by the Commendatore. In both cases an absolute and biblical Law of the Father has justice done. All the better, because Lulu, as Berg tries to prove in his musical score, only loved Schön: her life ended after he died.
Musical modelling
The reconstruction of a linear time into a circular space is also expressed in the musical score. After the interval, the music returns to the place were it started in a 'movement retrograde'. Berg reaches this effect through a musical idiom constructed by his specific atonal series which are constantly transformed: basic form, inversion, retrogression and inverted retrogression. These precompositonal elements are mixed with normative (known musical forms) and reflexive referential elements, to be compared with Wagner's foreboding and remembering signifying systems.
To characterize his figures, Berg chooses for Dr Schön and his son Alwa normative musical formations: the sonata-form which has a clearly epic structure: exposition (two musical themes are offered), the interweaving of these two themes, and recapitulation (the exposition is repeated). This last part is often in the form of the rondo - a cyclical movement - a theme that constantly returns. Berg assigns this form to Alwa who, as standard musicological interpretation has it, is also representing the all male fascination for Lulu's beauty. His continuing devotion is the point of focalization of the whole composition. Both formations dominate the first two acts reflecting not only Schön's inability to part with Lulu but also Alwa's dependence on his father. In the third act this musical theme and its variations point to Lulu's eclipse into prostitution, waiting for Schön's return.
Against this normative and more recognizable musical discourse which installs the musical storyline of Schön, Lulu's world is expressed in the development of her atonal series, basic for the musical idiom of the opera. As musicologist Georg Perle remarks: "They are a musical counterpart to the physical boundaries that frame that staged world, and they are a symbol of the enchantment and fatality that attends its protagonist." (1985, 87) Dominating in the third act, Lulu's fatal attractions, her free-giving body, is twice condemned as that of the eternal prostitute. Her story as protagonist, her history, is folding back into a pre-history, a no-man's, all-male land. The construction of Lulu's musical character is thus fixed on her body, her sexuality in a circular discursivity that could be called 'semiotic' in the Kristevian sense, interrupting the symbolic order of normative musical representation. Lulu's 'otherness' is also pointed out in her manifold coloratura arias, which, against a solid choir of low male voices, suggest in Adorno's terms (1968,p.277) that her 'absolute corporeality, her irresistibility and her in-humanity, her pre-humanity are one and the same thing'. It is in her voice that she touches the presubjectivity of the Lacanian "Réel", in the terms of De Certeau (1988) a world of unmarked space and time that cannot be mediated by language and signs. A world signalling the first lost object of desire which can not be symbolized but only experienced on the borderline of the human condition (jouissance). As a male fantasy, the high floating voice resembles the cry of the damned and punished woman. Lulu's cry at the end of the opera is of another sort. Her four times spoken "No" at the moment she is killed marks the point where jouissance turns over into horror : "Nothing is less liberating than that cry because it does not make The Woman into a woman (...) it marks the ultimate uprooting of what was properly human, feminine, and desiring (...) what is revealed (...) is emptiness, the Unnameable, a void.. (Poizat, 1992, 204)
Theatrical modelling
Berghaus never acknowledges the stage directions of the author/composer. Her stage designs are complex symbolisations of mental spaces: places as already transformed into collectivized sub/conscious historical memories. For the Berg opera, she abandons any realistic sort of reference to a specific time and place. What we see, laying in the dark, is a gigantic urban landscape of concrete, trash and glass stretching from the proscenium up to a hill. Colored in black grey and silver, connotations both of a frozen sea and that of an underground world are offered. High up to the left a small glass room with entrance and exit doors is crowned by a vertical wooden construction suggesting a cross. The space is only slowly unlocked, dis-covered in the mise en scene and finally shrinks back to where it all began. Clearly Berghaus adopts in her spatial construction the cyclical movement of Berg's opera. In left and right on the stage, oppositions are marked between inner and outer space / Berlin and Paris/ while on the depth axis, near-far away, London is constructed. A vertical axis high-low centers in high a connection between Eros and Thanatos, and in low one between sex, money and betrayal. The high wall the characters have to climb for their exits and from which they straddle as they descend, defines the whole space as a hole, a subterranean cave, the underbelly of the social body, Lulu's horrifying sexual organ.
When the theatrical space no longer changes, as prescribed by Berg, time stagnates and the characters become highly immobile and exchangeable as part of a cyclical movement from life to death, a movement which Berghaus imposes on all her main characters, from left to right, from low to high. From inner space to outer space, from lust to money, from appropriation to death. Everyone dies in or next to the glass cage -literally connotated as Lulu's bedroom and metaphorically (Weibszimmer) as Lulu's body. In this way Berghaus realizes initially a mythologized worldview of an eternal mechanism in which power, money, lust and blind idolatry bargain, sell, condemn and kill the female body.
This perspective is in a specific sense historized, the thirties, through artificial quotations recognizable by the leaning construction of the stage architecture (Expressionism) juxtaposed with a shining escalator referring to the cool technical distance of the Neue Sachlickeit. Film is used in the opening scene, the prologue of the opera is set before a porn-cinema where the male characters are seduced to enter. The woman on and, surprisingly, before the poster is a Marlene Dietrich look-alike. Slowly she follows the visitors into the cinema. Film quotations of Pabst's Lulu-movie appear above right, short sequences of men and their furtive gazes. Doubled and repeated, they get a hallucinatory force. As object of these gazes, a filmic Lulu appears right before the interval: dressed in white with long red hair, she is the living image of the late-romantic Pre-Rafaelite woman. Maxim Dessau takes this image as a start for the interval film in which Lulu and Gräfin Geschwitz discover one another's faces, eyes, hair, play with the wigs of the judges, and end the filmic sequence laughing and rolling in the hospital bed Geschwitz is pushing over a countryroad. This intersubjective seeing interchanges with the projected Surrealistic images of faces and eyes to be seen, connotated sexually in their liquid depths, followed by loose limbs, arms, legs, a dummy, finally organized in the rhythmic filmed legs of a writing -machine, as of showgirls. Reflecting a provocative partialising of the female body, these historical images point to the voyeurism and fetishism the public is expecting in a Lulu-production - and mostly gets. A historical 'reality' is not evoked, next to the historicity of the opera itself, the temporal period is indeterminate. The mechanism is eternal and leads only to ruined landscapes and destroyed people.
And yet time passes, and yet Berghaus presents a beginning as cause and an ending as telos.
Time is then installed on three different levels of the visual register.
1 Narrative time as a construction-reconstruction of the semantic oppositions in the configurations of the characters concerning their appearance as social constructs.
2. Time as a genesis of their bodies expressed in the kinesic sign systems.
3. Time as a reflexive remembering, as a crossroad of historical intertexts, suggested in the "scenic" metaphor - an image that suddenly rises," flashes" and, restores hidden and forgotten analogies.
I can only give a few examples.
ad 1. Since an operatic setting demands clear and elementary signs, Berghaus uses costumes and colors as primary systems. The men are all clad in accordance with their social status: black tails for the bourgeois, informal clothing for the non-bourgeois: the Painter, the Acrobat, the Negro. Lulu's short little dresses of the first part are in the second part replaced by a fashionable costume like the other Parisian women. In London she wears a simple shroud. Geschwitz - no longer 'mannish'- wears in different materials the pantsuit Lulu is wearing when posing for her portrait in the first scene. This basic semantic setting of analogies and differences moves over, especially by a color dramaturgy, to other isotopes referring not only to other characters but also recalling these other characters in a kaleidoscopic process of changing configurations. Bourgeois and non-bourgeois become very relative terms, man and woman also, social oppositions are deconstructed, neutralized in favor of another system of norms and values which shows us a new critical-ethical dimension closely connected with the histories of their bodies.
ad 2.Since an insatiable lust drives the bodies towards sexual gratification eventually replaced by power and money, Berghaus emphasizes a specific physical dimension of the characters alternating between the socialized symbolic and the childlike imaginary dimensions. It is there that we see the characters win or loose, whether they regress to an infantile immobility or learn from their experiences. As a red line in the scheme of their movements, we discover a pattern of laying down and standing up - in a cycle from birth to death, from child to adult - that for the male lovers finally ends in a foetus position and for the two women in a slow process of integration. From constantly laying down for her respective lovers, clinging to their bodies in a terrified dependency, Lulu learns to stand on her own feet. With and against this development we see a playful innocent young girl who looses her sexual domestication and develops sexual desires of her own as a subject of her own history. Lulu's quest is initially safeguarded by Berghaus through a division between Lulu as subject and as object of desire that is represented in the Image, a gauze female silhouette standing between her and the gaze of her lovers. Lulu looses in Berghaus' reading when she refuses to accept a possibility of a more equal love with Geschwitz, which is installed in the erotic film scenes of the interval between the two women. Refusing the oedipal fixation of the opera on Dr Schön, the unselfish Geschwitz represents here the disregarded mother and woman as love-object. Lulu's sexuality is ambiguous, pre-oedipal and polymorphic or post-oedipal in Berghaus' non-dominant sexual discourse. Her betrayal answers in the negative the ethical questions Berghaus asks of all her characters: who learns from their experiences? who achieves a measure of liberty? of responsibility? Acquiring independence, Lulu looses her innocence. Her social and sexual power corrupts her body in its reflexes, a conditioned and impotent repetition of inscribed mechanisms. This is the real story of Lulu that the director writes in the theatrical present body, a range of possibilities not grasped.
ad 3. Berghaus' ethical stance is not moralistic. Immediately after the interval when Lulu mechanically tries to win back a distrusting Alwa by betraying Geschwitz, the director starts exploring a historical (con)text which could explain by analogies. Wrapped in a white linen sheet, the image of the lonely woman starts a course of associations from, in Berghaus' words: Roman senator, Greek statue, mummy, pupa, ghost, Christ in the Garden of Olives, Christ's corpse. Signifying life and death, an active and passive principle, the Christian connotation of the Messiah, already prepared in the cross on stage, is revived in the closing scenes. Lulu in her white shroud put in hard yellow light is the image of the suffering Christ. Within a western cultural idiom, it is an extremely shocking reference in its elusive analogy to the holy and the whore, the sacred and the depraved, that find its similarity in the sacrifice of the body, flesh and blood. It touches a mythical and religious dimension which, provocative in its gender variation, both negates Berg's biblical 'eye for an eye', and creates an unexpected perspective on the Lulu-figure : Lamb of God, a lamb sacrificed to the Gods. Water and fire purify her. Her execution by the last man in her life is accompanied by an agonising cry which, as that from the man on the cross, lingers on. The rise and fall of a modern heroine are thus finally read through a pre-historical and clearly barbaric text. Its Christian Messianism, the eternal deliverance, has not yet taken place or is perverted.
Conclusion
Reading the three texts, libretto, music and performance, as each other's intertexts, there is still another aspect of structural analysis to discover. We have seen how Berghaus transfers Lotman's circular mythical aspects of libretto and music to the theatrical space as a whole and attaches linearity, historicity to the visual construction of the characters. Doing this, she breaks the geometry and circularity of the dramatic and musical space in favour of a spiral form Lotman describes as the eschatological text formation, a transition between the circular and linear text mechanisms. The sacrifice of the hero/god, his death, and resurrection takes place in the text and not at the end. In this sense Berghaus takes the retrogression of the musical score seriously. The return to its origins also means a resurrection, a rebirth. Where musical time stops, an utopian conclusion is projected. The interval film signifies an open ending : "With and through Geschwitz everything starts again, on a different level the question is posed if continuing relations are possible at all."
Thus overruling Berg's telos, Berghaus also transcends the blame the opera lays on Lulu by formulating a more general question. In her vision, Lulu is killed by the historical and cultural inscription of her body, its total sexualization and its fatal corruption. That is her timeless tragedy.
Restoring Lulu in a story of her own, Berghaus also uncovers in the opera a hidden chain of horrifying abject circling around sexual depravation. In Berg's libretto there is a highly curious and unique physical description of Jack the Ripper. In Lombrosian terms, he portrays a repugnant degenerate who nevertheless is recognized by Lulu as the man of her dreams. Impersonated on stage by the singing Dr Schön, this hidden abject reflects back on Lulu's sexual perversity including the (excluded) love-relationship with Geschwitz. It also refers back to the Negro who keeps eight white prostitutes but is disguised by Berg as the white painter. The Jewish banker who lusts for little goy-girls is directly visible and unshielded. This cost Berg his friendship with the exiled composer Arnold Schönberg.
Berghaus overcomes the Bergsian abject clearly in the splitting of the Lulu-figure. Jack looks exactly as the late Dr Schön. The Negro, although blackfaced, wears the costume of the painter with colors red and blue connecting them both with the sexual obsession but also with the naive innocence of Gräfin Geschwitz. The Jewish banker is part of the general depravation of the exotic Parisian social body.
There remains the question of Berghaus' hidden other.
I can only find it in the male reaction to the performance, critizising its exceptionally harsh, greyish and pessimistic character. Unmediated by aesthetics and/or eroticism, Berghaus seemed to have touched an unbearable social symptom deeply embedded in the modelling history of Christianity and its need for human sacrifice.
The 1988 Lulu-production of Brussels was, quite unusually, never repeated.
Bibliography
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Certeau, de M. The Writing of History, T. Conley (transl.), New York, Columbia University Press, 1988
Lotman, J. The Structure of the Artistic Text, Michigan, Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1977
Lotman, J. 'The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology', in Poetics Today, Vol. I, 1-2, p. 161-184, 1979
Pavis, P. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, London, Routledge, 1992
Perle, G. The Operas of Alban Berg: Volume Two Lulu, Berkely, Los Angeles, University of California Press,1985
Poizat, M. The Angel's Cry : Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1992