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Staša Zurovac: LULU

Date created: 11.05.2021.
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Lulu

dance-theatre-music monodrama inspired by Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays Der Erdgeist (The Earth Spirit) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box)

Director/choreographer/author of the dramatugical concept: Staša Zurovac

Author of the music/composer: Alexander Balanescu

Costume and set designer: Bjanka Adžić Ursulov

Video designer/photographer: Jonatan Salgado Romero

Lighting designer: Marko Mijatović 

Sound engineer: David Kent

Performers: Andressa Miyazato (dance) / Alexander Balanescu (violin)

Supported by City of Linz

 

Lulu is a dance piece conceived by one dancer and one musician. In general, both Lulu plays are a relationship-based pieces and that’s why it’s interesting to me to reach for a process in which all the other characters as live performers are removed from the concept. With this procedure, I get an opportunity not to deal with a narrative retelling of Wedekind's plays, but to get the opportunity to deal with the inner experiences of the character and explore it, which I turn into poetic images whose purpose is to reach the universality of interpretation and touch the archetypes of behaviour and experiences stored in every human being. 

My fascination with Wedekind's Lulu finds its source in the multidimensional tragedy, as well as in the beauty of the character herself who walks the destructive path of her own destiny, from a femme fatale with a strong need to destroy men, embodying the power of female sexuality, manipulating the natural force she wants to control and take revenge on the male world, furthermore, a sexually emancipated woman who uses sex to gain power, all the way to a completely different woman ruled by the bloodstream of harmless, innocent characteristics of essentially emphasized vulnerability or a woman who is simply what she is and defies all specifications.

Through several marriages, in which each husband dies, Lulu hardly reaches the limits of the tangibility of her own identity, because each husband not only does not see her as she really is, but tries to project onto her what he wants her to be.

Through the prologue and five dance-musical images-acts, we pass through Lulu's dramatic inner journey, plowed by the furrows of tragedy, on which the insatiable search for liberation inevitably leads to her own tragic end. Her life is her funeral.

In the strong interaction of two souls, one speaking body and the other speaking music, to the music of Alexander Balanescu, the piece is performed by Brazilian dance artist and performer, former lead dancer of Staatstheater Darmstadt and Musiktheater Linz, Andressa Miyazato and violin virtuoso and founder of the world-famous Balanescu Quartet, Alexander Balanescu.

Staša Zurovac

Award-winning choreographer, author, and director Staša Zurovac was born in Zagreb, where he also received his studies in ballet. He also studied at the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg. He was the principal dancer at the National Theater in his hometown. Since 2003 Zurovac has worked as a choreographer and author for the national theatres and theatres in Zagreb, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Split, Rijeka, Novi Sad, Lisbon, Arnhem, Skopje, Darmstadt, etc.