American Lulu premiered at Berlin’s Komische Oper in 2012, where it was dubbed a “Jazzy BlackPower Bergwerk”. Geschwitz-now “Eleanor,” a Blues singer-emerges as the hero, choosing a path of moral good (and evading her original fate at the hands of Jack the Ripper), while Lulu herself remains mired in a sexualized subservience to men. Neuwirth, however, seizes on this relationship. In Berg’s opera, Geschwitz’s unrequited love can easily seem peripheral to the larger plot. Even more radical, perhaps, are the gender politics of Neuwirth’s revision-and, specifically, its approach to the character of Countess Geschwitz, Lulu’s steadfast companion and would-be lesbian lover. White European characters are recast as African Americans, and the drama is interspersed with spoken excerpts from the writings of Martin Luther King. Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu reinterprets Alban Berg’s Lulu against the backdrop of the American civil rights movement. Lulu begins to look like a subject facing down the viciously commodifying world to which she has adapted all too well. By recycling the objectified female image to excess, this parallel, trans-production silent opera destabilizes its own fetish. This ongoing re-adaptation of Berg’s opera allows the original to be heard less as a canonical work than as an open process in which music is an entry, not an end in itself. Drawing on Artaud’s “theater of cruelty,” in tandem with Derrida’s idea of the “supplement” as both excess and remedy, this article argues that the opera’s sonic fault-lines open a space for a parallel, visual opera to emerge, with multiple Lulus engaging each other onstage and informing each subsequent production. American Lulu has been criticized for its sound-materials’ uneasy fit, without much comment on its visual aspects – a strange lacuna, considering Berg’s interpolation of silent film in his instructions for the opera, which itself has a mirror-like structure. In the Berlin version, a body double dressed as a Las Vegas-style showgirl recycles these projections back into human form.
The opera also includes digital projections of Lulu’s face and body, jerkily animated, violently mutilated, or invaded by the singer as she walks through her own larger-than-life image. Billed as a “Jazzy BlackPower BergWerk” at its 2012 premiere, Olga Neuwirth’s adaptation of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu combines jazz, soul, and sound clips of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches in close relationship with the original score.
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