A musical demolition and a dramaturgical interrogation, Laura Bowler’s Deconstructing Pierrot takes Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and looks at the work through a contemporary queer lens. A new interpretation of Albert Giraud’s poems that repurposes musical material from Schoenberg’s work in a subversive act of defiance of the great master. It interrogates Schoenberg’s vocal writing for the female voice, and its evocation of mental instability. The genderless Pierrot representation of the alienated artist is brought into the present, accompanied by the many ills and preoccupations of the modern day artist; social media, identity, consumerism, loneliness, clicks, environmentalism.
