Concept by Sarah Rothenberg; choreography and direction by John Kelly; music by Johannes Brahms, Arnold Schoenberg, Johann Strauss; lyrics from poems by Otto Erich Hartleben; set design by Scott Pask; lighting design by Jennifer Tipton; costume design by Donna Zakowska; hair and makeup design by Bobby Miller. Produced by Da Camera and the Lincoln Center Great Performers New Visions series.  World premiere: The Wortham Theater Center, Houston, Texas, March 1998; New York Premiere: The New Victory Theater, New York, January 1999.

With: Barbara Allen (Columbine), Guillermo Figueroa (violin), John Kelly (Pierrot), Jonathan Kinzel (Harlequin), David Krakauer (clarinet), Sarah Rothenberg (piano), Lucy Shelton (soprano), Fred Sherry (cello) and Carol Wincenc (flute).


     In 1998 I was approached by Sarah Rothenberg, a renowned pianist and the Artistic Director of the Houston-based chamber group Da Camera. She had conceived a musical/theatrical event centered around Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 masterpiece Pierrot Lunaire, a song cycle comprising twenty-one poems by Otto Erich Hartleben, sung in German in the startling technique of sprechstimme, which could be said to lay somewhere between speaking and singing. I was enlisted as director of the event and also functioned as one of three dancers who would provide the visual/kinetic counterpart to the onstage chamber musicians, led by Sarah on piano and sung by the great soprano Lucy Shelton.


     Moondrunk also had three main characters––this time they are soldiers whose playful movements become progressively more sexual. When they shed their clothes, we see that one is a woman. Red ribbons, a metaphor for blood, are pulled from their bodies––from the heart, the vagina, the mouth, the anus. An awakening. In the final section, “Nostalgia,” the three performers assume the garb and perform the stock antics of characters from the Italian Commedia del’Arte––Pierrot, Columbine and Harlequin.


    

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Moondrunk


A version of Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 song cycle Pierrot Lunaire

 
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