EXBERLINER Issue 168, February 2018

WHAT’S ON — Stage
DON’T MISS
Bette Davis... “Fasten
Your Seatbelts!”
Former Gorki
ensemble member
Bettina Lohmeyer
wrote, designed
and performs in this
homage to the late
film legend at the
English Theatre. Feb
16, 17, 20:00; Feb
18, 18:00
Liberté
At the Volksbühne,
Catalan filmmaker
Albert Serra (The
Death of Louis XIV)
premieres this new
work about French
libertines attempting
to export their
lifestyle to a resistant
Germany. In German,
French and Italian,
with German and
English surtitles. Feb
22, 24, 25
Catalogue (First
Edition), Man Made,
Elephant
Three works by
renowned artists
William Forsythe, Jan
Martens, and Rabih
Mroué are staged at
HAU2 as part of the
“Out of Now/Dance
On” festival, which
examines the nature
and potential of
dancers over 40. Feb
28, 20:00
“ Love obeys no rules”
Lydia Lunch presents her own version of
Carmen’s doomed love triangle at the Deutsche
Oper’s Tischlerei space. By Daniel Mufson
Jasmine Hirst
Interview
Best known as part of New
York’s “no wave” music
scene in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, Lunch has since gone
on to work as a writer, actor and
motivational speaker. Now, she hits
Berlin with a revised version of her
multimedia autobiographical work
My Lover the Killer. The so-called
“industrial noir opera” is part of
the Deutsche Oper’s “Ambushed
from Behind” programme,
which invites outside artists to
collaborate on new work related to
one of the mainstage performances
– in this case, Carmen.
How does a no wave icon end
up performing at the Deutsche
Oper? They called me. [Laughs]
I’m not a fan of opera in general;
I’m a fan of the madness, lust,
politics, perversion that is housed
within the operatic form. You
know, the psychodrama. My life
sometimes feels like an opera.
And, when they proposed Carmen,
which is a love triangle where
she gets murdered, I thought of
My Lover the Killer, a love triangle
where I do not get murdered.
It just made sense to put those
together. Both are about love
triangles – only mine is a true story.
They weren’t already aware of
My Lover the Killer? No! No!
Not at all. It was the right time,
the right place, the right situation,
and we may never perform it again.
Certainly we won’t perform it again
in conjunction with an “ambushed”
Carmen, which means we incorporate
some of the musicians or
some of the text—I mean we’re still
working on exactly what we’re going
to incorporate into it. Since My
Lover the Killer is set to video, and
“If you knew the value
of your pussy, maybe
you wouldn’t be
crying when men try
to grab it.”
has a narration that takes a specific
amount of time, we’re working on
ways to incorporate certain themes
either lyrically or musically, and
probably bookending My Lover the
Killer with some of Carmen’s music.
What’s your opinion of Carmen,
the character? I admire anyone,
especially a woman, who understands,
as Carmen says, that “love
obeys no rules” and throws themselves
fully into it.
This ex-lover of yours almost
killed you back in the 1970s, and
before that you were sexually
abused as a child... You must
have strong feelings about
the current debate on sexual
harassment. Obviously, I’ve been
screaming in the face of patriarchy
for 35 years and accusing the
patriarchy of fucking over the entire
fucking female planet; I’m just having
a little problem wrapping my
mind around such a broad brushstroke
between typical flirtatious,
aggravating behaviour and rape.
There is a huge divide.
But there’s surely criminal
behaviour short of rape, behaviour
that should be punished.
I’ve been saying “Annie get your
gun” for decades; I’ve been talking
about a million menstruating
murderesses storming the White
House for years, semi-sarcastically,
and asked how we’ve gone from
sacred prostitutes to corporate
whores. What I don’t get is: If there
are 100 women all knowing what’s
going on, why does it take 20 years
for white, privileged, Hollywood
harlots to co-opt a movement that
was started by a woman of colour
to deal with domestic violence,
which is very different? I know I’m
treading a difficult line. And I’m not
slut-shaming, I think you have every
right to be as fucking slutty as you
fucking want. As a matter of fact, if
you knew the value of your pussy,
maybe you wouldn’t be crying when
men try to grab it and you don’t like
it – instead, you’d grab ’em by the
balls and twist. It’s that simple. n
Ambushed from Behind: Carmen
(My Lover The Killer) Feb 17, 20:00
Deutsche Oper (Tischlerei)
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EXBERLINER 168