Vienna Festival

Powerful images with a gay slant

Two halves of a bull, a torero and a lovelorn woman: Spanish performer Angélica Liddell creates visually stunning performative sequences that remain rather enigmatic.

Nobody will deny that the new Festival director has a penchant for violence. We were already threatened with murder at the opening, and the deed was then carried out on Mozart's "Titus". Kirill Serebrennikov's baroque arias and the novel "Blutbuch" (Book of Blood) also left the arena horribly mangled. And now the Spanish performer Angélica Liddell's two-hour solo "Liebestod" takes a broad look at bullfighting. In other words, a barbaric, reprehensible ritual that does not deserve the mystification and glorification cultivated here.

The basic tone of the evening, however, is surprisingly different: namely, lamentation from at least two pipes. On the one hand, the protagonist laments her own fading under the grasp of the insensitive audience. And on the other, she refers to an interview with the bullfighter Juan Belmote, who laments the identity crises that are no longer granted to the bulls he massacred.

The actress shows strong performative sequences and impressive images, created with the help of two bull halves, a lot of incense and a Ritz action that caused a visitor to collapse.

Also on offer: nine cats, four babies and text passages by Emil Cioran. All of them densely symbolic, but often closer to a religious fad than a recognizable statement.

Until reading the program booklet brings us to the last things: "In the German surtitles," we learn in horror, "gendering is omitted due to the high reading speed". We ask for your understanding.

But this is exactly what is evaporating.