Multiplicity as Resistance: Dancing Wedekind's Lulu

The dance performance of Hans Henning Paar's Lulu-Eine Monstretragodie (Lulu-A monster tragedy) in Munster in 2014 joined a long legacy of adaptations of Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays (1895/1904). Paar's casting and staging choices, which include having multiple dancers in the role of Lulu as well as incorporating the technologies of projection and the mirror, stage an embodied intervention into the long-held interpretation of Lulu as a projection of male fantasy. They open the possibility of instead apprehending Lulu, the person and the literary work, as a multiplicity. I bring Paar's choreography into conversation with other dance adaptations, the legacy of casting the role of Lulu, and prior Lulu scholarship and argue for conceiving of Paar's Lulu as a Braidottian nomadic subject that is nonunitary, dynamic, and in-process. This performance and its particular conception of Lulu complicate traditional readings, inviting audiences to critically reflect on dynamics of gender, sexuality, class, and power raised in the plays and their adaptations.