For the legendary torero Juan Belmonte, bullfighting was a spiritual, ritualistic exercise. Upright, almost motionless, he fought dangerously close to the bull’s body. Suffering from lung cancer, Belmonte, the greatest matador of his time, took his own life in 1962. In her new work, Spanish author, director and performance artist Angélica Liddell unites Belmonte’s search for tragic beauty and sanctity with Richard Wagner’s tragic consummation of love in death, as he expressed it in “Tristan und Isolde.” In her production of “Liebestod,” Liddell evokes the figures of the bull and the bullfighter and is reflected in both. Simultaneously lover and beloved, she confronts her own abysses, her raging passion and yearning for death, offending her audience and the contemporary cultural chic, which, Liddell argues, has lost its connection to myth and transcendence. In the middle of a stage world that resembles a Spanish bullring, Angélica Liddell screams, stutters, whispers and sings her lyrics about love and death as if in a final rite of summons that takes her to the origins of her theater.
- Note: the performance contains explicit depictions of self-aggression