Johannes Müller / Philine Rinnert

Opera as a refuge from monstrous gender stereotypes: Richard Strauss’ Oper Salomé has been marked out as ‘monstrous’ ever since its premiere in 1905. It is thanks to the music, which took the listener into unknown territory, but also because the female protagonist combined the greatest angst fantasies of the time: differences such as hysteria, being Jewish or the supposedly male experience of sexual desire. In their new musical theatre project, Johannes Müller and Philine Rinnert confront Richard Strauss’ Oper Salomé with techniques from drag – a genre in which gender has an extremely dramatic role to play. Lip-syncing, elaborate costumes and slander amalgamate to form a discourse on the exoticism of opera, and the question of whether it can actually be liberating to be a monster like Strauss’ Salomé. A revue consisting of opulent Salomé re-enactments, musical analysis and archive documents.