Sangra Tango

Paris, in a post apocalyptic future. Vampires have taken over political and social power, imposing a fashion anarchy headed by the magnificent Vlad Dracula, a widely acclaimed fashion designer and photographer. From clubs to parties, from photo shoots to fashion shows, the infamous count leads an outwardly self indulgent life with his clique of iconic vampires and pop idols.

Invited by the conductor Premil Petrovic to stage Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a musical theater work from 1912 based on the poems of Albert Giraud, LaBruce transposed a strange and tragic episode of true crime onto the composition. Complementing the original atonal score is a narrative about a trans man who is outed by his girlfriend’s father and forbidden from seeing the young woman again. Crestfallen, the protagonist decides to prove the fact of his manhood by castrating a taxi driver and then revealing his newly transplanted member to the two of them. This story, which for LaBruce “serves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order,” is rendered in a visual style that nods to the era of Schoenberg’s melodrama. LaBruce cheekily appropriates the formal vocabulary of silent cinema with black-and-white photography, irises, and intertitles like “A cock, a cock, my kingdom for a cock!”

An Italo-American teenaged girl in Michigan, with a Catholic family, becomes pregnant. To avoid both a scandal and an abortion, she secretly gives birth to a boy in hospital, which is run by nuns. They establish a false identity for him and arrange to have him brought up in Argentina. At the age of 18, the boy discovers that his biological mother is Madonna Ciccone, who, after giving him up, became the iconic international pop-culture mega-star.