Sehnsucht nach menschlichen »Musterstücken».: Shakespeares Sonette, getanzt

Marlene Meuer

Authors

Marlene Meuer Leuphana University Lüneburg

Keywords:

Shakespeare’s sonnets as ballet, human factory, artificial beings, love, antasies of longing, self-alienation, Pygmalion myth

Abstract

Four scenes from the 2019 Hamburg ballet Shakespeare – Sonnets are placed in a human factory showing how artificial humans are produced, brought to life and capture the longing fantasies of the factory workers, i.e. their own creators. The following article explains these key scenes against the background of the overall composition of the ballet and discusses implications of interpretation: The tendency towards idealization of the human being appears both as an anthropological characteristic as well as a quality of great art producing the danger of human self-alienation and loss of self. The famous cultural-historical symbol for this is the Pygmalion myth: the misanthropic artist who falls in love with his own ideal work of art.

Author Biography

Marlene Meuer, Leuphana University Lüneburg

Marlene Meuer is a literature and cultural studies scholar with a comparative orientation. She received her PhD with a cultural hermeneutic thesis on polarizations of antiquity in the Age of Enlightenment, subsequently completed teaching and research stays in Weimar, Freiburg, Eichstätt, Aberdeen (UK), Catania (IT), Marbach, Konstanz, and Prague (CZ), and wrote a second book on Schiller's Laura cycle. She currently teaches at Leuphana University Lüneburg and researches in the field of aesthetics and interart studies. She is a member of the Junge Akademie at the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz.