Bella Faust

Lisaboa Houbrechts wrote a musical theatre production with profound visual power, inspired by her own life and depicted through the eyes of a contemporary, intersex Faust. 

A fifteen-year-old girl (Bella Faust) is in the hospital, on the eve of an operation that will shape her life. At her bedside, an enigmatic figure appears: Mephisto. She asks Bella to sign a blood pact to stay alive. The price is steep: Bella will lose her gender and her reproductive organs. She signs. The doctors and nurses perform the live operation.  

In the delirium of the anaesthetic, the history of the visual arts flashes before Bella’s eyes. She needs art to comfort her. She meets Frida Kahlo, Marina Abramović, Edvard Munch, Caspar David Friedrich, and Louise Bourgeois: artists whose work has been fuelled by physical wounds, grief, trauma, and transformation. The blood from these artists’ visual worlds merges with the blood from Bella’s abdomen. Their studios blend with the hospital room, forming one vast, hallucinatory space. 

After the operation, Bella is reborn in that museum as a contemporary Frankenstein with a mysterious scar on her abdomen. Through that scar, she discovers an extraordinary strength within herself. Together with Mephisto, she begins to build an ark – a mythical vessel of art, memories, and the future. 

Houbrechts reworks Goethe’s iconic Faust motif to address an intersex condition in which the removal of ingrown testes in intersex teenagers leads to the absence of puberty and a lifetime of hormone replacement therapy. Houbrechts aims to create a grand visual world in which the blood from the operation merges with the blood of art history, thereby offering the viewer comfort and catharsis. 

It strikes Houbrechts that so many artists draw inspiration from traumatic experiences with their bodies to ultimately reach the mystical realm of transgression and art. The scars – visible or invisible – become a source of language, a passageway to a realm where the personal is elevated to the mythical. In this tension between injury and imagination, Houbrechts recognises an echo of Goethe’s Faust: the longing to reach beyond the life we have been given, to catch a glimpse, through the darkest chambers of existence, of something greater. 

Houbrechts wishes to link her new text to a musical reworking of several fragments from Busoni’s Doktor Faustus and the Requiem(s) by Mozart and Fauré. The various movements of the Requiem will be related to the different phases of Bella Faust’s operation and mourning, leading to a rebirth.