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The Kunstenfestivaldesarts Diary (2)Dateline: 14th May, 2008Perhaps because it is a holiday weekend, there are a lot of Germans in town. Or perhaps they work for the European Commission. A group of Germans on a tram are talking amongst themselves about how much they prefer Strasbourg to Brussels. The Kunstenfestivaldesarts will certainly attract people from the EU communities working and living in Brussels. Perhaps, also, this is why so many of the audience for Heiner Goebbels' production are German speakers. Music Theatre and Dance Theatre are very popular in Germany. Later on in the month, I'll be seeing VA Wölf/Neuer Tanz and I'm looking forward to it. But now for the Théâtre National de la Communauté Française, which seems to have been stripped down to a huge black box inside. It is spacious, well-equipped and has a relaxed atmosphere. The festival and box office staff are friendly and efficient in every venue I've been to, which is a pleasant relief from all those stressed out people at the Edinburgh Festival giving tickets for the wrong show on the wrong day at the wrong time. An Indian lady in a sari behind the counter in the foyer is selling spicy Indian tea as well as soft drinks and beer. There is a terrace outside in the sunshine. I'm looking forward to this. I haven't seen anything by Heiner Goebbels for about three years. At the time I took some theatre design students with me. Goebbels and his designer Klaus Grünwald have been working together in close collaboration for years and the design is as important as the music itself. One of the students afterwards complained that there was no story. I tried to explain that was the whole point; Goebbels himself doesn't set out to tell stories. Everyone can tell a story; a woman at the bus stop, the hairdresser, bartenders, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, not to mention women talking over the garden fence, they all know how to tell stories. The knack is to give an audience enough to let them make up their own stories…like Kris Verdonck. Stifters Dinge One of the great things about the Kunstenfestivaldesarts is the fact that there are so many artists taking part on whom one cannot stick a label. Heiner Goebbels is one of them. Difficult to categorise, impossible to institutionalize, the creator of theatre, music-theatre, concerts and installations, in Stifters Dinge he has created theatre without people. Perhaps, if I were to stick my neck out, I would say it is a type of image-based, musical object theatre. But then all labels are reductive and one thing that is certain about Goebbels is that he aims to soar far into the realms of the imagination and take his audiences with him. Heiner Goebbels is one of Europe's most intriguing, controversial and fascinating composer-directors. I'm trying to choose my words judiciously here, because Goebbels simply cannot be pigeon-holed. He refers to his work as music-theatre, but he started out writing music for classical, text-based theatre: Shakespeare's Richard III, Goethe's Iphigenie, Kleist pieces etc for some of Germany's most renowned directors (for example, Klaus Peymann and Matthias Langhoff), and while he has written concerts for full symphony orchestras, such as the Berlin Philharmonic, and radio works, he claims to have integrated theatrical experience from the beginning of his career. Working with theatre directors and for the cinema, he was disappointed by the limitations imposed on the music. Goebbel's music exists not merely to enhance emotions but to actually create images: hence his move into the director's chair. The inspiration for this latest piece is the description of nature in Adalbert Stifter's 19th century work My Great Grandfather's Portfolio, along with a 17th century painting. Stifter describes in minute details the ominous and uncanny sounds he could hear while on a trip through the countryside in the coldest of freezing winters, sounds which were threatening, magical, unsettling. It is clear in his descriptions that Nature has the upper hand where mankind is concerned. During this performance we hear a narrator recounting the story (in French with Dutch surtitles), the disconcerting noises, the thudding and tinkling and swishing and sighing of the snow-covered forest as he attempts to pass through on a horse-drawn sleigh, before turning back due to the danger. Onto a large screen a landscape is projected, reflecting in the placid water of three oblong tanks covering the floor. Pianos and an arrangement of sundry pipes and metal drums create the sound-score. Later, we hear a taped interview with the father of structuralist anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss, talking about his youthful proclivity for adventure, travel, simply walking, even in Paris as far as his legs would carry him, and the taste for discovery that came from these derives*. The interviewer asks him if there are any places left on this planet where man has not made his mark and Levi-Strauss answers in the negative. Man has now conquered all it seems. And Levi-Strauss insists that he is content to live alone, a solitary existence, eschewing his fellow men. In this we find the pith of the performance Stifters Dinge. As silky white screens descend and lift and reflect the lighting, the pools of water, pianos play, rain falls, the sun shines through in pristine glory. But eventually, the water is transformed into fetid pools, stagnant green and yellow, bubbling as they emit noxious gases. Like Kris Verdonck, Goebbels has a bleak vision. But then perhaps it is the other way around. In the programme we are told that Goebbels has envisaged a place without men, without their arrogant assumptions of superiority. Perhaps, these pools of bubbling green and yellow slime are the enriching primordial mud from which life will emerge. Is this end perhaps the birth of life, or the re-birth of life? The ultimate triumph of Nature? Can the slate be wiped clean? Can we start again? Goebbels cites Hans Eisler, friend and sometime collaborator of Brecht, as his musical inspiration. Like Eisler, his work has an 'interconnectedness', not an overt political content perhaps, but, as he puts it himself, a scepticism, particularly towards politics and art. He co-founded the 'Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blasorchester' (difficult to translate, but if one puts 'left-wing', 'radical' and 'brass band' in the same sentence one can get the picture). But he also co-founded the art-rock trio Cassiber with Chris Cutler and at the same time composed for the Frankfurt Ballet. Goebbels doesn't see himself as a revolutionary director, but claims that he loves to disappoint, in a creative way, by which he means that he prefers to confound expectations and keep his audience alert. In Black and White, written for a large orchestra, The Ensemble Moderne, he had musicians playing badminton and throwing tennis balls at thunder sheets. In Hashirigaki Japanese music blended with the Beach Boys and texts by Gertrude Stein; the link, he said was melancholy. He refutes the notion that he might be a 'collagist' though. Ordinarily, his pieces are devised through improvisation, his stage and lighting designer, Klaus Grünberg and the actors are all involved from day one. The stage image, the lighting and the improvisation are crucial to the process. After a period of intense rehearsal, he goes away and spends five or six months writing the piece and putting it all together. Most of his work has for years been produced by Theatre Vidy in Lausanne, with co-producers from many major European theatres or festivals. The assurance of a tour through prestigious, main-stage venues equally provides Goebbels with the financial support required for such a long period of gestation, huge spaces and costly sets. What I like the most about the work of Heiner Goebbels (besides, of course, the stunning images, the magic and mystery, the movement and music, and the lighting which is always almost a character in its own right) is the simple fact that as a spectator I feel as if I'm treated as an equal. He doesn't send me a message I'm supposed to decode as he intends me to, he treats me like an adult with a creative mind and imagination of my own, and prompts me to use it. It is an experience from which I make my own sense. In Stifters Dinge one senses a juxtaposition of things natural and things mechanical; the man-made and that which once might have seemed inscrutable and beyond human intrusion are brought together. Moments of mystical stillness were disrupted, breathtaking vistas sullied and at the end, as the applause broke forth spontaneously, and then hesitantly as the audience felt a sense of absurdity, it was the pianos that moved forward for the curtain call. When the house-lights went up, the entire audience descended onto the stage en masse to mill around the instruments and objects, peer into the pools and explore in a way they would never dare to do if the space had been peopled by human actors. * A derive is (in French) an long, aimless walk, usually in an urban environment, that has the intention of leading the walker into unexpected discoveries. Jackie Fletcher >> Next
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