Heiner Goebbels revels in mystery. A composer, theatre director,
musician, improvisor, and/or visual-installation-performance artist, his work is difficult to characterise, and particularly resistant to straightforward
interpretation. In the 1970s he performed avant-jazz in a duo with Alfred 23 Harth involving recitation and electronics, and agit-prop political songs by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill; was later a member of art-rock
trio Cassiber from 1982-92, while writing music for theatre, film and
ballet productions. Recently he’s written more conventional chamber and orchestral compositions for Ensemble Modern and the Ensemble Intercontemporain, among others, many of which have been released on ECM. However, it’s his indulgently multi-disciplinary stage productions that presently occupy him, baffling and thrilling audiences internationally.
There’s an alluring sense of intrigue to these works, a darkly enigmatic
playfulness, that recalls the dream-like cinema of David Lynch. After emerging from Goebbels’s worlds the work-a-day routines of ‘reality’ seem humdrum and lacklustre. Eraritjaritjaka, for example,
titled after the Australian Aboriginal word for ‘Nostalgia’, set the
writings of Elias Canetti to a string quartet by Ravel, the drama involving
the solitary actor leaving the theatre, followed by a video camera, to his
flat where he then chopped an onion. La Reprise (Repetition) fused texts by Kierkegaard and Alain Robbe-Grillet with the Prince song ‘Joy in Repetition’, so effortlessly that the connections seem obvious. Stifter’s Dinge, staged at the CUB Malthouse from 8-11 October as part of the Melbourne Festival, is performer-less theatre, a depersonalised, mechanised opera of suspended player-pianos, wires and projections surrounded by barren trees, dank pools and industrial detritus.
Employing live music performance, robotic sound generation, fragments of classical, jazz, and vintage Papua New Guinean ethnographic recordings, and fragments of texts from William S Burroughs, Malcom X and mystical romantic writer Aldabert Stifter (the inspiration for the work), Stifter’s Dinge presents a fascinating inquiry into the nature of existence, absence, sound and action.
Joshua Meggitt spoke with Heiner Goebbels prior to his Festival appearance.
Cyclic Defrost: About your work Stifters Dinge, about to be performed at the Melbourne Festival, where did the idea for it come from? I’m particularly interested in the depersonalised aspect of it, the idea of doing a theatre or music piece without live performers.
Heiner Gobbels: I would go back to earlier collaborations with the same set designer, Klaus Grünberg, and we discovered in nearly – no all – of my earlier pieces that in certain moments when we would do what the audience wouldn’t normally expect from theatre, when we don’t show anything up front, when we don’t do this classical intensity of presence, dramatic expression and front stage, when we don’t do that, we discovered that the audience is most attentive and most involved (laughs)! So we said, “since these are the parts we liked most, and we already made a couple of machines for the earlier shows, like moving lights on stage which moved and played like an animal”, we thought, “let’s try and make a piece that keeps this imagination and holds the audiences imagination for more than an hour.” That was the starting point.
CD: Is there a sense of Conlon Nancarrow involved perhaps, or electronic music, where there is no performer, was there a link there at all?
HG: Umm, electronic music – up to a certain part yes, but not in the very abstract sense, I’m not so much into that. But I like the term ‘absence’. Conlon Nancarrow was already a big inspiration in the early eighties, and you’ll see some influence in this piece because there are five pianos on stage. But in difference to Conlon Nancarrow we have only two
pianos which play themselves, but the other pianos have no keyboards
anymore. They are rather treated badly, by machines that scratch their
insides. So this has a little bit of a different aesthetic coming up. I have
nothing against electronic music but I’m rather more interested in the balance between electronic music and live produced music, but in this piece in actual fact all the sounds used are created live on stage; there’s no electronic music at all. Not even samples, which I’m famous for (laughs). But there’s stones, there’s water, there’s metal, there’s tubes, plastic tubes, and everything is being performed by machines on the stage live, except voices
CD: There is one live voice?
HG: No, they’re recorded.
CD: In terms of distinctions between it being a music piece, a theatre work, a concert performance, do you deliberately try and blur these distinctions or are you just not concerned with them at all?
HG: Umm, I think the first idea. What I really like about the theatre, or any performance, is that you never know after five minutes what it’s going to be like for the next two hours. So I’m constantly shifting the modes of perception, so you never know what I am going to do, and the audience thinks, “am I supposed to understand it? Is this just music
without words?” Because there are lots of voices that are completely unknown to us. For example, there’s a recording of Papua New Guinean Indians from 1904 by an Austrian ethnographer, on wax cylinders, which of course we can’t understand, but we can get a lot of intensity out of them.
CD: Similarly, your music throughout your career has existed across genres and styles, do you look at music in a similar way, of disrupting and unsettling genre distinctions, or do you just create
and then see what happens?
HG: I don’t think I have a hierarchy between music and sounds and noises and words. I think for me the acoustic world is all equally interesting, on all levels. And in order to provoke and create and allow the imagination of the audience – which I think is the most valuable thing of a performance – I don’t make a distinction between what we see and what we hear, they don’t necessarily go together. Which means that the audience, who always want to connect what they see with what they hear, and to know where its coming from, then they connect with it in a very individual way.
Actually what I wanted to say about the electronic part is that of course behind this real space with real machines, real sounds, there’s a lot of MAX/MSP technology, which allows me to handle the performance in a musical way. Actually a friend of mine, a musician and composer, he built me a keyboard, an 88-key keyboard, an ordinary midi keyboard, which I can, for example when I press the F sharp, then it started to rain, with the A for example a stone starts to move against another stone, it moves backwards against the A-sharp, so it allowed me to treat all the elements of the stage, even the lights, in a musical way.
CD: Works like Stifter’s Dinge seem less overtly political than some of your early work. Is politics something of a necessity when you create music, and do you think it’s vital for art to have a political component?
HG: I think you should not stress the political component as an artist, I think this has the opposite effect. When you reduce theatre or music in order to make a political statement you lose the artistic mystery and the freedom for imagination, and all that. But, on the other hand, this piece is quite politically perceived now, in an ethnological/ethnographic way, by recognising and highlighting the unknown, the other, the stranger, by refusing to mirror ourselves, and also in an ecological way, because it somehow raises up in the audience… But this was not our primary intention, but it raises up questions about how to deal with natural forces, ecological catastrophes, raising the limit of our
range.
CD: I’m also thinking of your piece entitled Eraritjaritjaka, the Aboriginal word for nostalgia. What prompted the decision to use that word for the title? Was there a specific connection, an ethnographic motivation?
HG: The first idea to use that word was because I was
completely attracted to that word ‘eraritjaritjaka’, I mean, I don’t know how to
pronounce it (laughs) but when I read it I just said it, ‘eraritjaritjaka’. I found
this word a couple of times in a book by Elias Canetti, who found it in some
ethnological research on the population of Aranja, which is an island
close to Australia. And of course it is stunning what this word eraritjaritjaka
means, which is: a desperate looking for something that has been lost. And of course that was the second reason to use this wonderful word, and the third reason was that it played an important role in the work of Canetti which
inspired me for the whole piece. So there were a couple of reasons to use it,
but the most effective reason probably is that I love to call my productions
with a name where no one knows what to expect. Because the only thing I ask for from an audience is to be curious, and to be ready to see something that they’ve never seen before.
CD: This new piece certainly looks as though it has that connection in mind.
HG: I think so too.
CD: So after the mystery of Stifters Dinge, what else are you working on?
HG: After this piece I made a work with the Hilliard Ensemble, a singing piece, for a capella quartet, they specialise in medieval music but I did a theatre piece with them, in which they are performing, and reading, and speaking text, performing like actors. It was an exciting experiment for them. And now I’m preparing a new production with a choir from Slovenia, 30 girls aged between 10 and 20, and we’re starting with the first rehearsals at the end of this week, and we’ll premiere the piece in two years. That’s basically the rhythm I work, I take a lot of time.
CD: Yes I’ve noticed! But it seems like that’s the way to get those results. Many thanks and I look forward to seeing you in Melbourne.
HG: Thank you.
Heiner Goebbels performs Sifters Dinge as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Book tickets online.
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