Eraritjaritjaka

THE INDEPENDENT, 02 September 2004
Eraritjaritjaka
I don't know why, but I've never quite managed to crack eggs, melt butter, chop herbs, peel an onion and whisk up a perfect omelette in complete synchronisation with the scherzo of Ravel's String Quartet. I wish the German composer and theatre creator Heiner Goebbels would share that secret, and quite a few others, with me. It's hard enough getting your tongue round the title Eraritjaritjaka - an Australian Aboriginal expression for wishing for something lost, a sort of nostalgia, perhaps - before even trying to digest and describe the work itself. Goebbels's previous work has proved mostly unclassifiable, but the addition here of hi-tech real-time video, along with quirky visuals and the prominent use of the Mondriaan String Quartet, adds yet more levels to his fascinating and original multi-media mix.
In Eraritjaritjaka, Goebbels draws on diary entries and other jottings by the Bulgarian-born German novelist, essayist and sociologist Elias Canetti who died a decade ago. His words, which explore the ways a creative artist perceives and assimilates the world, are given a new twist, assembled without any loss of integrity into what the composer describes as a "musée des phrases".
There is something magical in the way Goebbels juxtaposes artificiality and reality in his meticulous plotting of the staging, lighting, music, text and video. It begins simply enough with part of Shostakovich's sombre Eighth String Quartet. The scene is set for the actor André Wilms (presumably being Canetti) to walk on, speaking in French, the English surtitles throwing up dazzling references to the power of creative forces and relationships and the search for truthfulness to one's inner self. Music colours the work's moods, with extracts from Crumb's Black Angels, and from Scelsi, Bryars and Kurtag, as well as echoes of Bach, all containing veiled references and providing motifs for Goebbels's own music.
When, in one passage, it's suggested that, as they age, humans grow smaller and unimportant, I half expected the tiny old couple from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive to pop up. Instead, as he expounds a theory on our relationship to animals, Wilms encounters two remote-controlled robots. Then, after delivering a torrent of philosophical themes and ideas, Wilms is seen on film, exiting the Lyceum Theatre, entering a taxi and disappearing through the streets of Edinburgh.
Next, the miniature house downstage is dwarfed by a lifesize version upstage. Through its uncurtained windows, and on video too, we become intruders on a domestic scene - hence the omelette. Not everything you see and hear is real, though the ear and eye desperately want to believe it is. Yet even the clock was showing real time, 11.30pm, so were we dreaming or could the projected house have been the actual house on stage?
(Lynne Walker)

Financial Times, November 30th 2004
Eraritjaritjaka/Heiner Goebbels Berlin Festspielhaus
The title of Heiner Goebbels' new piece of music-theatre is apparently Aboriginal for "longing", but you certainly do not hear it uttered in this ingenious hour-and-a-half, much as you might like to.
Its French subtitle, "Musée des phrases", is more apposite. Goebbels, who has never pretended to make things easy for his audiences, has based his show on texts by the 1981 Nobel Prizewinner Elias Canetti. The evening's first irony, which Goebbels must enjoy, is that the Bulgarian-born Canetti wrote in German; and here was a "museum of sentences" delivered in the German capital in French.
Mind you, it is wonderful French, wonderfully delivered by Alsatian actor André Wilms as Canetti. Dramatically, this is a one-man show. Musically, the motor is the Mondriaan Quartet, who open with Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet and throughout play - amid electronic interpolations composed by the director - a mishmash of extracts from Bach to Bryars.
This is trademark Goebbels: mixing music and text, casting his stage and figures in riveting games of light, weaving uncategorisable stage magic.
Wilms performs a kind of ballet with the music, commenting on it, keeping it at bay, engaging with it: "In music, instead of walking, as they normally do, words swim." The musicians move from one side of the stage to the other, from front to back. Though little happens, there is no stillness.
Wilms is caught in an oblong of light and seems able to rotate it. The dark stage floor opens to reveal a white square; a black backdrop is pulled up similarly to reveal the façade of a house with four windows. Wilms exits pursued by cameraman. He takes a taxi to a Berlin flat and his image is projected on to the façade. He continues to soliloquise: "A society where people cry only once in their life".
The rest of the show is a real-time film "somewhere else", with the quartet continuing to play live; so how is Wilms able to chop an onion, in perfect sync, with the pizzicato of Ravel's String Quartet? That would give the game away. Suffice it to say that while one wonders what a lot of Goebbels' magic is for, his tricks are breathtaking. The production is moving to Paris, to wind up the Festival d'Automne (tel +33 1 5345 1717) from December 7-19.
(James Woodall)

www.edinburghguide.com, Mon August 30th 2004
Eraritjarijaka: musée des phrases
In the beginning there is a quartet playing some slow and beautiful Shostakovich, black on black except for their white shirts, the music totally occupying everyone's minds. Just as we are settled, seduced and immersed in the music, it begins to break down into crackling white noise. The quartet moves to the back of the stage but the music carries on. Our ears hear an electronic continuation of the piece but we can't pinpoint the moment that this took over. As the crackling dies away a white square has grown and appeared magically in front of our eyes.
A solitary man enters from the auditorium and his arrival at the corner of the square presents our first inversion for contemplation - except that we don't yet know that this is important and the whole action will move too fast and in too many directions for contemplation to be possible. This first inversion is light and shadow (or light and dark), especially when the man becomes the shadow and the 'shadow' becomes a beam of light moving as he moves around the stage. It is the first of the Musée des Phrases.
Always and continually there is music, the underpinning and driving impulse of this whole unique, extraordinary, multi-dimensional theatre experience.
We are led gently into the conundrums - and to the deeply philosophical arguments and dilemmas - by listening to the man muse (only an accent mark and one letter separate us from the subtitle) on words: on single words' existence, their meaning, use, interpretation and, above all, their eternal meaning, fixed forever. Then he moves on to consider words' interaction on each other, as each one's eternal fixed, non-volatile state becomes destabilised by their impact on each other.
By chance I had been reading, only the day before, about the Zero Point Field (the vaccuum) and its energy. Gravity causes particles' energy and the Zero Point field's energy to interact or 'jiggle' at different rates.(1) So here was an example of words as concepts acting in exactly this way: separately one thing, together something altogether different. Too quickly for thoughts to develop, we were to consider words and music: the dangers presented to words and their stability by music, where the words "swim along". So now words are being swept away from the interior stablility of the listener, who must think on their changing impact on himself.
But all this is too linear. The central concept of self and others - of each topic's 'selfhood' and changing interaction with 'non self' - is examined in a fascinating stream of consciousness which looks at little and large (where, while hearing the most dramatic 'storm' music, the little model house is transformed as if by magic into the stage set of the scaled up exterior wall of the large house) - conundrum: if we have been hearing storm music, why is the puff of smoke rising up in a windless atmosphere?
The big surprise is the man's exit half way through the piece from the theatre we sit in, followed by a video cameraman who films his journey, entry into his house, his subsequent meal and an at-the-door encounter with an intellectually brilliant nine year old boy, all shown to us on the theatre's screen. Suddenly it's a video film and we have no time to wonder why he's gone- or whether he'll come back - because the stream has flown swiftly along taking us all with it.
In the strangely rational manner of dreams, where everything seems to make some kind of sense and logic, the notes about concepts come into sharp focus then fade away again. Constantly Magritte comes to my mind as what I see and hear plunge me into his cool, surreal world of disparate objects and themes 'jiggling' along with each other. And all the while is the music, sometimes leading the thoughts, sometimes expanding on the stream of consciousness and the philposphy; always, underpinning everything, is the mind's search for order - even in the most strange and outrageous juxtapositions. Inspired lighting also helps to achieve a rational balance.
And, because everything single thing is important in this unique composer/playwright's mind, we must come to think on the strange, unpronounceable title. It's an Aboriginal concept, meaning looking back to a lost, ideal time of peace and happiness, the Dreamtime. The Musée des Phrases has been built up in just-logical, tangential mental leaps, with 'self and non-self' swimming along in music's eternaly-logical flow. We've seen real theatre with real people melt into video film and back again. Our minds - as well as the hero's mind - have been caught up on a slightly-too-fast, disorienting journey and have tried to sort the experiences into an order we can feel, at the very least, comfortable with and at best have under control.
The music has ranged across some three centuries. from the 'dreamtime ' of Bach's Art of fuge to the destablised feeling invoked by George Crumb's Black angel. In the end, we are brought to a stable, harmonious point and we leave a mind-expanding, ultimately optimistic experience with the feeling that the Zero Point Field of human existence is an orderly one, all underscored by the music.
It was a marvellous music theatre experience and a privilege to have been present at it. It's one that this reviewer will return to as many times as possible, knowing that new concepts and aspects of psychology and philposophy will be discovered. Truly this is an master who sees music in a multi dimentional way and can show us new things.
(Pat Napier)

The Scotsman, Mon August 30th, 2004
Eraritjaritjaka: Musee De Phrases
SURREAL and utterly beguiling are probably the most apt descriptions of a Heiner Goebbels event, part of the German composer/director’s appeal is his ability to defy definition. Certainly "music theatre" hardly seems adequate to describe the fusion of music, art, theatre, video, literature and even a brief nod to science and engineering that come together in the extraordinary Eraritjaritjaka: Musee de Phrases. As the last part in a trilogy which Goebbels wrote for the superb French actor André Wilms, the piece takes as its starting point the history of the string quartet. To begin with the Mondriaan Quartet played the first movements of Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet. Wilms joins them reciting a "museum of phrases" from Auto-da-fe - the only novel written by Bulgarian writer and critic Elias Canetti. This fragmentary discourse about life takes on new meaning when Wilms exits from the stage and the theatre. His journey by car through the streets of Edinburgh to a flat off Nicholson Street is conveyed by a real-time video camera onto a screen in the shape of a large house. Wilms then cooks an omelette, cutting up the onions in perfect time to the pizzicato movement of Ravel’s Quartet. He is joined in the flat by the quartet and then as if by magic, they are all transplanted into the interior of the stage house from which they emerge for the finale. A performance of the exhilarating and intriguing work of Goebbels should be mandatory every festival.
(Susan Nickalls)

THE GUARDIAN, Monday August 30th, 2004
Eraritjaritjaka
Heiner Goebbels's music theatre is a world of literary allusion, knowing intellectualism and avant-garde glamour. His latest project, Eraritjaritjaka: Musée des Phrases, is a collaboration with the actor André Wilms and the Mondriaan string quartet. Its fusion of 20th-century string quartets with film, speech and electronics creates a multi-faceted dramatisation of one man's quest to comprehend the world.
The texts, spoken by Wilms in French, were a sequence of dazzlingly imaginative aphorisms by Elias Canetti. In one scene, Wilms indulged in a miniaturist fantasy in which people became smaller and less important as they aged; in another, he was confronted by a mysterious, animatronic robot - the catalyst for a meditation on the nature of animals and the psychology of looking at another living being.
In a brilliant set piece, Wilms described the role of the orchestral conductor as an embryonic despotism, and his ever-changing relationship with the Mondriaan players became the theatrical embodiment of Canetti's elliptical, subversive texts. Movements from George Crumb's acerbic Black Angels expressed Wilms's alienation as he sat alone writing. He mused on society's obsession with food to the accompaniment of Gavin Bryars's elegiac First String Quartet.
But the theatrical coup of the staging was its use of video. Followed and filmed by a cameraman, Wilms left the theatre, climbed into a taxi and was taken home. Projected on to the set in the theatre, he continued his Canetti-inspired monologue while preparing an omelette in perfect synchronisation with the quartet's performance of the scherzo from Ravel's String Quartet. The secret behind this mind-boggling theatrical precision was revealed towards the end of the performance, when the cut-out house on the stage was unmasked as the house shown in the film.
For all its inventive theatre and Wilms's virtuosic performance, there was something glib and hermetic about Eraritjaritjaka. Despite the range of references plundered by Goebbels, the staging never achieved a sense of emotional or expressive depth, only a playful but self-conscious revelling in its own literary cleverness and visual sophistication.
(Tom Servic)

THE SCOTSMAN, Sunday August 22th, 2004
A musical mystery tour
THE box office staff at the Edinburgh International Festival are sure to be having a laugh. That’s because anyone calling for tickets for the new Heiner Goebbels show will have to make an attempt at pronouncing the title. And exactly how are they supposed to pronounce Eraritjaritjaka? t’s the first question I put to Goebbels - the director and composer who works at the intersection of classical music and theatre - but he leaves me none the wiser.
"Just make it very simple," he says, rattling the title out in a way that doesn’t sound simple at all. My rough interpretation is this: you should put the stress on the two ‘it’ syllables and deliver it with a groovy jazz rhythm. Otherwise just call up and ask for the Heiner Goebbels show.
A piece of music theatre that depends on a clever visual surprise - I won’t ruin it for you - Eraritjaritjaka features Amsterdam’s Mondriaan Quartet playing the music of JS Bach, Gavin Bryars, Ravel, Shostakovich and others. They are joined on stage by actor André Wilms reciting enigmatic texts by essayist Elias Canetti. During the multimedia performance, Wilms takes a journey into a house where all is not what it seems.
How does Goebbels describe it? "That’s one thing I don’t have to do," he says. "With all my work I try to make this question difficult. What drives the attention of an audience is the unforeseeable, and the secrets and the mystery of a performance. That’s what I’m trying to work on. It starts like a string quartet concert, but you shouldn’t expect it to stay like this."
He suggests it’s an opportunity to experience the ideas of Elias Canetti, a Bulgarian writer better known on the continent than in Britain, even though he lived here as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna from 1938 until his death in 1994.
A sometime lover of Iris Murdoch, Canetti published a study of mass behaviour and totalitarianism, Crowds and Power; a novel, Auto-da-Fé which won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981; two autobiographies, a number of absurdist plays and several books of aphorisms.
It is these elliptical and unconnected aphorisms that Goebbels uses in combination with "some of the most beautiful string quartet music of the 20th century". Audiences who saw Goebbels’ previous shows at the Edinburgh Festival, Black on White and the Beach Boys-inspired Hashirigaki, will know not to expect the conventional. "A wonderful lady after the show said to me it was like being in a picture of Magritte," he says. "Nobody was ever able to describe so precisely what I intended to do."
THE PERFORMANCE is the third instalment of a trilogy, though their relationship is only thematic and it does not matter that the first two parts, Ou Bien le Débarquement Désastreux and Max Black, have not been seen in Edinburgh. There are two factors that connect the three parts. One is actor André Wilms, who starred in Deborah Warner’s A Doll’s House and Aki Kaurismäki’s Juha. The other is that each piece was inspired by a writer’s informal notebooks: Ou Bien... combined writings by Joseph Conrad with African music, while Max Black teamed notes by Ludwig Wittgenstein with electronic music.
"It’s not very well known that Canetti published five or six little notebooks of observations he made during the day, in the newspaper, looking out of the window, looking into people’s eyes on the tram, on the subway," says Goebbels.
"He looked with his sharp, uncorrupted mind. I’ve been working only with these little notes, these aphorisms, on animals, the world, relationships, human beings, education, on a lot of subjects. What I love so much in this genre of non-dramatic literature is that you can attend to somebody’s thinking. I try to make it visible or audible."
By "non-dramatic" he means there’s no narrative that holds the text together. The language is non-linear. To create a show of this nature is a slow and steady process of workshopping and experiment. After dwelling on the idea for a couple of years, Goebbels spent a week improvising with Wilms last October, at which point there was too much text and too much music. After further whittling down and shaping, the show was ready to premiere in April, the language inspiring the selection of music.
"I’m trying to find metaphorical reasons for the choice of music," says Goebbels. "There are lines to be drawn through the music of the piece. One could be music that has been dedicated to similar subjects, such as Shostakovich and Mossolov, who were always dealing with authoritarian structures and political experiences.
"On the other hand, there is a chronological line through the piece which starts with quite an early string quartet from Shostakovich and goes up to an American string quartet from the end of the century."
In the notoriously conservative world of classical music, you’d expect Goebbels’ approach to be controversial. The string quartets might be central to Eraritjaritjaka, but the musicians are rarely positioned in the usual faces-to-the-audience arrangement and are frequently upstaged by the visual effects. Goebbels’ experience, however, is that audiences and players have a hunger for more imaginative staging, and it’s rare for the traditionalists to get indignant.
"We have to be aware that every concert is a performance - and a performance in a visual sense," says Goebbels, who is a professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen in Germany. "If we don’t reflect that then we are not moving the genre ahead. In the construction of the piece there’s something that gives a new perspective on what we thought we knew already. How can music be visible? That’s something I try in Eraritjaritjaka: not only how the mind can be visible in a very entertaining way but also how music can be visible."
The simple act of putting a string quartet on a stage with theatre lighting is enough, he says, to change an audience’s perspective. "The treasure of the string quartet repertoire is so rich that if you change a little bit about it, it will immediately change your focus.
"Even if you’ve been seeing string quartets for 20 years, you will suddenly discover the elegance of an arm; you will see the communication between musicians when they have to play the fugue of Johann Sebastian Bach over a distance of eight metres, because they are sitting in the corners of a square. It’s tiny things that can make the architecture of music visible in a very pleasant way."
In this, Goebbels is less an iconoclast than a sensitive artist genuinely interested in - and often respectful of - the boundaries between the different art forms. "There are a lot of boundaries," he says. "But it is very interesting to cross them.
"It is very interesting to pretend, for example, that the whole night will be a string quartet evening and to end up with a live, hand-held video which nobody would expect at the beginning. There are a lot of different laws and preconceptions to be respected, but it is very nice to go back and forth."
(Mark Fisher)

THE GUARDIAN, Friday August 20th, 2004
Round peg in a square hole
Everything Heiner Goebbels touches turns to music - words, pictures or sound. He tells Andrew Clements about breaking the rules
Brian McMaster's benevolent reign as artistic director of the Edinburgh festival may not always feature contemporary music as prominently as it might or should do, but it has made a regular feature of the works of Heiner Goebbels.
It was at Edinburgh in 1997 that the first Goebbels piece to make people sit up and take notice, Black on White, was brought to Britain by Ensemble Modern, and there have been more premieres in subsequent festivals - the theatrical Eislermaterial and Hashirigaki, as well as the concert work Surrogate Cities. Next week, Goebbels' latest work makes its British debut at the festival - Eraritjaritjaka, first seen in April in Lausanne, Switzerland, completes a trilogy that Goebbels has built around the French actor André Wilms.
Eraritjaritjaka (the title comes from the Australian Aboriginal language Aranda, describing a desire for something that has been lost) is a typical Goebbels achievement, bewitching to look at, as compelling, mysterious and intricately layered as everything he produces, and just as hard to categorise.
The text is made up of quotations from the notebooks of the Nobel prize-winning writer Elias Canetti, creating what Goebbels calls a "musée des phrases", and he has compiled the score in the same way, to create an equivalent "museum" of the string quartet. A live group (the Mondriaan Quartet of Amsterdam) plays music that surveys the whole historical span of the quartet repertoire: Shostakovich's Eighth and the Ravel Quartet feature most prominently, but there are also shorter extracts
from a range of composers from Bach to Gavin Bryars.
Then there is the theatrical staging - directed as always by Goebbels himself and making much use of real-time video - with Wilms delivering Canetti's words as a monologue to a counterpoint of mysterious encounters and everyday activities.
It all sounds contrived, but it's a perfect example of Goebbels' dramatic alchemy. He brings together material from very different cultures and artistic genres and makes them cohere in an extraordinarily powerful way, cutting across all the usual categories of the performing arts in the process.
In Black on White, for instance, a recorded interview with the dramatist Heiner Müller (to whose memory the whole work is dedicated) is one starting point. A short story by Edgar Allen Poe is another; the musicians are required to sing, recite and move around the stage while playing Goebbels' score. Hashirigaki is woven from a novel by Gertrude Stein and the backing tracks to the Beach Boys album Pet Sounds, and draws in elements from Japanese music as well.
Goebbels says he only thinks of himself as a composer "from time to time", and points out that much of what he does (such as everything in Eraritjaritjaka apart from the very end) does not involve his own music at all. But everything about his pieces - the way in which the layers of image, text and sounds interact, the way the performers move and relate to what is heard - is entirely musical, arranged in a totally composerly way.
In any case, he has never felt constrained by the usual stylistic pigeonholes that make it easier to deal with all contemporary art forms, but music especially. Goebbels wouldn't fit into them in any case, and puts that down to his fundamentally anti-authoritarian outlook, and to growing up in a family in which he could encounter classical music and pop on equal terms.
Though he was born in 1952 in south-west Germany, he has been based in Frankfurt for more than 30 years. His home is a 10-minute walk from the city's central station, a few blocks from where, in the 1970s, when he was studying sociology at the university, he lived in a squat as part of what he describes as an "undogmatic" group of leftwing students that included Daniel
Kohn Bendit and Joschka Fischer, now the German foreign minister. Despite all the music in his upbringing, Goebbels never considered it as a possible career, expecting he would do something with more social relevance, though he played in jazz and rock bands in his spare time.
What changed all that was his discovery of Hanns Eisler - the pupil of Schoenberg and long-time collaborator of Bertolt Brecht who fell foul of the Un-American Activities Committee in the USA after the second world war and returned to the fledgling East Germany, where he became a leading intellectual figure and composed the country's national anthem. Goebbels got to know Eisler's songs in the mid-1970s, and at the same time discovered a book of interviews in which Eisler laid out his belief that music and politics could be reconciled. Goebbels abandoned his ideas of a career in sociology in favour of studying music, and putting into practice what he had learned: "In a way," he says, "Eisler changed my life."
More than 20 years later, Goebbels acknowledged that debt in Eislermaterial, a spare, haunting tribute to the composer incorporating both Eisler's original songs and some of the music Goebbels had written in the 1970s.
Written again for Ensemble Modern, the piece is minimally theatrical; the musicians sit around the edge of the stage, creating an empty space with a bust of Eisler at the centre: "My staging of Eislermaterial is extremely shy, so that people have to come closer to the music rather than the music seeming too upfront ... I don't think such a setting would work with any
other 20th-century composer."
Theatre has played an important part in his career from the outset. In the late 1970s Goebbels was the musical director at the Schauspiel in Frankfurt, where he worked with directors such as Ruth Berghaus and Hans Neuenfels, and it was there he met Müller, who was to be the next major influence on his work.
They worked together for a decade, producing a number of Horspielen pieces for radio that reflected both Müller's views about the importance of words and how they should be delivered and Goebbels' views on how text and his music should be combined. "My thinking about literature and my thinking about the relationship between words and music comes a lot from Heiner Müller," he admits, and it's no accident that his first international success, Black on White, should have become a memorial to Müller, who died while it was being composed.
Yet Goebbels' vision of theatre is very much his own. The trilogy of pieces conceived for Wilms - Or the Hapless Landing (1993), Max Black (1998) and now Eraritjaritjaka - shows how vivid that imagination can be and how every piece occupies its own utterly distinct world. "Whenever I work with André Wilms I find I use texts that are not dramatic, which are not written for the stage, because those tend to concentrate on relationships and emotions rather than on the thoughts behind the words. That's why I like
to use notebooks - from Francis Ponge and Joseph Conrad in Or the Hapless Landing, Valéry and Wittgenstein in Max Black and now the notebooks of Canetti for Eraritjaritjaka. I deliberately didn't use Canetti's plays or much from his only novel Auto da Fe; I'm looking for words or images or music that open up perspectives, not narrow them; that's why I favour those texts."
Yet the words are only one layer of Eraritjaritjaka; there is the music - "I think the string quartet is the field of music that has been most explored. Almost every 20th-century composer has composed for string quartet" - and the staging, in which everything has a role to play. "When I balance these different elements they have to coexist, and for that coexistence I work on all of them - the set and the lighting as well as the music and the text - from the very first day of rehearsals. The later a medium arrives in the process, the more illustrative its role becomes. But you only have this freedom [to alter things during rehearsals] when you don't have to follow a dramatic text, and when you don't have to do it in the last three days of rehearsal; by then it is too late."
But Goebbels' refusal to fit into pre-existing categories still causes problems; the Germans, he observes, invented pigeonholes. So last year he completed his first opera - or at least a theatre work, Landscape with Distant Relatives, that he described as an opera, and which was first staged in an opera house, in Geneva. But he admits the label was a trick, an attempt to get German music critics to see one of his pieces. When Black on White was first performed in Frankfurt, in 1996, the premiere took place in a disused tram shed and was more or less ignored by the opera world, simply because the venue was unfamiliar. "So I called this work an opera and all the German music critics came; they even went to Geneva to see it, just because I had called it an opera."
(Andrew Clements)

REALTIME magazin (Australia)
In the space between words
Janice Muller talks to Heiner Goebbels
German composer and theatre director Heiner Goebbels is always good for a surprise. The first in his latest production, Eraritjaritjaka—Museum of Phrases, is the title. The piece premiered at Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne in April and is based on texts by Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born German novelist, essayist, sociologist and winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature. Eraritjaritjaka is an Indigenous Australian word from the Arunta language, defined by Canetti in The Agony of Flies (1992) as meaning "full of desire for something that has been lost.” Goebbels is clearly pleased with the title’s linguistic challenge: "I like to have a curious audience, not one who knows what to expect. With this title I can be sure of that, and as a nice side effect the audience can make a little musical rhythmical experience by learning to pronounce it.”
Once mastered, Eraritjaritjaka flows off the tongue with the complexity and lightness characteristic of Goebbels’ theatrical landscapes. As with the equally tongue-twisting Hashirigaki, which dazzled Sydney Festival audiences earlier this year, Goebbels delivers a riveting collage of text, music, sound, light and image by gathering what appear to be disparate elements and placing them side by side in a theatrical context: "I try to construct theatre using musical criteria. I hold myself back and respectfully allow the individual parts I use to keep their own identity and to develop.”
Eraritjaritjaka incorporates text from Crowds and Power (1960), Auto-da-fé (1935) and the many notebooks recorded during Canetti’s lifetime. Goebbels first encountered Crowds and Power while studying sociology in the 1970s. "Canetti’s political sense for balances and against hierarchies not only meets with mine”, says Goebbels "but also with my interest in avoiding these structures in the use of the medias of theatre.” However, it was only recently, at the suggestion of a colleague, he picked up the notebooks. "After a few words I knew immediately that here was something for me to work on, but also”, he laughs, "as usual, it took me 6 years to do so.” His favourite of the notebooks is The Human Province (1942-1975) for "its dense combination of perspectives on politics and privacy. It’s short, bitter and full of humour at the same time.”
Goebbels was attracted to the way Canetti uses words: "He observes the structure and architecture of language as much as he does the society as a whole. The language is reduced, not a word too much and he hates adjectives.” However, it was Canetti’s thoughts on the relationship between music and language that really made an impact: "The way he described the relationship between words and music was like a description of something I had been experimenting with already in my work...Most importantly, he leaves space between the words, which can be useful for music, to make the structure of the sentences transparent and powerful at the same time.”
Eraritjaritjaka features the music of 20th century composers Shostakovich, Mossolov, Scelsi, Oswald, Lobanov, Bryars and Crumb performed by Amsterdam’s Mondriaan String Quartet. "The decision to incorporate a string quartet was about the character of the music, which I considered to be on a metaphorical level comparable to Canetti’s texts”, says Goebbels. However, perhaps in keeping with the nostalgic mood of the title, Eraritjaritjaka ends with the only non-20th century piece to be included, Bach’s The Art of Fugue.
Also on stage is the extraordinary French actor André Wilms, who delivers Canetti’s broad ranging speculations on human behaviour, the nature of power, privacy, language, history, music and animals, savouring the words while never drawing attention away from their impact. "He is a superb actor” Goebbels enthuses, "with a great intelligent taste and huge musical abilities, without being a musician himself.” This is their third collaboration following Or the hapless landing (1993) and Max Black (1998), both also based on notes and notebooks. "We are very confident with each other... which is the most important condition to create something, when we both don’t know much about it in advance.”
Eraritjaritjaka begins with a string quartet, a bare stage, and Shostakovich’s moody quartet # 8. As the last note resounds, a white strip of light cuts the stage in half. The reverberating sound is stretched and amplified into scraping and tearing, while the light peels back the black floor, replacing it with a crisp white square. A blank page? A mirror? A suited man enters. He contemplates the nature of words and music, his gestures and movements part of the music, the music part of his thoughts and utterances.
Goebbels has worked with long term collaborators Klaus Grünberg (set and lights), Willi Bopp (sound) and Florence von Gerkan (costumes). The stage is initially an exquisite but recognisable landscape of clean geometry, black and white contrasts and arresting lighting. However, the overall effect of Eraritjaritjaka is one of peeling back layers, and it is at the halfway point that Goebbels delivers his major surprise. The actor puts on his hat and coat, steps from the stage and leaves the theatre. A cameraman follows. Suddenly we see projected, on the façade of the house that fills the stage, the actor crossing the theatre foyer and riding in a cab through the streets of Lausanne, all the while observing the world around him and listing possibilities for an imagined reality: "A society where people laugh instead of eating. A society in which people suddenly vanish, but no one knows they are dead, there is no death, there is no word for it, but they are content with that” (Elias Canetti, The Human Province).
Finally he stops to buy a newspaper and walks to a nearby apartment. When he steps inside, we are transported into the cluttered, private world of Canetti’s Auto-da-fé protagonist, sinology expert Professor Peter Stein, a character who can communicate in ancient languages but has difficulty with contemporary interactions. We see him alone with his private thoughts and tasks, haunted by unseen voices. We see him tear off the day’s date from a wall calendar, peruse his mail, prepare an omelet and listen to the evening news while folding his laundry. From the reality of the stage we have been transported into a film and our sense of reality has been disturbed. This is heightened, when in a remarkable moment, the string quartet is suddenly there in the apartment, playing Ravel, among the professor’s library.
Goebbels never forgets the logic of the stage and in incorporating the use of live video, he weaves the 2 realities of stage and film so that the mediums support and enhance one another. "I was very clear in advance that the use of video had to be a structural decision, which paid attention to the laws and priorities of the medium itself”, he explains. Shot by award winning Belgian film maker Bruno Deville, Goebbels sees the purpose of the live video as "providing 2 perspectives which are difficult to show in the theatre: the reality of the outside world on one hand and a very intimate, isolated private perspective on the other. We cannot pretend to be able to reconstruct something like these on a stage. We reach the limits of representative theatre when we try to achieve that.”
Early critical response to Eraritjaritjaka has been positive, describing it as "genius”, "where nothing is predictable but nevertheless, all entirely convincing.” Recently awarded the Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh International Festival, the piece has tour dates until late 2005 and will appear next in Berlin, Zurich and The Hague in November. Audience response in particular has pleased Goebbels: "I didn’t know how our construction of the piece would work: the serious beginning, the 20th century string quartet music, the high importance of the live video and the absence of the main character in the second part. But it seems that especially the second part seems to draw audience attention more than I dared to hope. It’s nice to be able to surprise an audience.
(Janice Muller)

NZZ, 23. April 2004
Russian doll system"
A play by Heiner Goebbels in Lausanne, based on texts by Canetti
Enigmas are sometimes enlightening, even if they cannot be resolved. Working around the secret involves placing, replacing and displacing verbal and musical signs until they reveal their energy. Discoveries are born of recomposed instants, not from a broad meaning that has undergone no change. Heiner Goebbels’ new musical play, created at the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, confirms this vision through its unpronounceable title: Erarjaritjaka. This is not a magic spell but an expression used by Australian Aborigines which, according to the definition given by Elias Canetti himself in the Necklace of Flies(1992) describes the obsessional longing for something that has been lost: a state of affliction or melancholy – we are drawn into this at once by the Chostakovitch string quartet, interpreted contemplatively by the Mondriaan Quartet from Amsterdam. A dark-suited figure moves nearer on a leaf of white light – or is it the surface of a mirror, on which steps, words, sounds will begin to reverberate? His shadow revolves like a pendulum, vibrates with the music, alternately with and against the rhythm. Light, body and voice harmonize to the sound of the instruments. This production (scenecraft: Klaus Grünberg) is striking in the strict geometry of lines, a rigorous topography in which the choreography of contrasts alone gives birth to the movement: black and white, positive and negative, up and down: polarities borne by the long breath of the sound.
This most recent collaboration with the Alsatian actor André Wilms may be fatal to what is known as modernity, to the order which determines and penetrates all things. While Wilms acts the orchestra conductor, the demagogue, the animal tamer, passages taken from Mass and Power by Canetti comment on these tyrannical laws and scores, all of which stem from ‘the Russian doll system of the secret’. The musicians and the beast – a robot born of the improbable union between a cannon and a baboon – obey, but not for long. The Conductor of words soon finds himself alone facing empty chairs and imaginary sounds. All that remains are ‘those signs scratched on yellowish paper’.
It is at this point that the most surprising part of the play begins: Goebbels knocks down the walls, removes his actor from the stage and projects him into a series of superimposed levels which echo each other. Wilms takes his hat and coat and leaves the theatre. Change of perspective: a curtain opens and the house, until now present on the stage in miniature, becomes life-size. First as a two-dimensional back cloth onto which the action is projected, and then as a giant Advent calendar, with windows opening gradually, revealing the different rooms and the cameraman within (live video: Bruno Deville). His vision draws us behind the façade.
We enter a haunted house, a parallel universe imbibed with melancholy which is, in fact, the apartment of a character based on the sinologist Kien, the booklover from Canetti’s novel Auto-da-fé. The camera wreaks havoc with this daily life and all its minutely orchestrated meanness, its banal acts and private movements, deforming it into something monstrous. On the desk, the pencils measure the small space they are left, a typewriter stutters and, in the kitchen, the noise of the whisk and the pepper mill increase in volume. The solitary diner devours his own tracks, with no appetite but down to the last crumb. Windows open and the scene splits, women’s and children’s voices haunt the house: we are at the heart of the film, surrounded by associations of images and words, dazed by collages of text and music organized in counterpoints. But where are we really? Have we been transported to the hallucinated hell of a Jean Cocteau, or is it the grotesque meticulousness à la Jacques Tati which gives each gesture its worrying distance?
From stage to film, from film to stage: characters, voices and sounds change place and vector as if their initial aim was to transgress limts. And it all takes place so lightly with an almost somnambulistic virtuosity, nothing is predictable but, nevertheless, it is all entirely convincing. If the word ‘genius’ did not have such a pompous connotations, it would, with this production, be more than ever appropriate.
(Sabine Haupt)

FAZ, 22nd April 2004
Disordered memories in an attic
A museum of phrases: Eraritjaritjake, by Heiner Goebbels, based on texts by Elias Canetti, at the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne
What is a composer? Etymologically, it is someone who composes, puts together. But what does he put together? For Adrian Leverkühn, in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus – and even in the more conservative musiclovers do not see it this way – the world was still in order. A composer composed his own works from the twelve notes of the tempered system. For John Cage this was not enough, as it was the complete universe of sounds that the composer, in his opinion, had to make audible. But since La Monte Young used a splinter of wood from a Bösendorfer to make a ‘piece for piano’ nothing has been quite the same in the world of composers. Since then, Richard Wager and Mr. Bösendorfer both deserve the title of ‘composer’, the Ring and a grand piano serving their vocation as total works of art. And perhaps that is not so bad.
What is a musical play? From an historical point of view, it is a work destined for the stage in which people sing, speak, act and, occasionally, dance. For the inventor of musical theatre, it was too much. Spoken dialogues? They existed already in operettas, before the Revolution. Dance? An unnecessary addition, typical of the Latin mentality. It was time for a totally musical, theatrical work. But the hierarchy inherited from the past was still all too present: the musicians, in the orchestra pit, played; the singers, on stage, sang; the conductor, on his rostrum, took care that nothing was heard that the composer had not intended to be heard. But that time is past, since instrumental theatre and the anti-authoritarian movement took over the universe of music. Henceforth, singers play instruments, the orchestra is on the stage, the conductor takes part in the action by humming. Not only do all have the possibility, they also have the obligation to contribute to the composition.
What is an artist? Let’s be clear about this: he is not only the inventor of beautiful things. Eclecticism and objet trouvé, serigraphy and play-back, quotation and theory of the open form have destabilized the notion of the value of the original. And is the artist perplexed, under the dome of the XXIst century? He has become ingenious.
One might see Heiner Goebbels as a composer of musical plays. And as an artist, giving full meaning to the term ‘composer’ – author of musical theatre: he associates sounds and words, images, movements and lighting which do not necessarily belong to him. He puts them together in a production which he initiates, but is not limited to him. He is the modern composer, par excellence. And one of the most tonic, it has to be said. He has just written a new work for the Théâtre de Vidy-Lausanne (where two of his musical plays had already been presented – Max Black and Hashirigaki) – Eraritjaritjaka, ‘a museum of phrases.’
Anyone who knows Heiner Goebbels’ work will have no difficulty recognizing him here, even if the music is borrowed mainly from Chostakovitch and Ravel, Gavin Bryars and George Crumb, J-S. Bach, Ciacinto Scelsi and Alexeij Mossolove, even if the texts – including the title, a mysterious word from the Aborigine language – are all taken from the works of Elias Canetti. For the art of transposing everything into gesture, with the help of the language virtuoso, his favourite actor André Wilms, the art of weaving links between global vision and acoustic signals, this can only belong to Heiner Goebbels. And makes him a composer, in the literal sense of the word, assembling others’ materials.
And this is what happens: the four musicians of the Dutch Mondriaan Quartet, dressed in black, come on stage and start to play, as if this were a chamber music concert. Nothing suggests a musical play but it looks as though the programme of the string quartet will continue. But because we are in a theatre and conditioned as playgoers, we start to observe the musicians’ movements. We notice how the musical phrases are prolonged into the arm movements, how the head movement of the first violin transmits the melodic theme to the second violin. And suddenly, in the harmonious rhythm of the four musicians, we also distinguish the musical summum of the piece. Goebbels uses the audience’s expectations to communicate something of the structure of the music and this reminds one of John Cage’s iconoclastic concepts of exibition: when, in a glass cabinet, a Greek vase with images of warriors is placed next to Polynesian shrunken heads, the object does not tell the same stories that it would if placed with a collection of other ancient works of art.
Suddenly the musicians stand up, take their chairs and go to the back of the stage. But the music that they were playing continues – on tape – increasingly interrupted by sounds, increasingly violent, as if paper or cloth were being torn. A luminous line appears, like those that indicate the safety issues on planes. As the noise becomes louder, the line becomes broader as if someone was lacerating the black ground to transform it into a square of white light. These interactions between optic signs and acoustic signs are characteristic of the whole play.
André Wims starts to say, and act, Canetti’s texts: texts drawn from his many autobiographical works, from his novel Auto-da-fé and from his essay Mass and Power; observations on human behaviour, Canettis’ ‘minima corporalia’, converted into images, simultaneously grotesque and utterly convincing. While he is reciting the impressive passage on relationships with animals, taken from Man’s Territory, a little remote-controlled robot crosses the stage, an ‘electric insect’, which seems to have come directly from a George Crumb composition, Black Angels: “Every time you observe an animal attentively, you have the feeling that a human is hidden inside and is laughing at you.”
Heiner Goebbels, Klaus Grünberg, his lighting specialist, Florence von Gerkan, responsible for the costumes, and Bruno Deville, live video cameraman, do not overdo the accessories or the signs. But each action echoes other moments of the performance so that the totality is aspired into a vertiginous complexity. Halfway through the play (one and a half hours with no intermission, accompanied by the string quartet only), André Wilms put his coat on and leaves the theatre. The video camera follows him and films his departure through the foyer, his taxi ride through Lausanne, the flat where he lives, right up to the attic in disorder. The images are projected on to the façade of a house, the backcloth. Imperceptibly, the play has become a film. But the actions appears to be taking place in real time, the television news is of that day (the Dutroux court case one evening, the enlargement of the European Community another…), the clock shows the time that it really is in the theatre, Wilms tears the page for that day off a calendar. And then, on stage, the windows open, we see a flesh and blood André Wilms writing on a typewriter, while the video system projects the same scene. Where are we? In a theatre? At the cinema? Where is reality, where is fiction? Our sense of disorientation is consolidated by Bach’s Art of the Fugue. Goebbels is trying to decipher the secret of our reality, without revealing it. He has succeeded.
(Wolfgang Sandner)

Basler Zeitung, 22.4.04
Eraritjaritjaka: a new production by Heiner Goebbels at the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne

One world view transformed into - percussive and poetic - music
Black on black, an empty space: the stage. Four musicians dressed in black: a string quartet. They play the slow overture of the quartet op 110 by Dmitri Chostakovitch, in which the first violin starts to draw out an elegiac, nostalgic melodic line. It is with this music - and nothing other than the music - that Heiner Goebbel's new production opens. Goebbels started by studying sociology before taking up music and, after a 'Sponti' period with the Socalled Leftradical Wind Orchestra, decided to present his own theatrical/musical/literary projects throughout the world, in particular Hashirigaki and Landscape with distant relations.

Longing for something lost
Amplified by loud speakers, somewhat chaotic, the music seems to come from afar. And when the four musicians attack it with energetic bows, its echo resounds for a while afterwards. Longing for something that is lost, Heiner Goebbels' new production is entitled "Eriaritjaritjaka" - a beautiful word borrowed from the Aranda language, that of Australian aborigines, and which means precisely "possessed by longing for something lost". Goebbels found it in Elias Canetti's works. With texts taken from Canetti's autobiographical writings, Goebbels has built a 'museum of phrases'. The world premiere took place this Tuesday in the Thèâtre Vidy-Lausanne and this summer it will go on tour.
Eraritjaritjaka is the third part of a trilogy created by Heiner Goebbels with the French actor, André Wilms. The two first parts were also based on notes and notebooks: in Or the disastrous disembarkment (1993) he turned his gaze to distant colonies: in Max Black (1998), based on texts by Valéry, Lichtenberg, Wittgenstein and Max Black, the human individual faces himself; with Eraritjaritjaka, finally, Goebbels and Wilms take us, with Canetti, to 'man's territory' (the title given by Canetti to one of his anthologies): reflexions on man and his relationship to others, on his habits, on fashions, on music, language and many other themes.

Authenticity and life
The musicians retire to the back of the stage, freeing space for a white square, a 'carpet' for André Wilms. Sometimes the narrator appears paralysed on this rigid surface, sometimes he strides across the stage (stagecraft and the impressive lighting are by Klaus Grünberg); he directs the musicians and is directed by them, alternately violent or tender; and at all times, down to the tiniest gesture, his acting breathes authenticity and life.
The Mondriaan Quartet from Amsterdam interpret Chostakovitch with verve and intensity, but also Scelsi, Ravel, Bach and others, including Goebbels himself. The music penetrates the percussive phrases of Canetti (subtitled in German) and a sort of musical view of the world, sometimes in pitiless lightning flashes, sometimes poetic and playful. There is a brilliant transition from real action on the stage to a filmed expedition into the urban existence of the writer (live videao Bruno Deville). But in this 'longing for something lost' nothing is sentimental or nostalgic, it all remains contemporary and focused on the present - like Chostakovitch's music, which opens the production, and whose melancholy accents envelope today's discords as never before.
(Andras Klaeui)