23 October 2000, Friede Karl, Hamburger Morgenpost
Review (en)

A theatre for the eyes, ears and nose

Texts of Gertrud Stein and music by Brian Wilson: " Hashirigaki " filled the audience with enthusiasm.

"We make a thing, then we make another one". The texts of Gertrud Stein are compositions in prose. What is fascinating is not the sense, but definitely the rhythm of the language - created also by repetitions. The books of Stein must be read loudly. Heiner Goebbels makes that it achieves itself. "The Making of Americans" is the basis of his musical play "Hashirigaki", the first performance of which was played on Thursday at the Deutsche Schauspielhaus. In this coproduction (among others with the Theater Vidy-Lausanne), three women are at the centre of it. The Japanese Yumiko Tanaka, the Franco-Canadian Marie Goyette, and the Swedish Charlotte Engelkes - who belongs to the troupe of the Schauspielhaus since this season. Goebbels constructed around the artists a theatrical world of light, music, language, sounds and movements. "We live, love, dream� "We build cardboard cities and make them fly up to the sky. Bells of cow hang over grounds of rope, ring in a gloomy way, turn into balloons and float. Goebbels is a magician. His art is a theatre for the senses. For the eyes and the ears and, after a small explosion, even for the nose. Blue, green, yellow, red colours of a powerful beauty, the light designer Klaus Grünberg convenes them by magic on the semi-circle of the stage, traces of light looking like spirals of writing that seize the actresses and let them disappear. Then the three women are back again, each of them with an instrument case. They produce a western oriental sound coming out from vibrations of traditional Japanese music and rhythms of the Beach Boys. Among other things, "Hashirigaki" means "to hurry". It may have been the literary style of Stein, but for the production of Goebbels, the word is misleading. We don't hurry, we hover, hold by the hand of these three expressive women who walk toward the art on a stuffed ground -through the language of Gertrud Stein and the music of Brian Wilson, through the time and the space and through our consciousness. "Some come together to see something, to hear something ". To be together, to see something, to hear something. One moment of happiness! (Friede Karl)

on: Hashirigaki (Music Theatre)