Translated material
The Bushman's Way
New performance by Heiner Goebbels
The first meeting of Moscow theatergoers with the composer and director (perhaps these words should be written with a hyphen) Heiner Goebbels took place in 2001 at the Theater Olympics. He and the Swiss theater Vidi-Lausanne E.T.E. brought to Moscow a performance with an incomprehensible name “Hashirigaki” (as it turned out, this means “talking and thinking on the go” in Japanese), composed by Goebbels from the texts of Gertrude Stein, Japanese music, lighting effects, but above all from his own visions and whims. Goebbels readily said that the idea for the play came to him when he saw three different actresses (Japanese, Swedish and Canadian) together, that if it were not for his great namesake, the late playwright Heiner Müller, he would not have started doing theater at all, that the plot , action, characters, etc., do not interest him. The audience, who had already tasted Bob Wilson's performances, nodded respectfully: of course, of course, we know, we know. Visualization, installation, non-verbal communication - we don’t live in Berdy-Kerbabaevsk, tea. The laws by which Heiner Goebbels' theater exists seemed to be known or at least partially recognizable, this ensured a stormy ovation for the performance of Hashirigaki.The performance brought by Goebbels and the Vidi-Lausanne theater E.T.E. at the VI Chekhov Festival, is called even more exotic than before: “Eraritjaritjaka”. The booklet claims that in the language of the Australian Bushmen this word means “inspired by the desire for something that no longer exists.” The performance features texts by Elias Canetti, a German-language writer who won the 1981 Nobel Prize. There are two performers on stage: the wonderful French actor André Wilms, who once worked with Heiner Müller, and the string Mondrian Quartet from Amsterdam, playing the music of Bach, Ravel, Shostakovich and several modern composers, of whom I only know Goebbels himself. It would seem, where is the estate, and where is the flood. The easiest way is to think that the director deliberately composes a theatrical cocktail from ingredients that initially have no connection with each other and are not aimed at any common meaning. Either he’s just “making us look nice,” or he’s fooling us.
In fact, Heiner Goebbels offers for consideration things that are very important to him. If the method of examination is too complex and the conclusions unclear, this is not the fault of the director who is looking for an opportunity to explain himself seriously. Seriousness for him always means beyond the boundaries of traditional theater. That is, at those levels at which neither the logic of a coherent plot, nor the lively charm of an actor, nor any powerful scenographic metaphor can convince anyone of anything. In his performance, Heiner Goebbels tries to reach those levels where only music, intuition and witchcraft work.
We are, of course, not talking about Goebbels’ personal magical skills (if he possessed them, he would not need either theater or music). We are talking about the human ability to transform, which Elias Canetti - not only a prose writer and playwright, but also a very important philosopher - writes in his book “Mass and Power” (section “Premonition and transformation among the Bushmen” and the next few) . According to Canetti - a thought that we have to simplify extremely - the Bushmen civilization retained the memory of the fluidity of the world and human nature. This fluidity gives the Bushman incredible abilities for a modern European, but it also disturbs him with the constant presence of something alien in his own feelings, in his own body. It awakens a craving for firmness, for self-identity, and ultimately obliges a strict ban on transformations. All that remains from the former, fluid world is the ability to have vague premonitions and longing for everything that has disappeared.
An attempt to return to the previous cycle of transformations has only one alternative: emotional pretense and social slavery. However, there is nowhere to go back; the fluid world has hardened and petrified; hence our spontaneous and universal “eraritjaritjaka,” which everyone feels to the extent of their innocence. This, as far as I understand, is the ideology of Heiner Goebbels’ theatrical work. The trouble is that I can only speak about the content of this work as the sum of theses not expressed in the performance (Brecht, perhaps, could have expressed Canetti’s thoughts in plain text, but not Goebbels) and my own, guesswork-interpreted impressions. It is often said that with the questions “What is the point here?”, “What does this mean?” etc. one cannot address modern theatre, especially the kind of theater of the kind practiced by Bob Wilson, Christophe Marthaler or Heiner Goebbels. Such questions, they say, only reveal the narrow-mindedness and crude rationalism of the questioner; modern theatre, like installation art, like music, one must be able to enjoy it without thinking about any meaning. As for me, I could tell in some detail how the relationship between the musicians of the Mondrian Quartet and the pseudo-conductor Wilms is built, how the space is inhabited and why the white pentagon in the background turns first into a projection of a house, and then into a natural house with luminous windows and a lived-in space behind them. I could describe how Canetti's ideas are translated into the language of stage gestures and how eloquent are the details invented by Heiner Goebbels (for example, a small upside-down house located next to a large one); I don’t know about the reader, but this rationalization activity would give me great pleasure. But still, the main meaning of “Eraritjaritjaki” is the musically, compositionally proven inexpressibility and inaccessibility of the main meaning. Goebbels does not try to explain what this meaning is, but he insists: there is a meaning; was not, but is. “Where is he? - He's there. - Where is it? “We don’t know,” as Derzhavin wrote. But it is he who inspires us to desire what no longer exists.