AESTHETICS OF ABSENCE

Aesthetics of Absence presents a significant challenge to the many embedded assumptions and hierarchical structures that have become ‘naturalized’ in western theatre production. This is the first English translation of a new collection of writings and lectures by Heiner Goebbels, the renowned German theatre director, composer and teacher. These writings map Goebbels’ engagement with ‘Aesthetics of Absence’ through his own experience at the forefront of innovative music-theatre and performance making. In this volume, Goebbels reflects on works created over a period of more than 20 years staged throughout the world; introduces some of his key artistic influences, including Robert Wilson and Jean-Luc Godard; discusses the work of his students and ex-students, the collective Rimini Protokoll; and sets out the case for a radical rethinking of theatre and performance education. He gives us a rare insight into the rehearsal process of critically acclaimed works such as Eraritjaritjaka and Stifters Dinge, explaining in meticulous detail the way he weaves an eclectic range of references from fine art, theatre, literature, politics, anthropology, contemporary and classical music, jazz and folk, into his multi-textured music-theatre compositions. As an artist who is prepared to share his research and demystify the processes through which his own works come into being, and as a teacher with a coherent pedagogical strategy for educating the next generation of theatre-makers, in this volume Goebbels brings together practice, research and scholarship.

Heiner Goebbels is a professor at the Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft of the Justus-Liebig-University Gießen, President of the Hessische Theaterakademie, and Artistic Director of the Ruhrtriennale – International Festival of the Arts. This page intentionally left blank AESTHETICS OF ABSENCE

Texts on Theatre

Heiner Goebbels Edited by Jane Collins Consultant Editor Nicholas Till Translated by David Roesner and Christina M. Lagao

Add AddAddAdd Add Add Add Add AddAddAdd AddAdd AddAdd First published in English 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 original German language text, Heiner Goebbels; selection and editorial matter, Jane Collins; translation and Foreword, Routledge The right of Heiner Goebbels to be identified as author of this work, and of Jane Collins for the editorial material, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First published in German as Ästhetik der Abwesenheit by Theater der Zeit 2012 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-415-83103-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-83104-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-85015-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books CONTENTS

Foreword: Heiner Goebbels: a composer who composes theatre vii Acknowledgements xii Editor’s introduction xv Translator’s note: Of means and perceptions – translating Heiner Goebbels xx When a tree is already being mentioned, you don’t also have to show it: A preface xxiii

1 Aesthetics of absence: How it all began 1

PART I Texts on work(s) 9

2 Description of a picture, table-parties and comparative degrees: About the opera Landscape with Distant Relatives 11

3 ‘Some things you only remember, because they don’t have anything to do with anything’: Questions on constructing Eraritjaritjaka 17

4 Real time in Oberplan: A theatre of deceleration 25

5 Peculiar voices: On working on I Went to the House But Did Not Enter 33

6 The space as invitation: The spectator as the object of art 38

PART II Texts on artists 47

7 ‘But I wanted this to be a narrative’: Jean-Luc Godard as a composer 49

8 What we don’t see attracts us: Four theses on Call Cutta by Rimini Protokoll 54

9 The mystery of signs: For Robert Wilson 60

v CONTENTS

10 Trust no eye: For Erich Wonder 65

11 ‘To comprehensively build up a society with modest prosperity’: The Ensemble Modern as an example 69

PART III Texts on education 75

12 Research or craftsmanship? Nine theses on the future of an education for the performing arts 77

13 If I want an actor to cry, I give him an onion: On working with actors 82

14 A giant wooden pistol: Theory and practice in Gießen 87

15 Organizing hearing and seeing: The practical study of theatre 94

16 Compromise is a bad director: Theatre as museum or laboratory 100

Appendix: Biography 105 Index 107

vi FOREWORD Heiner Goebbels: a composer who composes theatre

Nicholas Till

We shouldn’t be surprised that one of the most innovative of current theatre-makers is first (if perhaps no longer foremost) a composer. Indeed, Hans-Thies Lehmann has identified ‘musicalization’ as one of the distinctive traits of what he calls postdramatic theatre, citing Goebbels as a prime example amongst a number of theatre-makers who employ music and sound as autonomous elements within the theatrical experience, or who work with quasi-musical approaches to theatrical construction.1 Of course composers have always played a prominent role in theatre as producers of opera, or of music for related forms such as the court masque or popular musical theatre. But Goebbels on the whole dislikes opera.2 Although he designated Landscape with Distant Relatives (2002) as an opera, it displays few conventional operatic elements other than its scale and length, and a liking for fancy dress. Goebbels’ aversion to opera is indicative of his approach to theatre more generally. For opera exemplifies the kind of hierarchical deployment of its components that Goebbels finds to be over-determined: composer and librettist agree on an idea; a fixed dramatic text is written according to that idea; the composer seeks to re-present the drama conveyed in the words through his or her music; the production team and performers work to convey the musical drama on stage. In its ultimate form opera always aspires to the ideology of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, in which all of the constituents are supposed to work to one overwhelming dramatic end. For Goebbels this process imposes one ‘totalitarian’ vision upon the theatrical work. ‘I hate the totalitarianism of some forms of entertainment’, he says, ‘which doesn’t exclude very serious artworks. Even a left wing writer or communist composer can be very authoritarian in the structure of his works.’ But this meant that as a composer Goebbels had to unlearn many of the presuppositions of classical musical composition, above all that the value of the musical work is determined by its control of formal structures, and by the force of its rhetorical suasion. For this reason it is worth reflec- ting on Goebbels’ particular background as a musician to understand the distinctive constituents of his approach to making theatre (and, indeed, related forms such as the experimental radio dramas of the 1980s, which provided a stepping stone into live theatre-making). Goebbels undertook formal musical study in Frankfurt whilst completing a degree in sociology. His decision to do so was in part motivated by his discovery of the composer Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), a committed communist and frequent collaborator of Bertolt

vii FOREWORD

Brecht. Although Eisler had studied with Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of serialism, which was the twentieth century’s most radical experiment in musical form, his social commitment led him to turn away from musical processes that seemed so uncompro- misingly cerebral and alienating. From Eisler Goebbels learned the principle of ‘Fortschritt and Zurücknahme’ (progress and withdrawal). As Goebbels explains, it means that you can’t advance on all fronts at once. If you want to develop one element in a progressive way, then you have to accept the conventions of another element to take people with you. For Eisler this meant employing popular musical forms to communicate progressive political ideas, or being able to use more abstract musical languages to accompany concrete film images. And for Goebbels this means that no mode of artistic expression is beyond the pale. He hates what he describes as ‘political kitsch’, but understands that popular culture retains a kernel of utopian truth that, in Theodor Adorno’s words, ‘unties the tongue of kitsch, unfetters the longing that is merely exploited by the com- merce that kitsch serves’.3 Goebbels recognizes this utopian strain (and its inherent melancholy) in the 1960s Californian pop of the Beach Boys, music from whose dreamy album Pet Sounds weaves its way through the theatre piece Hashirigaki (2000), serving as an accompaniment to three female performers who counterpoise the music with actions, texts from Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, and with music by Goebbels himself, played on a quavery theremin and a wheezy portable organ. Combining reas- suringly familiar sounds with surprising theatrical gestures that subtly defamiliarize the music, Hashirigaki both evokes and questions the hazily laid-back dream that American pop represented for so many young Germans in the smug and repressive conformity of the post-war years in Germany. As already suggested by Hashirigaki, a wide range of elements are discernible in the musical languages that Goebbels draws on, including rock, pop, electronica, free jazz and various forms of non-western music. For Goebbels, however, the stylistic variety of his musical languages is not that of a composer borrowing from popular or non-western culture de haut en bas (as with some twentieth-century modernist composers who appropriated jazz idioms, or gamelan techniques), nor postmodern pick ’n’ mix eclecticism, but the result of his practical engagement as a performer in his formative years in the 1970s and 80s, working as keyboardist in a duo with the free improv saxophonist Alfred Harth, and with the art rock band Cassiber. From free jazz in particular Goebbels learned a valuable lesson when he attended a concert by the American jazz trumpeter Don Cherry in 1971. Cherry had assembled an impressive line up of free jazz talent, all with explosively individual styles, yet managed to weld them together: ‘he calmed them down with very simple raga melodies. This was a very important experience for me – the tension and balance between complexity and simplicity, between the collective and the individual artist who was able to balance that out.’ Cassiber likewise consisted of four very individual musicians – Goebbels himself, Harth, the British art rock drummer Chris Cutler, and the vocalist Christoph Anders. ‘Each one had an equally important part in bringing different elements of style, biography, taste and colours into the group. The group was more a confrontation between styles than it was common aesthetic.’ The experience of welding such a diverse set of ingredients has clearly informed Goebbels’ approach to theatre-making, with Goebbels working like Don Cherry to hold together the disparate elements that he assembles. ‘Maybe that was my role in Cassiber’, he says. ‘Somebody who improvised the structure, since performers like Alfred Harth or Christoph Anders really went very far in the transgression of sax tone or singing.’

viii FOREWORD

For this reason Goebbels is unhappy with the term ‘collage’ to describe his work, since this implies too appropriative an approach to the materials he employs or the artists he works with. And again, it is in his handling of musical forms that his dis- tinctive practice as a theatre artist can be observed. In an early theatre work Ou Bien Le Débarquement Désastreux (1993), a key work in the development of his theatrical thinking, as he makes clear in the opening essay of this book, Goebbels incorporates African kora music, composed and played by Boubakar Djebate. But he respects the musical autonomy of such components, explaining that ‘I try to work with them with the greatest possible respect. I never try to mix them. I try to keep it quite transparent. The African musicians felt they could do their stuff. They didn’t feel they were being exploited. Even when I have a strong aesthetic confrontation between the different rhythms of European and African music you feel the clash. I don’t try to cover it up.’ This principle extends to the various constituents of his theatre works, about which he says, with a clear echo of Brecht’s insistence on retaining a critical distance between theatrical elements, ‘What I love is distance between things that you would normally expect to be together or close. I try not to match words and people, words and pictures, music and words in an illustrative way. Distance on stage keeps our senses awake and curious, and actualises our longings and desires for the matches.’ (‘Distance’ is a term that recurs throughout Goebbels’ writings in this book.) But this also means paying careful attention to the connections between the different elements: ‘I take a lot of care with the links. If you work with different elements you have to compose the links between them.’ Temporal links, spatial links, conceptual links. An example of Goebbels’ exquisitely detailed attention to links can be found in a moment in what remains for me his definitive work, Black on White (1996), made with the contemporary music Ensemble Moderne. Although Goebbels is remarkable for his reinvention of theatrical genres, rarely repeating himself, Black on White can be seen as an example of a non-operatic genre of music-theatre known as ‘instrumental theatre’, a term first coined by the composer Mauricio Kagel in the 1960s, in which the protagonists are the instrumental players themselves. In Black on White the musicians play their instruments, make a wide range of ‘non-musical’ sounds, speak texts and carry out various dramatic actions (which Goebbels describes in more detail in the chapter entitled ‘Aesthetics of absence: How it all began’), always in their own personae as musicians rather than as actors playing roles within a dramatic narrative. I need to describe some of the constituents of Black on White in order to convey the mastery with which Goebbels weaves them together. The piece is built around a short story by Edgar Allan Poe entitled Shadow, which recounts the last days of a group of ancient Egyptians awaiting the imminent destruction of their decaying civilization. We hear the text read sometimes in German by the playwright Heiner Müller (pre-recorded, since Müller had died shortly before the piece was made), at other times live by members of the company in their own languages. As an elegy for Heiner Müller, with whom Goebbels collaborated on many projects, the work is highly personal. But it is also a memorial for a German past that was too long suppressed in the post-war years. At the heart of the piece is a scene where the whole ensemble repeat obsessively the line ‘a dead weight hung upon us’, which is immediately followed by the eerie sound of distant florid voices taken from recordings of pre-war Jewish cantors calling the Kaddish, around which Goebbels’ players weave a threnody at first angry and then consolatory; Trauerarbeit (mourning work) for the dead weight of a past from which the future begs to be

ix FOREWORD released. In a subsequent moment we hear Müller’s weary reading of a long passage from Poe’s text, followed by a member of the ensemble declaiming a passage about a buried corpse from T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland,punctuatedbyjazzyfigurations from the rest of the ensemble that manage to be both edgy and raucous. In one corner of the stage, seemingly oblivious to the events going on around him, the ensemble’s flautist enters with a kettle, which he fills from a tap in the corner, and then produces a little calor gas camping stove and a mug. He lights the stove and places the kettle on it, tears open some teabags, shaking the tea into his mug, and then puts a flame to the empty bags so that they ignite and ascend into the stage flies like amaretti papers – a familiar party trick, perhaps, but here suggesting some sort of propitiatory or memorializing act. In a moment of heart-stopping theatrical timing the raucous ensemble winds down, leaving just the sound of a lone accordion note hanging in the air, which then traces a gentle modulation that segues into a perfect triad from the whistle of the kettle, which sounds bang on cue as the water comes to the boil. The flautist then takes out a piccolo and plays a poignant, keening lament above the kettle’s drone-like accompaniment. In the statement about links that I quoted above Goebbels used the musical term ‘compose’ to describe the making of such transitions. I’m not sure whether he meant this literally or figuratively, but in this instance the term is appropriate in both aspects, and either way it is indicative of the kind of musically founded craftsmanship that Goebbels brings to his theatre works. And it is also the sensibility of a musician that enables him to appreciate the textural and sonorous properties of language, rather than simply its communicative meaning. Goebbels acknowledges that he first recognized these possi- bilities from the work of German post-punk bands such as the industrial outfit Einstürzende Neubauten. ‘This gave me the trust that it might be possible to work with German words in a way that was not preoccupied with their meaning. They were using language in rhythmical, repetitive ways, in which the words were placed under a mag- nifying glass rather than being sung in a big [Romantic] Lieder manner.’ (Indeed, another aspect of opera that Goebbels instinctively dislikes is the overbearing ‘pathos’ of operatic singing.) And for Goebbels the energy of musical performance in itself, ‘the shape or the force of the rhythm, or the joy of the performer … the intensity of the player, or the humour that comes along with it’, is as important to the meaning and experience of a work as any more specifically representational elements. Goebbels’ work is never merely abstract – there are too many concrete references being made as sounds, images or words are juggled dextrously – but he undoubtedly brings his musical sensi- bility for forms, textures, tempo and rhythm to his deployment of space, light, colour and dramatic pace and timing. The essays in this book repeatedly demonstrate Goebbels’ belief that any act of art- making entails a form of politics. Nowhere are the politics of art-making more ques- tionable than in the hierarchical structures and institutional prerogatives of the classical music industry, which continues its slow but inevitable decline as a result. But much mainstream theatre is institutionally and artistically moribund too, and it has often taken those working from other disciplines, such as in Goebbels’ case left-field music- making, to revitalize theatre and its institutions. As the writings in this book show, Goebbels recognizes the importance of tackling the institutional structures that so often determine the forms of art practices. And unlike most British theatre-makers, he recognizes the value of theoretical engagement with his own and other practices, which is what makes this collection of his writings so welcome.

x FOREWORD

Notes 1HansThies-Lehmann,Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, London and New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 91–93, 111–12. 2 All references to Heiner Goebbels’ views, and quotations of statements by him, in this essay are taken from an interview with Goebbels, published as Nicholas Till, ‘Heiner Goebbels: Street Fighting Mensch’, The Wire, Issue 229, March 2003, pp. 46–50. 3 Theodor Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 39.

xi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Black and white photographs Stifters Dinge, page 9: photograph by Nicolas Pilet. Eislermaterial, page 47: photograph by Matthias Creuziger. Entrance to the rehearsal stage of the drama department at Gießen, page 75: photograph by Heiner Goebbels. Portrait of Heiner Goebbels, page 105: photograph by Wonge Bergmann.

Colour plates Plates 1–9 Landscape with Distant Relatives: stage and lighting design by Klaus Grünberg; costume design by Florence von Gerkan; photographs by Wonge Bergmann. Plates 10–16 Eraritjaritjaka: stage and lighting design by Klaus Grünberg; costume design by Florence von Gerkan; video by Bruno Deville; plate 10 photograph by Mario del Curto; plates 11–16 photographs by Krzysztof Bielinski. Plates 17–21 Stifters Dinge: stage, lighting design and video by Klaus Grünberg; plates 17–19 and 21 photographs by Mario del Curto; plate 20 photograph by Klaus Grünberg. Plates 22–26 I Went to the House But Did Not Enter: stage and lighting design by Klaus Grünberg; costume design by Florence von Gerkan; photographs by Mario del Curto.

Text 1 Aesthetics of absence: How it all began Presentation given as part of the Cornell Lectures on Contemporary Aesthetics on 9 March 2010, first published in Ästhetik der Abwesenheit, Texte zum Theater, Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2012. 2 Description of a picture, table-parties and comparative degrees: About the opera Landscape with Distant Relatives

First published as “Zur Oper Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten” in: Stiftung Lucerne Festival (ed.): Composers-in-Residence: Isabel Mundry – Heiner Goebbels, Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 111–123.

xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

3 ‘Some things you only remember, because they don’t have anything to do with anything’: Questions on constructing Eraritjaritjaka Revised presentation to the annual meeting of the research network “Wahrnehmung, Sinn und Sensationen” [Perception, Sense and Sensations], at the Freie University Berlin, 13 November 2004. First published in: Christina Lechtermann, Kirsten Wagner, Horst Wenzel (eds.): Möglichkeitsträume – Zur Performativität von sensorischer Wahrnehmung, Berlin 2007, pp. 141–152. 4 Real time in Oberplan: A theatre of deceleration “Stifters Dinge als ein Theater der Entschleunigung”, Revised version of a presentation given at the annual conference of the research network “Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der Künste” [Aesthetic experience in the context of the delimitation of the arts] at the Freie University Berlin 2009. First published in: Dirck Linck, Michael Lüthy, Brigitte Obermayr, Martin Vöhler (eds.): Realismus in den Künsten der Gegenwart, Zürich 2010, pp. 75–84. 5 Peculiar voices: On working on I Went to the House But Did Not Enter First published as “Zur Arbeit an “I went to the house but did not enter”, Theater der Zeit, 1/2009, pp. 24–27. 6 The space as invitation: The spectator as the object of art Presentation at the symposium “Topos Raum” [Topos space] at the Academy of the Arts Berlin, November 2004. First published in: Angela Lammert, Michael Diers, Robert Kudielka, Gert Mattenklott (eds.): Topos Raum – die Aktualität des Raumes in den Künsten der Gegenwart, Berlin/ Nürnberg 2006, pp. 255–272. 7 ‘But I wanted this to be a narrative’: Jean-Luc Godard as a composer First published in Patrick Primavesi, Olaf A. Schmitt (eds.): Aufbrüche. Theaterarbeit zwischen Text und Situation, Berlin 2004, pp. 327–331. 8 What we don’t see attracts us: Four theses on Call Cutta by Rimini Protokoll First published in: Miriam Dreysse, Florian Malzacher (eds.): Experten des Alltags. Das Theater von Rimini Protokoll, Berlin 2007, pp. 118–127. 9 The mystery of signs: For Robert Wilson Laudation for Robert Wilson on his reception of the Hein-Heckroth-Stage-Design-Award on 19 March 2009. First published in: Theater der Zeit, 6/2009, pp. 32–34. 10 Trust no eye: For Erich Wonder Laudation for Erich Wonder on his reception of the Hein-Heckroth-Stage-Design-Award on 14 April 2003. 11 ‘To comprehensively build up a society with modest prosperity’: The Ensemble Modern as an example First published in: Hanns W. Heister, Wolfgang M. Stroh, Peter Wicke (eds.): Musik- Avantgarde – Zur Dialektik von Vorhut und Nachhut, Oldenburg 2006, pp. 133–140.

xiii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

12 Research or craftsmanship? Nine theses on the future of an education for the performing arts Revised keynote for the symposium “On Talent Development” for the British Arts Council, given at the Edinburgh International Festival 2010. First published in: Theater der Zeit, 7-8/2011, pp. 70–74. 13 If I want an actor to cry, I give him an onion: On working with actors Revised version of a presentation given at the conference “Wirkungsmaschine Schauspieler” [The actor as affectmachine] at the ZHdK Zurich in April 2010. First published in: Bernd Stegemann: Lektionen 3 Schauspielen – Theorie, Berlin 2010, pp. 227–234. 14 A giant wooden pistol: Theory and practice in Gießen First published in: Annemarie Matzke, Christel Weiler, Isa Wortelkamp (eds.): Das Buch von der Angewandten Theaterwissenschaft, Berlin, Köln 2012, pp. 53–67. 15 Organizing hearing and seeing: The practical study of theatre Revised version of a presentation given at the conference of the directing schools at the conservatoire for acting “Ernst Busch” in summer 2008 in Berlin. First published in: Nicole Gronemeyer, Bernd Stegemann (eds.): Lektionen 2 Regie, Berlin 2009, pp. 58–66. 16 Compromise is a bad director: Theatre as museum or laboratory Revised version of a presentation given at the symposium “Neue Theaterrealitäten” [New Theatrerealities] during the “Körber Studio Junge Regie” 2008 in Hamburg. First published in: Theater der Zeit, 6/2011, pp. 18–21.

xiv EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Heiner Goebbels entitles his preface to this collection ‘When a tree is already being mentioned, you don’t also have to show it’; wise counsel that should be borne in mind by anyone approaching artistic production or editorial introductions. As the general editor tasked with guiding the reader into this first English translation of his collected writings, I plead guilty to not always adhering to Goebbels’ advice, having been unable to resist including what is ‘already being mentioned’ in my overview. Perhaps it is Goebbels’ capacity to encapsulate, in a sentence or a phrase, a multitude of complex ideas germane to so many aspects of performance composition and reception that makes him so eminently quotable. Of course Goebbels is not simply talking about reiteration; he is talking about a familiar theatrical phenomenon whereby something being expressed in one medium is simultaneously duplicated in another, in this instance the aural and the visual. In the theatre this aesthetic doubling usually involves the presence of a performer as the primary expressive medium to which all other modes are inferior. As an alternative Goebbels posits a way of working that respects the value and integrity of all media and pays close attention to the individual qualities of materials. Writing about developments in performance in the mid eighties, Elinor Fuchs argued that the dominance of theatrical presence was being undermined by the work of the likes of Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson who by this time had established ‘[a] theatre of Absence, [which] by contrast disperses the center, displaces the Subject, destabilises meaning’.1 In his opening essay Goebbels cites Fuchs a number of times and explains how he has embraced dispersal and displacement as strategies in the creation of his own music-theatre works and as principles underpinning his teaching. He also reminds us that despite the volume of works produced by the theatrical avant-garde over the last 40 years, the dominance of presence has not been undermined; that the majority of productions in mainstream opera and theatre still remain predicated on the centrality of performers, ‘self-confident soloists–assured of their roles, characters, and bodies’ (p. 1). The essays in this volume map in a circuitous way, the development of Goebbels’ engagement with the notion of ‘aesthetics of absence’ garnered from his own experience at the forefront of innovative music-theatre and performance practice. In this collection he reflects on his own works created over a period of more than 20 years; introduces some of his artistic influences, including the work of his students, and sets out the case for a radical rethinking of theatre and performance education. He demonstrates the breadth and scope of his references across fine art, theatre, literature, politics, anthro- pology, contemporary and classical music, jazz and folk, which not only inform his

xv EDITOR’ S INTRODUCTION multi-textured music-theatre compositions, but are also incorporated in them. However, as Goebbels also points out in his preface to the volume, he is not offering a model or a template for an aesthetic of absence but seeking rather to explain ‘my theatrical interest in it’ (p. xxiv). From theatre for example, he frequently acknowledges the ideas of Bertolt Brecht as a key influence but he does not endorse Brecht’s ideological certainty or his didacticism. As an artist who is prepared to share his research and demystify the processes through which his own works come into being, as a teacher with a coherent pedagogical strategy for educating the next generation of theatre-makers, Goebbels brings together practice, research and scholarship. Like his music-theatre works these texts are complex, playful and teasingly elusive in places. The moment we try to pin him down, to situate his practice and his ideas, we discover he has moved elsewhere. However, certain themes, historical references and arguments, inflected differently according to context, do emerge threaded through all the sections of the volume. These advocate a break with the established hierarchies of theatrical convention and indicate a strong drive towards the democrati- zation of theatre; they call for openness of interpretation and trust in the intelligence of the audience. These recurrent motifs coalesce as principles underlying his writing, his works and his teaching. I draw your attention to three in no order of priority; readers will doubtless identify many more. Goebbels’ formal experiments with materials, what he terms the ‘means’2 of produc- tion; space, light, sound, performers and text, can be seen to have their antecedents in the works of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scenographers Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig. Appia, in his ‘For a Hierarchy of Means of Expression on the Stage’3 recognized the creative potential of light and space as independent elements, although he still positioned the actor at the top of his ‘expressive’ hierarchy. Craig on the other hand, frustrated by the limitations of the realistic acting styles of his day, looked to non-western performance and puppetry as alternative models on which the actor should base his work. ‘[D]o away with the reality of action, and you tend towards the doing away with the actor.’4 By displacing the actor from his elevated and central position Goebbels gives equal weight to all the theatrical means or elements of perfor- mance. In collaboration with stage and lighting designers, sound artists, musicians and performers, he juxtaposes sound, light, text, materials, bodies and space whilst preserving the individual integrity and the separate contribution of each to the whole performance event. The ideas and influence of the American writer Gertrude Stein appear in a number of the essays. He develops Stein’s notion of theatre as a ‘thing in itself’5 to advocate a non- representational, non-referential theatricality. Here again there are echoes of Craig’s rejection of ‘realism, the blunt statement of life’6 and the reductive danger of ‘connecting actuality and art’.7 The formal properties of Stein’s writing are also at one with his own democratization of stage space. In Wars I have Seen8 for instance, Stein spreads her attention evenly across seemingly trivial and domestic quotidian occurrences and major historic events. In a similar vein Goebbels pays equal attention to foreground and background dispersing the action evenly across the stage space. His concern to give the audience authority, what he terms ‘authorizing’ their sight, a verb, he points out, that is not unrelated to the distribution of power, attests to his belief in the ability of the audience to find their own meanings. There are no messages encoded in his works, neither do they offer the mutual self-affirming identification that marks the

xvi EDITOR’ S INTRODUCTION conventional relationship between actor and audience. His visual dramaturgy, although highly structured and meticulously wrought, empowers the audience to think for them- selves, engages them intellectually and emotionally, leaves space for the workings of their own imaginations. The volume is divided into three parts:

Texts on work(s) Goebbels himself describes his works as ‘experiments’ and these essays give us unique insight into his praxis. They offer a critical commentary on a rehearsal process that is predicated on having no preconceived vision but rather engages with what is there, with the particularity of the means that he has assembled. As in any laboratory experiment the outcome is not a given; materials are brought together in different formulations, new agents introduced to stimulate reactions until the right balance between all the elements – light, sound, text, music, recorded media and performers – is achieved. Always mindful of not offering interpretations but rather striving to find forms as open as music, his works juxtapose the familiar and the strange in unsettling contrapuntal rhythms. With no central protagonist pulling focus, the eye of the audience is free to roam as these polyphonic compositions open up the imaginative space between sound and image, hearing and seeing.

Texts on artists In the second section, Goebbels introduces us to some of the individual artists and artist collectives whose works have inspired and influenced him. All of these writings reiterate and extend in their different ways many of the thematic threads that he explores in his own works. As a composer, Goebbels is able to analyse in minute detail the intricacies of the opening sound track of Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague; he becomes both protagonist and audience when he participates in a performance conceived by his ex-students, the collective Rimini Protokoll. There are tributes to Robert Wilson and the stage designer Erich Wonder on the occasions of their being presented with Hein Heckroth Stage Design Awards. The profound influence of Wilson is clearly apparent as Goebbels acknowledges the precision with which Wilson constructs his works to elicit open but ‘far from arbitrary’ (p. 61) responses from the audience. In his laudation to Erich Wonder, with whom Goebbels collaborated on a number of projects, he remarks on the importance of the ‘foreign otherness’ of Wonder’s stage imagery. He contends that this ‘otherness’ is a crucial alternative to the trite and predictable visual clichés of the mass media and that Wonder’s singular design aesthetic ‘provides a rare argument for the arts’ (p. 66). Goebbels has collaborated with the self-organizing group of musicians, The Ensemble Modern, over a number of years. Flying in the face of convention, they seem to literally embody the principles that underpin his work. Eislermaterial (1998), a work created to honour the centenary of Brecht’s musical collaborator Hanns Eisler, had no conductor or finished score and the musicians were spread across the stage space in non- affiliated instrumental groups. Collective responsibility for the performance was shared across the ensemble in the face of many obstacles. That they achieved cohesion against these odds Goebbels considers a fitting memorial to Eisler, who consistently engaged with the social and the political in his music.

xvii EDITOR’ S INTRODUCTION

Texts on education Goebbels has a lot to say about education in the performing arts. Currently Professor at the Institute of Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen, Germany, he is on numerous educational boards and a passionate advocate of a more integrated approach to the education of young artists. The dual model operating in Germany, of conservatoires on the one hand, that provide highly specialized training for young per- formers to equip them with the skills needed to enter the industry, and universities on the other, which offer a more broad-based research-led approach to arts subjects with less emphasis on skills, has been replicated in many countries across the world. Goebbels makes a convincing case in his final group of essays that this separation does not bode well for the future health of the performing arts. The lack of research and critical engagement in conservatoire training maintains a market-led industry, perpetuates assumptions about hierarchies in production and encourages moribund aesthetics that remain unchallenged. Neither do these institutions equip students to cope with the contingencies of professional practice once they graduate by preparing them for a ‘more precarious and far more complex future’ (p. 77). The theoretical bias of many university music, theatre and per- formance departments has shifted significantly over the last 30 years with most places offering practical experience alongside theory modules; Goebbels argues however in the final section of this collection that there is still much more to be done. ‘Nine theses on the future of an education for the performing arts’ (p. 77) sets out a collaborative, non-hierarchical model in which no one discipline dominates and in which the integration of theory and practice are core principles. Although he is speaking from his particular experience of performing arts education in a European context the challenge his ideas present to the institutionalized training regimes in place for young actors, singers, directors, musicians, designers and stage managers have far-reaching implications beyond western paradigms. Other essays in this section give us insight into the philosophy and methodology underpinning his own department, citing works by students that have affected him and calling for the need for laboratory-like conditions in which new forms can be explored. He is not against the acquisition of craft skills but rather insists on ‘teaching craftsmanship’ at the same time as teaching ‘the ability to reflect why craft is not the only thing that future theatre will bank on’ (p. 103). Goebbels reminds us that technology is never neutral; it ‘has its own dynamic, which essentially defines the production process’ (p. 101). Are we preparing students appropriately for these new modes of production, enabling them to creatively exploit the potential of technologies but also equipping them with the necessary analytical skills to critique them? These aesthetic strategies become a necessary counterpoint to the ubiquitous imagery of the World Wide Web and commercial media that have come to dominate the perceptual field. That there are other ways of seeing and hearing is what makes this volume so important. Bodies are fragmented and split by the Web and the notion of a single coherent ‘assured’ self has been replaced by recognition of our multiple performed personas. How will actor training, much of which is still based on early-twentieth-century notions of stable and consistent character, equip actors to engage with the varied demands of performance in the twenty-first? Aesthetics of Absence presents a significant challenge to the many embedded assumptions and hierarchical structures that have become ‘naturalized’ in western theatre production. In a visual and performance culture saturated with hackneyed images and behaviours Goebbels offers us the unseen, the unknown, the unfamiliar. As Marvin Carlson points

xviii EDITOR’ S INTRODUCTION out, ‘[t]o simply replace an aesthetics of presence with one of absence … would merely reverse the traditional structure, not reject it …’ What is needed is ‘a constant field of interplay between these terms … a field perpetually in process …’9 Goebbels is not trying to abolish theatrical presence but to redistribute it in ways that bring into being different kinds of perceptual experience. What he achieves in Stifters Dinge (Stifter’s Things) for example his ‘no-man show’ (p. 5) is a focus on the presence of objects, the interplay of elements that would normally form the background of the action. In this work supporting materials are brought to the fore becoming protagonists in playful juxtaposition with light, sound and text. Many of these writings were originally conceived to be spoken at conferences and symposia where Goebbels was invited to talk about his work, or as laudations delivered in recognition of the achievements of other artists. As our translator for this English edition makes clear, we have tried to remain faithful to that spoken voice rather than attempt to iron out or standardize its particularities and nuances. As an artist talking about his practice and the ideas that have inspired him, Goebbels often quotes from memory and on occasion the location of his references cannot be accurately sourced. In discussion with him we have located as many of these as we can but there remain a few quotes that we have been unable to pin down. These are all acknowledged as citations but their precise location remains unclear. We hope readers will accept these omissions as the immediacy and quality of the ideas expressed, in our opinion, overrides the need to strictly adhere to formal academic convention. The sections provide an organizing structure but the volume does not have to be read sequentially as concepts and propositions introduced in the first part are revisited in the later essays. This is not simply repetition but evidence of Goebbels testing and re-evaluating his ideas over time and in different contexts. Readers might benefit from adopting Goebbels’ own approach to his reading of the works of Canetti, taking time and going back to them again and again, discovering something new with each fresh encounter. However, in a similar vein to audience encounters with his music-theatre works, I suspect Goebbels would encourage readers to find their own way, to navigate their own journey as co-authors through these inspiring and timely texts, in order to inhabit the imaginative space they open up. Jane Collins, October 2014

Notes 1 E. Fuchs, ‘Presence and the revenge of writing: Re-thinking theatre after Derrida’, Performing Arts Journal, 1985, Vol. 9, No. 2/3, p. 165. [Capitalization in the original.] 2 See translator’s note. 3 D. Bablet and M.-L. Bablet, Adolphe Appia 1862–1928: actor – space – light, London: John Calder, 1982, pp. 57–59. 4 E. G. Craig ‘The actor and the über-marionette’,inOn the Art of the Theatre, London: Heinemann, 1911, pp. 80–94, here: p. 81. 5 Gertrude Stein, Plays. Writings 1932–1946, eds C. R. Stimpson and H. Chessman, New York: Library of America, 1998, pp. 244–69, here: pp. 258–59. 6 E. G. Craig, ibid., p. 89. [Italics in the original] 7 Ibid., p. 81. 8 G. Stein, Wars I Have Seen, New York: Random House, 2013 [1945]. 9 M. Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 135.

xix TRANSLATOR’S NOTE Of means and perceptions – translating Heiner Goebbels

David Roesner

The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.1

There is a temptation in every act of translation, be it between different languages, media or cultures, to act as an interpreter in the literal sense of the word: to interpret the original material for a new context, to clarify, iron out possible ambiguities, make it readable, comprehensible, digestible, speakable. In translating Heiner Goebbels’ essays, Christina Lagao and I tried to resist this temptation not least because he so often insists in his texts and his theatre work on the unexplained, the foreign, the unconnected, the equivocal. He also insists on the formal properties of language, its rhythms, structures and cadences; its potential for being both argumentative and evocative. What this meant was that we decided to stay as close to the original text as possible, to retain the unique style, wordings, sentence structures, repetitions and so forth, rather than trying to translate his essays into a more standard academic idiom. You will therefore find elliptic sentences, a tendency towards the passive voice, a series of repetitions both within and across the collected essays, some fairly bold leaps within the argumentative structure and some unusual punctuation choices. We tried to retain both the meaning of what Goebbels is arguing, but also the quality of the experience of reading his argument. He does not try to make himself or his thoughts overly familiar to the reader, he offers a lot of insight and doesn’t shy away from opinionated arguments, but his writing also retains a foreign quality, is at times unwieldy and requires some work on our end as readers. As translators we felt we shouldn’t do that work for the reader, not least because it would have reduced the texts to our reading of them. I do, however, want to comment on a few words that are central to almost all his texts and where there may be some loss in the translation. Heiner Goebbels very frequently uses the word ‘Mittel’–‘means’ is not an ideal translation as it is much less commonly used to refer to expressive elements, instruments, media or measures in the theatre – all of which are included in Heiner Goebbels’ notion of ‘Mittel’. ‘Mittel’ also comes with a number of connotations, not all of which are captured in ‘means’: the Marxist use in ‘means of production’ is certainly deliberate and important, but so is the notion of ‘vermitteln’–to communicate and mediate.

xx TRANSLATOR’ S NOTE

A second word pairing frequently used by Goebbels is about ‘hören’ and ‘sehen’ (Chapter 15 is even entitled ‘Das Hören und Sehen organisieren’): normally, one would be inclined to translate this as ‘listening’ and ‘watching’, given that in theatre we usually make use of this active and inquisitive mode of our senses. While this is certainly also true for Heiner Goebbels’ works, we still chose to consequently use ‘hearing’ and ‘seeing’:it reflects the experiential nature of the engagement he describes and also matches Gertrude Stein’s wording, whose Lectures in America are of great importance on Heiner Goebbels’ thinking. Finally, a central topos in Goebbels’ writing is the shifts in our perception, that his theatre and the artists he discusses bring about: his word, ‘Wahrnehmung’, has again a number of layers that we need to be aware of – it covers our sensoric perception, our cognitive processes, as well as the semiotic and phenomenological ways in which we make sense of what we perceive. The ethics of what theatre-makers offer for the audience’s Wahrnehmung – what Hans-Thies Lehmann called the ‘politics of perception’2 – are a core concern for Heiner Goebbels. Throughout the text there are a number of further environments, institutions, people or words that are specific to the German cultural context, its artistic institutions and educational systems and I have provided footnotes as and when I felt some additional information would be helpful at a given point. The federal and highly subsidized theatre, music-theatre and concert system, the municipal theatres with full-time employed orchestras and ensembles of actors, dancers and singers and the state-run conservatoires which train the next generation of these, are quite a unique context (and a recurring anathema in Goebbels’ writing). While all this may be quite specific to the German context, I think it is evident that Goebbels’ critique of particular educational and artistic practices applies worldwide and will resonate with all those involved in the arts far beyond the borders of a German-speaking art scene. My experience of teaching experimental approaches to music-theatre in the UK, which always includes sessions on Heiner Goebbels’ work and some of his writings, has over- whelmingly been that his work and thoughts provide a productive challenge, both in terms of their aesthetics and the working processes and work ethics involved. Where I found that in Germany (at the University of Hildesheim, where I studied and taught), it was often the students’ ambition to re-invent the theatre from scratch, to leave their mark by doing something entirely new (even if this sometimes resulted in re-inventing the wheel or in novelty for its own sake), I was struck by the tendency of my UK students to unquestioningly emulate the well-worn aesthetic and hierarchical models of what they perceived to be the received production models of the West End and thus the profes- sional ways of the creative industries. What Goebbels can teach these students is that theatre processes that follow a different ethics don’t have to be amateur, unpaid, rough or marginal: they can be just as professional but based on very different models of interaction and collaboration. His reflection of his working processes and the educational principles at his drama department in Gießen also call into question the institutionalized models of ‘how to’ direct, act, design, sing, make music: professionalism is not determined by a graded ability on your instrument or the mastery of enunciation certified by a top drama school, but by your ability to interrogate and put at stake everything you bring to the process of theatre-making: your skills, your role, your institution, your preconceptions, your held beliefs. Encountering his work then fosters in students an awareness of how important it

xxi TRANSLATOR’ S NOTE is to reflect upon what a theatre process needs, what has the potential to become productive in a given context in dialogue with a given material. Making this book available in English now will definitely further stimulate and enrich this kind of discussion; a discussion, which should feature centre stage in all teaching and making of theatre (despite the fact that Goebbels is so adamant to leave the centre unoccupied!). David Roesner, April 2014

Notes 1 Rudolf Pannewitz cit. in W. Benjamin, ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, in: Charles Baudelaire. Tableaux parisiens, Gesammelte Schriften IV.1, eds R. Tiedemann und H. Schweppenhäuser, trans. Jens Peters, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972, pp. 9–21, p. 20. 2 H.-T. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 184.

xxii WHEN A TREE IS ALREADY BEING MENTIONED, YOU DON’T ALSO HAVE TO SHOW IT A preface

While working, a lot falls into place, which – when making theatre – consists mainly of leaving out everything that I find boring. The usual illustrative intensifications and the duplication of the visible and the audible, which are so common in theatre and film, are certainly part of that. When the tree is already being mentioned, you don’t also have to show it. This means that for me it’s a matter of omitting what is already contained in another medium. It’s about trusting in the arts and techniques involved, and particularly trusting in those who are in their element: stage designers, sound designers, musicians, performers, technicians and many more. I am interested in what evokes contrapuntal tensions between up and down, between right and left, between before and after, between what can be seen and what can be heard; between what you expect and what actually happens; between what you experience and what you may think about it; between what can be understood and what constructively defies understanding. On completion of an artistic piece of work you may have learned something. Then you know what you’ve done. Or think you know. It wasn’t, for example, a conscious decision about ten years ago to use the first half hour of Eraritjaritjaka (2004) to quasi neatly introduce all the elements, one after the other, before they attack each other towards the end of the performance. They all have their initial individual entrance: at the beginning, with the concert of the string quartet, music; then, the entrance of the body of the actor; the disembodied language with the words of Canetti; the playing area, which – all in white – unfolds itself; the lighting, which does what it wants; the first prop, a small house, as the protagonist of its own scene; only then the stage design – the façade of a large house; eventually the medium of theatre itself – in a long monologue; and finally the film, which accompanies the actor out of the theatre and adds colour into the mix – up to this point everything was black and white. As the elements are spelled out in this way, the audience is empowered to make connection between them during the course of the performance, although that doesn’t mean that the elements abandon their independence during this process. I also wouldn’t have been able to predict some 20 years ago during the first rehearsals for Ou Bien Le Débarquement Désastreux (1993) that this music-theatre work would be about the ‘division of theatrical presence onto all elements’. Meanwhile I begin to see things clearer and try not to make a secret of it but instead account for what I know as best I can – in presentations and discussions, pre-show

xxiii A PREFACE and post-show talks. This is also to learn more about the work and myself: from the audiences, from my team, with which I have the great fortune to work, from my academic colleagues, or from you, the reader. This book is not aimed at delivering an aesthetic of absence, but seeks to explain my theatrical interest in it. It is not a single continuous text, but a collection of articles, conference papers and transcripts from the past ten years. The book thus follows on from the first anthology Komposition als Inszenierung [Composition as Mise-en-Scène/ Directing] (ed. Wolfgang Sandner), which assembles some of my own texts from before 2002 and contributions from other authors. This book consists of three parts. The first part collocates texts about my music- theatre works since 2002. But neither these essays nor real life provide a general answer to the question of what the inital impulse to these works was: sometimes it is a painting (Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten / Landscape with Distant Relatives), sometimes texts (Eraritjaritjaka), another time perhaps Gertrude Stein’s cyclical notion of history (Songs of Wars I Have Seen) or a sound – the vocal sound of the Hilliard Ensemble (I Went to the House But Did Not Enter). Only with Stifters Dinge1 [Stifter’s Things], eventually, it was actually the notion of absence. Amongst other things, I’m exploring the contents of forms. Investigating what forms do with us. Forms, with which we have somehow arranged ourselves, which don’t reach a level of consciousness and hence hold so much power over our perception. And even if I don’t develop my works based on a particular vision but always from given circum- stances and opportunities, it is still a case of not simply accepting the world as it is. Instead the aim is to outline and sketch something which we don’t already know; which could potentially be broadly relevant, touch audiences, occupy their thoughts, inspire them and trigger their imagination. The second part of the book gathers together talks and essays about artists, which in one way or another have significance for my work: Robert Wilson, Erich Wonder, Jean-Luc Godard, Rimini Protokoll and the Ensemble Modern. The third part, finally, looks at theatre education: these are texts about actor and director training, and about the degree at the Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen (ATW) and at the Hessischen Theaterakademie in Germany. Perhaps after writing one is also a bit wiser. Obviously many of the things I talk about in these texts can be seen differently. Perhaps it is not even ‘absence’ which has become paramount for me on stage, but a shift of presence from the visual to the acoustic. Because on the acoustic stage (of music-theatre works, compositions and radio plays) there can be interruptions, counterpoints and gaps, but nothing is truly ‘absent’. When the tree is already being mentioned, you don’t also have to show it. I thank Klaus Grünberg, Florence von Gerkan, Willi Bopp, Hubert Machnik, Stephan Buchberger, Matthias Mohr, André Wilms and many, many others I have had the pleasure to have a long and happy artistic working relationship with. I thank my colleagues at ATW, particularly Helga Finter and Gerald Siegmund, for the inspiring and reflective atmosphere in this department, the other academic staff and most of all the students, with whom I can share and undertake my artistic research. And I thank the editor Nicole Gronemeyer2 and my academic assistant Eva Holling for reading my texts with an attentive and critical eye. I thank the producers, who have given me the opportunity to work in the way that is the only way I can. I am thus saddened even more by the death of René Gonzales,

xxiv A PREFACE former artistic director of the Théâtre Vidy in Lausanne. With his help and that of his wonderful team I was able to create almost all my pieces over the last 15 years. I thank the many curators and festival directors worldwide, who have invited and shown my pieces, for their trust in my work. And in particular I thank my audiences, which have often retrospectively provided new perspectives on the pieces I am trying to write about in the following. Whether they have seen a moment in Stifters Dinge as a ‘sunset at sea’ or even a ‘glimpse of God’–Iamfine with (almost) all reactions. For me, it remains a scene, in which the historical recordings of incantations from Papua New Guinea are accom- panied by floating gauze curtains in front of stark backlighting reflecting the ripples of the water in three water pools below. It is not meant symbolically. Heiner Goebbels, August 2012

Note

1DR’s note: In German, no apostrophe is used to separate the possessive ‘s’ from the noun. 2 Nicole Gronemeyer was editor of the German edition.

xxv This page intentionally left blank 1 AESTHETICS OF ABSENCE How it all began

It might be best to demonstrate what I understand to be aesthetics of absence by relating to the experience of Stifters Dinge, a performative installation without performers, which has been touring since 2007. But maybe we should reflect instead on how this topic has developed in my work over the years in order to better understand what happens there and what I mean by ‘absence’. How did it all begin? Maybe with an accident in 1993 during rehearsals for Ou bien le débarquement désastreux [Or the Hapless Landing], one of my earliest music-theatre plays, with five African and French musicians and one wonderful actor, André Wilms. Magdalena Jetelová, a renowned visual artist from Prague, created the stage design: in the centre a gigantic aluminium pyramid suspended upside down with sand trickling out of it, and which could be turned completely upside down during the show; stage right a giant wall of silk hair, rippled smoothly by 50 fans behind it driving the actor crazy with their noisy motors. During one scene the actor disappears behind the wall of hair, in another he is sucked in completely by the hanging pyramid and then comes back, minutes later, head first. After rehearsing these scenes Magdalena Jetelová went directly to the actor, André Wilms, and enthusiastically told him: ‘It is absolutely fantastic when you disappear.’ Definitely something you should never say to an actor. André Wilms instantly became so furious that I had to ask the set designer kindly not to visit any further rehearsals. Far more interesting, however, is the intuitive approach from her perspective as a visual artist, with which she was able to question one of the most fundamental principles in performing arts. For despite some radical (and subsequently often ignored) experiments by the theatrical avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century (including Gertrude Stein’s plays and the approaches of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Adolphe Appia, and many other artists), and despite the intriguing experiments by American artists such as Bob Wilson, Richard Schechner, Richard Foreman and others in the 1960s and 1970s who proposed a performative theatre against the intimidating authority and gravity of texts – despite all that theatre and opera are still widely based on the classical concept of an artistic experience guided by notions of presence and intensity. The focus of perception is on expressive performers (actors, singers, dancers and instrumentalists): self-confident soloists – assured of their roles, characters and bodies. Among all the performing arts, only contemporary dance has been raising questions of subject and identity since the 1980s, and has attempted to translate them into the choreo- graphy of fragmented, de-located, unfinished, deformed or disappearing bodies.1 Theatre and opera stubbornly refuse to interrogate their traditional assumptions. Occasionally they will change the text of a play, sometimes they change the sound of an opera – but

1 AESTHETICS OF ABSENCE not much more than that. And speaking as someone who knows the inertia of educational institutions for actors and directors, I can reassure you this will go on for a while. What was merely an anecdote and a brief moment in Ou bien le débarquement désastreux became a crucial aspect for my work. Already in this piece the moment of presence is divided. The actor has to share it and accept sharing it with all the elements involved and produced by the reality of the set (which is not illustrative decor but itself a work of art): the confrontation between text and music, the separation between the voice and the body of the actor, the sudden clash between one music and another (music by two griots from Senegal and my own music performed by trombone, keyboards and electric guitar), the clash between one scene and another. Between these ‘separate elements’,2 as Brecht put it, distances occur, gaps for the spectator’s imagination. Ou bien le débarquement désastreux offers neither a complete picture, nor a musical chronology, nor a linear narration for that matter. It is based on three texts which allude to possible topics which may arise – personally and individually – for the spectator in response to the performance: Joseph Conrad’s The Congo Notebooks,3 a prose text called Herakles 2 oder die Hydra4 by Heiner Müller, and a poem on pine wood by Francis Ponge.5 The texts touch on topics such as the fear of the stranger, violence and colonization, an insistence on the acknowledgement and respect for ethnic differences rather than trying to find common traits. Or to put it with Maurice Blanchot: ‘The other is not your brother.’ Moreover, all the voices in this piece were in French or Mandingo – languages that only a few spectators are likely to understand. I actually do not mind that at all. One can ‘rest in it untroubled’ as Gertrude Stein says when she describes her first theatre experiences:

I must have been about sixteen years old and [Sarah] Bernhardt came to San Francisco and stayed two months. I knew a little french [sic] of course but really it did not matter, it was all so foreign and her voice being so varied and it all being so french I could rest in it untroubled. And I did. … The manners and customs of the french theatre created a thing in itself and it existed in and for itself. … It was for me a very simple direct and moving pleasure.6

Theatre as a ‘thing in itself’, not as a representation or a medium to make statements about reality, is exactly what I try to offer. In such theatre the spectator is involved in a drama of experience rather than looking at a drama event in which psychologically motivated relationships are represented by characters on stage. This is a drama of perception, a drama of one’s senses, as in those quite powerful confrontations of all the elements – stage, light, music, words – in which the actor has to survive, rather than act. So the drama of the ‘media’ is actually a twofold drama here: a drama for the actor as well as for the perception of the audience. This experience of a presence divided onto several elements probably explains why two years later – in the performance Schwarz auf Weiß / Black on White – I put my money not on the virtuosity of a brilliant actor but let the responsibility rest on the shoulders of 18 musicians of the Ensemble Modern,7 a collective protagonist, so to speak. This was therefore also a statement against an art form that is often entirely hierarchical: in its organization and working process, in the use of theatrical elements, in its artistic result, and not least with regard to the totalitarian character of its aesthetic and its relationship towards the audience.

2 AESTHETICS OF ABSENCE

In Black on White the musicians of the Ensemble Modern do not vanish in the orchestra pit for the benefit of soloists. They perform on stage themselves and discover their own theatrical abilities beyond their musical virtuosity: writing, singing, sorting things, playing badminton and other games, hitting drums and metal sheets with tennis balls or failing to do so, and reading: ‘Ye who read are still among the living: but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows.’8 This early anticipation of the ‘death of the author’9 in Edgar Allan Poe’s parable Shadow should not only be taken literally (Heiner Müller, friend and German author recommended this text to me before he died during the rehearsal period for Black on White). Absence can be found here on other levels, too: as a refusal of any dramatic action, for example. ‘Little seems to happen,’ said Ryan Platt in his introduction to a screening of the film version of Black on White at Cornell University some time ago.10 And Black on White is also a piece about writing. ‘Writing, which has traditionally retired behind the apparent presence of performance, is openly declaring itself the environ- ment in which dramatic structure is situated,’11 as the theatre scholar Elinor Fuchs wrote in 1985. ‘The price of this emergence, or perhaps its aim, is the undermining of theatrical Presence,’12 which also undermines the ‘self-presence’13 of the actor. Presence is twice reduced in Black on White by the rather amateurish ‘non-presence’ of the musicians, who had never done anything like that before. You can observe the un-expressive, un-dramatic, but highly concentrated faces of the musician-performers, who do not pretend to be anyone other than themselves as musicians in that very space and time we watch them in. Frequently they turn their backs to the audience thus dividing the attention of the audience across the ‘landscape’ of 18 simultaneously active people. To cite Elinor Fuchs again: ‘A theatre of Absence … disperses the center, displaces the Subject, destabilizes meaning.’14 In this performance we as spectators have to focus our gaze ourselves. This is not dissimilar to aspects of a later piece with the same musicians (Eislermaterial), in which the centre of the stage remains empty throughout. During the performance the musicians sit on the three sides of the stage. ‘Presence’ occurs on a purely acoustic level by close microphony and amplification. Structural hindrances / resistances / difficulties for the musicians (the distance between them, the separation of the instrumental families, and so on) help to visualize the communicative process of an ensemble for the audience; a self-dependent ensemble without a conductor. The conductor’s place is held only by a little statue of the composer Hanns Eisler, a close friend and collaborator of Bertolt Brecht. Strangely enough the audience’s attention does not dwindle due to the absence of any distracting spectacle during the performance, although I had been warned this would happen by seasoned theatre makers. ‘The experience of represented presence in the act of perception grows to the degree that the presented presence disappears’15 – as my colleague Gerald Siegmund put it in his recently published study on ‘absence’. Speaking of concerts, I would say that it is often the conductor who gets in the way of a self-responsibility of the musicians on the one hand, and a self-responsible perception of the audience on the other. Elias Canetti tells us why:

There is no more obvious expression of power than the performance of a conductor. [ … ] The immobility of the audience is as much part of the conductor’s design as the obedience of the orchestra. They are under a compulsion to keep still. Until he appears they move about and talk freely among themselves. [ … ]

3 AESTHETICS OF ABSENCE

During a concert, and for the people gathered together in the hall, the conductor is a leader. [ … ] He is the living embodiment of law, both positive and negative. His hands decree and prohibit. His ears search out profanation. Thus for the orchestra the conductor literally embodies the work they are playing, the simultaneity of the sounds as well as their sequence; and since, during the performance, nothing is supposed to exist except this work, for so long is the conductor the ruler of the world.16

This text is presented as an impressive virtuoso monologue by the actor André Wilms downstage (the classic position of presence) in the music-theatre piece Eraritjaritjaka before he leaves the stage, followed by a cameraman, while his live video-image continues to be projected onto the backdrop of the stage, the white façade of a house. The audience sees how he leaves the foyer of the theatre, enters a car, drives through the city in which the piece is being performed, leaves the car after a few minutes of driving, and enters his apartment. The words we hear during all this are taken from Canetti’s notebooks: ‘A country where anyone who says “I” is immedately swallowed up by the earth.’17 It is obvious: the actor’s absence is going to be a long one. The audience, released from the strong presence of the actor’s earlier monologue, is irritated, confused, but at the same time relaxed. Audience members do not even know if the actor, whom they paid to see, will ever come back. The camera follows him to his apartment, where he does un-dramatic things: opening and reading letters, making notes that borrow from Canetti (such as ‘Explain nothing. Put it there. Say it. Leave.’18), sorting the laundry, watching television, reading the newspaper, trying to live alone while being unable to – and thinking aloud: ‘You can’t exist with human beings. You can’t exist without human beings. How can you exist?’19 And he prepares scrambled eggs. The clock at the back of the kitchen shows the actual time, and the rhythm in which the actor cuts onions is in sync with a quartet on stage playing a string quartet by Maurice Ravel. Both prove the liveness of the mediated presence.

Let us recap the different concepts of a ‘theatre of absence’ as they have been discussed so far. Absence can thus be understood:

 as the disappearance of the actor/performer from the centre of attention (or even from the stage altogether)  as a division of presence among all elements involved  as a polyphony of elements, for example as an independent ‘voice’ of the lighting, the space, the text, the sounds as in a fugue by J. S. Bach  as a division of the spectator’s attention to a ‘collective protagonist’ with performers who often hide their individual significance, for example by turning their backs towards the audience  as a separation of the actors’ voices from their bodies and of the musicians’ sounds from their instruments  as a de-synchronization of hearing and seeing, a separation or division between visual and acoustic stage  as the creation of spaces in-between, spaces of discovery, spaces in which emotion, imagination and reflection can actually take place

4 AESTHETICS OF ABSENCE

 as an abandonment of dramatic expressivity (‘the drama doesn’t happen on stage’, says Heiner Müller)20  as an empty centre: both literally, as an empty stage, i.e. the absence of a central visual focus, and as an absence of what we call a clear ‘theme’ or ‘message’ of a play; we could compare this with the nouveau roman by French authors in the 1950s such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, who circled his topics with perplexing techniques, or with novels in which core themes are not explicitly mentioned but rather permanently provoked and obsessively produced for the reader (such as, for example, the jealousy in La Jalousie)  as absence of a story, or – paraphrasing Gertrude Stein –‘Anything that is not a story can be a play.’21 ‘What is the use of telling a story since there are so many and everybody knows so many and tells so many … so why tell another one?’22  and last but not least absence can be understood as avoiding the things we expect, the things we have seen, the things we have heard, the things that are usually done on stage. Or, in the words of Elias Canetti again, which we hear when the actor in Eraritjaritjaka finally opens the window of his apartment: ‘To spend the rest of one’s life only in completely new places. To give up books. To burn everything one has begun. To go to countries whose languages one can never master. To guard against every explained word. To keep silent, silent and breathing, to breathe the incompre- hensible. I do not hate what I have learned; I hate living in it.’23 In this moment the audience sees the actor live on stage opening one of the black windowpanes in the backdrop and slowly – as they see the cameraman and the string quartet through the now-open windows in the actor’s apartment – the audience realizes that he has possibly never really left the stage.

This complex twist in the relationship of inside and outside perspectives (the projection of the camera perspective onto the façade of the house vs. one’s own view through the windows into the inside of the apartment), of interweaving of music, text, perception, deception, the sudden, surprising shock of an unforeseeable presence – all this becomes the actual drama for the audience in Eraritjaritjaka.

Following this experience, we, my team and I, want to proceed in this direction. The experiment we tried with Stifters Dinge (the above-mentioned piece without a performer) was this: Will the spectator’s attention hold even if one of the essential assumptions of theatre is suspended – the presence of an actor? Even more recent definitions in theories of performance still speak of the co-presence or shared participation of performers and spectators at the same time and in the same space.24

Hence Stifters Dinge became a ‘no-man show’, in which curtains, lights, music and space – all the elements that usually prepare, support, illustrate and serve a theatrical per- formance and its performers, become (in a kind of justice long deferred) the protagonists, together with five pianos, metal plates, stones, water, fog, rain and ice.

When there isn’t anyone on stage any longer, though, to assume the responsibility of presenting and representing, when nothing is being shown, then the spectators must discover things themselves. The audience’s delight in making discoveries is enabled only by the absence of the perfomers, who usually artfully fulfil the task of demonstrating and

5 AESTHETICS OF ABSENCE focus the audience’s attention on themselves. Only their absence creates the gap, which renders this freedom and pleasure possible.

In Stifters Dinge the performers are replaced by non-anthropomorphic machines and objects – elements such as curtains, water, fog, rain and ice – and elements of the mise- en-scène such as the curtains, the lighting and acousmatic voices. We hear disembodied voices, the voices of Claude Lévi-Strauss, William Burroughs and Malcolm X, and we also hear early recordings of anonymous voices from South America, Greece and Papua New Guinea. During the incantations from Papua New Guinea we see reflections of water on a ballet of curtains, which slowly move up and down. My colleague Helga Finter describes the effect of such acousmatic voices:

The recorded voice suggests to the spectator the construction of presence-effects, since he perceives the spoken words as being addressed to him. This can be attributed to the acousmatic status of such a voice, the source of which remains invisible. The spectator will thus connect what he hears with what he sees in order then to formulate hypotheses about motivation and causality. His scopic desire stages what his invocatory desire [invokatorisches Begehren] is able to hear. Thus the perceptive intelligence of the spectator itself actively stages the performance as he weaves and reads his own audiovisual text.25

In a traditional text-based theatre, in ballet or in opera the spectators identify with the actors, singers or dancers on stage and recognize themselves in them. This obviously does not work in Stifters Dinge, and it rarely works in any of my earlier pieces. Instead of offering self-affirmation to both a performing and a perceiving subject, a ‘theatre of absence’ might be able to offer an artistic experience that does not necessarily have to consist in a direct encounter (with the actor), but in an experience through alterity.26 Alterity is to be understood here not as a direct connection to something, but as an indirect and triangular relationship whereby dramatic identification is being replaced by a rather precarious confrontation with a mediating third party, something we might call the ‘other’. Absence as the presence of the other, as a confrontation with an unseen image or an unheard word or sound, an encounter with forces beyond man’s control, that are out of our reach. What started as an experiment became, by the appearance of the elements themselves on stage, a quasi anthropological and ecological topic for my team, the audience, and me. Now, after more than 150 performances, it is fair to say that the experiment works. Audience members react with puzzlement, then irritation and heightened attentiveness, they are intellectually and emotionally animated and they often let me know afterwards with some relief: ‘Finally nobody on stage to tell me what to think.’

Notes 1 See Gerald Siegmund’s Abwesenheit. Eine performative Ästhetik des Tanzes, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006, a study of absence as a performative aesthetic of dance. 2 B. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. and ed. John Willet, London: Methuen, 1964, 1974, p. 37. Editor’s note: A further discussion of Brecht and stage design can be found in: C. Baugh,

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‘Brecht and Stage Design: The Bühnenbildner and the Bühnenbauer’, in P. Thomson and G. Sacks (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 235–53. 3 In: J. Conrad, Last Essays, eds H. R. Stevens and J. H. Stape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 121–68. 4 In: H. Müller, Geschichten aus der Produktion 2 ( = Texte 2), Berlin: Rotbuch-Verlag, 1974. 5 In: F. Ponge, Mute Objects of Expression, trans. Lee Fahnestock, New York: Archipelago Books, 2008 [1976], pp. 73–130. 6 Gertrude Stein, Plays. Writings 1932–1946, eds C. R. Stimpson and H. Chessman, New York: Library of America, 1998, pp. 244–69; here, pp. 258–59. 7DR’s note: The Ensemble Modern is a leading ensemble for contemporary music, founded in 1980 and based in Frankfurt. 8 E. A. Poe, ‘Shadow: A Parable’,inThe Complete Works, ed. J. A. Harrison, Vol. 2, New York, AMS, 1965, pp. 147–50; here, p. 147. 9 See R. Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. St. Heath, London: Fontana Press, 1977. 10 DR’s note: Ryan Platt is currently Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance, Colorado College and was a doctoral student at Cornell University, where Heiner Goebbels was artist in residence in 2010. 11 E. Fuchs, ‘Presence and the revenge of writing: Re-thinking theatre after Derrida’, Performing Arts Journal, 1985, Vol. 9, No. 2/3, pp. 163–73; here, p. 169. 12 Ibid., p. 163. 13 See ibid., p. 166. 14 Ibid., p. 165. [Capitalization in the original.] 15 G. Siegmund, Abwesenheit, op. cit., p. 81. 16 E. Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984, pp. 394–96. 17 E. Canetti, Das Geheimherz der Uhr, Aufzeichnungen 1973–1985, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994, p. 181 [The Secret Heart of the Clock, trans. J. Agee, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989]. 18 Ibid. 19 E. Canetti, Aufzeichnungen 1973–1984, München: Hanser, 1999, p. 54. 20 DR’s note: Heiner Goebbels seems to refer to the line from Hamletmachine: ‘My drama doesn’t happen anymore.’ (Müller, H., ‘Hamletmaschine’,inTheater heute, Nr. 12/1977, pp. 39–41, p. 40). 21 Gertrude Stein, ‘Plays’, in op. cit., Lectures in America, Boston: Beacon Press, 1935, p. 260. 22 Ibid. 23 E. Canetti, Die Provinz des Menschen, Aufzeichnungen 1942–1972, München: Hanser, 1973, p. 204 [The Human Province, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, London: Deutsch, 1985]. 24 See E. Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004 [The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, London: Routledge, 2008]. 25 H. Finter, ‘Der (leere) Raum zwischen Hören und Sehen: Zu einem Theater ohne Schauspieler’,in T. A. Heilmann, A. von der Heiden and A. Tuschling, Medias in res: Medienkulturwissenschaftliche Positionen, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011, pp. 127–38, p. 132. 26 See A. Eiermann, Postspektakuläres Theater. Die Alterität der Aufführung und die Entgrenzung der Künste, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009.

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