Eraritjaritjaka, Musée des Phrases (review)

Through their unexpected constellations of image, sound, and text, Heiner Goebbels's music-theatre pieces jostle the audience into consciousness of the interdependent acts of seeing, hearing, and perceiving. In his most recent work, Eraritjaritjaka, Musée des Phrases, this process begins as soon as prospective audience members encounter the title's first word, excised from one of the notebooks of Bulgarian-born Nobel Prize–winner Elias Canetti. As he was researching Crowds and Power(1960), Canetti was struck by this Australian Aboriginal term meaning "driven by the desire for something that is lost." When Goebbels created his third piece inspired by writers and their notebooks, he claimed this evocative first word for his title.

At the Lincoln Center symposium before the show's US premiere, Goebbels told moderator Bonnie Marranca that he deliberately changed the format of Eraritjaritjaka—a mind-bending collection of Canetti's aphorisms; string quartet music ranging from Shostakovich to Crumb to Bach to Goebbels himself; and stark, iconographic stage pictures—every seven minutes. In each new section, a different element of the performance text received primary focus. Echoing Goebbels's strategy, this review juxtaposes reflections on the light-dominated section of the show with that foregrounding video. I do so to emphasize how Goebbels translates his warning about the loss of perceptual freedom in the face of totalitarian regimes into a compelling visual form that traverses these distinct theatrical media.

Intense, mobile light, designed by frequent Goebbels collaborator Klaus Gruenberg, occupied center stage early in the evening. Into this light, a robot, which had been lurking in the shadows, propelled itself plainly into view. The staging's sole live actor (André Wilms) sat atop the only set piece adorning the bare stage, a mysteriously simple white house, and observed this strange creature. Wilms hung a ball on the robot's long antenna, which the robot then bounced about. As Wilms recited (in French with supertitled English) several Canetti aphorisms about animals, he simultaneously teased, tamed, and stayed out of the way of this mysterious being. Once Wilms worked up the nerve to get close to the mechanical beast, touching its long feeler gently, the creature turned on him, projecting a bright beam from its gigantic single eye. The light pursued Wilms about the stage, forcing him to exchange his eyeglasses for sunglasses, while he spoke of secrecy, watching, and power.

The robotic creature did not limit its searing gaze to Wilms. It also searched the house, transforming from a benevolent playmate into an agent of state power and interrogation. Here Goebbels provided the audience with a visual analog to Canetti's lifelong interest in metamorphosis through the robot's conversion and Wilms's role in it. Canetti's writings, and his aphorisms in particular, dwell on the ways in which power disfigures humanity and on people's complicity in their own perversion. His juxtaposition of the human and the animal, reversals of status between the big and the small, and sentences laced with clichéd exclamations indict language and its users in this dangerous political distortion. By offering unexpected, sometimes startling alternative images for the reader's consideration, Canetti reveals that intellectual habits and proverbial truths that skirt careful contemplation make the purposeful and positive social change for which he longs virtually impossible, while rendering the people who employ them ultimately less humane. Likewise onstage, if we reinterpret Wilms's attitude to the creature as exoticizing or demeaning, we might understand how the powerful breed rebellion in the weak and how the locus of power shifts wildly as a result. In this light, Goebbels makes us see quite literally that Wilms shares some responsibility for his pet's rematerialization as his foe. The audience soon experienced the consequences of Wilms's actions. I wondered with no little trepidation when the light would land on me and how quickly I might be spared as the glare landed elsewhere. My fears were soon confirmed: when I was seen...