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NOTHING IS MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN AN EMPTY STAGE Heiner Goebbels speaking about his Music-theatre-installation Stifters Dinge, about theatre without people, pianos in the rain and an invitation to watch and listen. Heiner Goebbels' new music-theatre work Stifters Dinge takes to the stage without people - no singers, no musicians, and no actors. Rather, the stage is peopled by things: Stones, basins of water, clouds of mist, pianos and a painting from the 17th century. The inspiration for the work is primarily Adalbert Stifter s descriptions of nature (My Great Grandfather's Portfolio). For the Berlin performance of his work the composer and theatre-inventor answers some questions about the project. What happens in your production of "Stifters Dinge"? Does anything happen? I'm not going to tell you. Where would that get us? Not to the theatre in any case. Theatre should always surprise us, awaken our curiosity, should show us something that we haven't seen before, something unknown to us, a puzzle, maybe a little magic, let's wait and see. Does the evening give us a concert, a sound-installation, a form of scenic meditation or a new form of music-theatre without subject matter? Gertrude Stein wrote "everything which is not a story can be a play", and that's an idea I hold to. We've all heard so many stories, the average woman on the street could tell a better one that I could. If it wants to be an art form, theatre must believe in its own reality and not try to impart wisdom about reality. In principle you're right about Stifters Dinge, it is a performance installation with various sound and voice pictures - but above all else it is an invitation to watch and listen. In this play without a main character, this performance without a performer, you've said goodbye to having people on the stage. Why is that? This isn't my last piece. In the next music-theatre production (with the Hilliard Ensemble) I'm even going to have real live singers on stage! But I'm interested in how far you can take absence and still - or perhaps precisely for that reason - be able to appeal to the imagination. In theatre as in other media we're constantly being addressed, looked at, yelled at. There's barely the space to discover anything on your own. In my pieces Eislermaterial and Eraritjaritjaka I noticed how grateful and moved the audience was when the stage was empty for a moment. In this piece you have pianos on stage. One, electronically powered, plays a composition by Bach, is this cost-reduction, a gag or a nod in agreement with Jonathan Meese's thesis that art does not need people? I played the Bach myself. So it's not a gag, rather a biographical moment because it was with this concert (but another movement) that at the age of fourteen I had my first and last success as a classical pianist... But a piano that plays by itself can be enormously moving, if it's raining at the same time. My pieces do need people - people to create them and people to experience them. My work

Heiner Gebbels

As the title suggests, this work touches on the texts of Adalbert Stifter, an early 19th century romantic author, whose reputation for Biedermeier convention is misleading. Stifter writes with the same eye for detail as an artist paints and if the plots of his stories appears to mark time because of the painstaking (and at first sight, boring) descriptions of Natural History, it is but proof of hisrespect for Things: such passages force the reader to slow down and become aware of each detail-as if anyone wishing to approach the text first has to i make his way through the \ forest on fus quest. Things and matter tell their own

STIFTER'S THINGS

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