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CriticalActsDriving Deeper into That ThingThe Humanity of Heiner GoebbelssStifters Dinge

Gelsey Bell

Adalbert Stifter, a 19th-century Romantic authorwho is little known outside of Germany (thougha number of his works have been translated intoEnglish).2 Originally premiered in September2007 at Thtre Vidy in Lausanne, Switzerland,Stifters Dinge has since been traveling through-out Europe, with runs in such cities as Berlin,London, and Paris, as well as the FestivaldAvignon in France and BITEF (BelgradeInternational Theatre Festival) in Serbia (whereit won the Grand Prix Mira Trailovic) in 2008,and Croatias World Theatre Festival in 2009.Itnally made its way to the New World forve days in mid-December 2009, where I saw iton an uncharacteristically (for New York City)snow-white Sunday afternoon.

Described by Goebbels as a compositionfor ve pianos with no pianists, a play with noactors, a performance without performers onemight say a no-man show (2009b), StiftersDinges foundational claim to avantgarde inno-

vation, and the original inspiration for its cre-ators, is an absence of human performers. Butrather than fullling Samuel Becketts dream ofa theatre without actors by allowing the text to

annihilate the performer,3

Goebbels and set and

Entering the expansive hall in the Park AvenueArmory in New York City, all I could see weremetal stairs leading up the back of a makeshifttheatre, much like the ramp into an alien space-craft on a Hollywood set. Despite the distantand ominous reverberations bouncing throughthe cavernous space, it was my footsteps, andthose of the audience members in front of me,that lay the heavy tone upon the afternoon. Thepace was slow and felt preparatory rather thantired. Once at the top of the stairs, I was cloakedin almost complete darkness a stark contrastto the bright afternoon sun hitting the fresh

white snow on the city streets I had just walkedin from. Turning a corner, I found myself at thetop of the small set of bleacher seats facing thedimly lit stage, only 165 seats in all. Thoughmy eyes were taking their time adjusting to thedarkness that obscured the enormity of the hall,I could listen to the aural architecture1 as lowmetallic tones and wobbly mid-register melodiesbounced off its vast balloon shed roof.

The performance is Stifters Dinge (StiftersThings), the latest music theatre work of com-poser and director Heiner Goebbels to cross the

Atlantic from Germany. The piece is named for

Gelsey Bellis a doctoral candidate in the department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the

Arts/NYU, where she is working on a dissertation on 20th-century experimental vocal music. She is

also an experimental vocalist, a singer-songwriter, andTDRs Managing Editor.

1. Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter define hearingas the detection of sound and listeningas active attention or

reaction to the meaning, emotions, and symbolism contained within the sound. Aural architecturedenotes the

properties of a space that can be experienced by listening (2007:5).

2. Born in 1805 in southern Bohemia, Stifter spent most of his life in Austria as a tutor and schulrat(elementary school

supervisor), while he wrote novels and short stories until his death in 1868 (see Gump 1974).

3. Not for me these Grotowskis and Methods. The best possible play is one in which there are no actors, only the

text. Im trying to find a way to write one. Samuel Beckett to Deirdre Bair, 19 June 1973 (in Bair 1978:513).


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lighting designer Klaus Grnberg(a frequent collaborator) developedthe show by working with tangi-ble materials things like pianosand water. By choosing to highlightnonhuman activity for a live audi-ence, they created a meditation onobjecthood and our relationship tothings, materials, and the environ-ment. Composed of an 80-minuteperformance for a seated audienceand then a 20- to 30-minute periodin which the audience is encouragedto walk around the stage space fora closer look at its music-makinglandscape, the whole event is both

performance and installation.The soundscape is dirty and

mysterious. Dirty because the tonesare impure, overowing with illog-ical harmonics, and replete withlow, gritty discordances. The musicevokes enigma both metaphori-cally and literally. Metaphorically,the dissonant harmonies are struc-tured by a slow beating rhythm,

with unanticipated rhythmic

accents, that marks time in a con-tinuous machinelike pumpingand evokes the cinematic thriller.(Waiting in my seat for the perfor-mance to begin, I try to gure out

what time signature the music is in.One moment it feels like 4/4 andthe next 5/8, until I realize that it issimply a continuous ticking, brokeninto smaller divisions only by myown creative listening.) In addition,

I literally cannot tell how the soundswere being made. Directionally, it is clear thatmost of them are created live on the stage, butit is not easy to identify the individual partsthat make the sonic whole. The set groans andhums like a waiting beast. Not necessarily anunkind beast, but a disgured one a patientmonster half in the shadows, waiting until youare more accustomed to its presence, its naturalrumblings, before it starts to really sing.

The theatrical space is set up as a prosce-nium without the arch, clearly demarcating theaudience from the stage rather than integrat-ing us. There is only the scaffolding and over-

head grid between the stage and the expanseof the hall. Most of the stage oor is taken up

with three rectangular cavities running con-secutively from front to back and parallel tothe bleachers; they are lled with water shortlyafter the beginning of the piece. Flanking thepools on the right are four speakers, poisedlike heads on tall gural stands. On the left arethree glowing contraptions that appear to con-tain the water thatlls the pools. Loomingupstage are the most sculptural elements of the

landscape: pianos, pipes, percussion, leaesstrees, metal, and assorted mechanical gadgetryarranged in three layers of depth. The pianos

Figure 1. Heiner GoebbelssStifters Dinge (2007), at Park Avenue Armory,

New York City, December 2009. (Photo: Stephanie Berger/Lincoln Center)


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are in various states: four uprights and the body

of one baby grand turned on its side, all withstrings exposed, some with no keyboards, sil-ver mechanical arms rigged to rush across thestrings, all prepared in one way or another.

The pianos reinforce the decidedly steam punkaura of the whole thing proud Victorian-erainstruments shown in Frankensteinian derange-ment. Mechanical technology that comparedto the sleek digital sterility of today seemssomehow more organic, replete with dirt, rust,mold, even bacteria, as if the gilded-era Armory

exists as a greenhouse for forests of wild pianosand steam-powered drums.

However, despite the clear protagonists ofthe performance being the sonic-producingset and the tenacious no-man show mar-keting, the performance begins with two menspreading salt over the empty pools and thenlling them with water. Though they do notlinger, their appearance as technicians aperformance of non-performance, the under-stated attitude of were just doing our job

highlights the backstage human hands thatmake the machine run. They remind the audi-ence that this is a fantastical human medita-

tion on thingness and not the nonhuman in its

natural element. They remind us of the lightboard operator, the usher seating latecomers,and then of ourselves, sinking farther into ourseats. Have we gathered here because of ourexcitement for the void of human performance?

What intellectual poetry is involved in sucha feat? And what is brought into relief whentechnicians then walk amidst the performingscenery? For surely their jobs could have beenautomated as well...The technicians presencebegs the question, which I think the pieces

creators wanted asked, How nonhuman istheperformance of scenery, theatrical props, andmusical instruments in this no-man show?Or, should I say, how human?

Though there is a progression to the eventsin Stifters Dinge, the piece moves forwardmore like a dream than a story. Trying after-

wards to recall the sequence, what came whenis not only unclear but seems irrelevant. As ifthe experience was meant to mix in the headof the receiver, to give an overall impression of

the show or to exhibit what this creation wascapable of doing, rather than conclude alonga linear line of logic or plot. This lack of story

Figure 2. Heiner GoebbelssStifters Dinge (2007), at Park Avenue Armory, New York City, December

2009. (Photo: Stephanie Berger/Lincoln Center)


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is entirely appropriate for a consideration ofthe nonhuman, as it is humanity that inces-santly creates meaning and mythology. As AlanBourassa relates, the human is but the cre-ation of a system of meanings and values thatmust in large part be called literary. [...] Thereis no story without the human, no human with-out stories (2002:60 61). Furthermore, ina lecture about the piece, Goebbels quotedGertrude Stein fromLectures in America say-ing, anything that [is] not a story could be aplay (Goebbels 2009a; Stein [1935] 1985:119).

Though Stifters Dinge is not void of the liter-ary, it uses music (which has always had a con-troversial relation to meaning)4 and technicaland environmental performing objects to probe

those phenomena that line the details of a story,that which is unknown and unknowable.

A smooth intermixing of the natural, themechanical, and the digital surfaces as the imageof a map is projected over the pools, which asthey graduallyll with water move our atten-tion from an artifact of human idealization tothe graceful physicality of water. Subsequently,multiple screens the same length as the poolsdescend to dance with the shadows of rippling

water. Soon one of the anthropomorphic

speakers is spotlighted and the voice of a Britishactor reads an extract fromStifters Die Mappe meinesUrgrossvaters(My GreatGrandfathers Portfolio;specically the third editionfrom 1867), while JacobIsaacksz van Ruisdaels paintingSwamp (1660) is projected ona screen and manipulatedthrough different colors and

saturations at a leisurely pace.The story, told in the rstperson, describes a sleighride in the countryside on a

winters day in which thetravelers hear strange noisesand eventually realize that theyare caused by branches and

trees falling over from the weight of ice that hascollected on them:

Now we recognized the noise that wehad heard earlier in the air; it was notin the air, it was close to us now. In the

depths of the forest it resounded near usand came from the twigs and branchesas they splintered and fell to the ground.It was all the more dreadful as every-thing else stood motionless. Not a twig,not a pine needle stirred in the wholeglittering brightness, until after an ice-fall a branch would come crashing down.

Then all was silent again. We listenedand stared; I dont know whether it wasamazement or fear of driving deeper into

that thing. (Stifter [1867] 2009)

It is easy to see in this excerpt how the wordthing becomes Stifters placeholder for boththe indescribable and the assemblage of min-ute detail his writings weave details that tellthe story using objects rather than descriptionsof people.

The spoken evocations of winter ice thenmelt into physical rain, which drips and owsonstage from above into the pools while one

of the most intact uprights lazily performs a

4. As early as Platos assertion in the Republicthat rhythm and melody should conform to words in the composition of

song (1997:1037, 2.400a), discussions of music have recognized a nondiscursive content that has the potential to

either deface or transcend linguistic meaning.

Figure 3. Heiner GoebbelssStifters Dinge (2007), at Park Avenue Armory,

New York City, December 2009. (Photo: Stephanie Berger/Lincoln Center)


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J.S. BachAndante (from the Italian Concertoin F major; 1735). For me, the scene sonicallyconjures reminiscences of childhood, staringout the window as the rain beats away at theglass and a family member site-reads a slowmovement on the piano in the other room.Exceeding Gaston Bachelards insight that thehouse allows one to dream in peace ([1958]1964:6), I am able to gaze at my dreaming inhindsight, discerning how I have used (andcontinue to use) familiar natural and musi-cal elements in the creation of my own privatemythology. Stifters Dinge performs a poetics ofspace that both encourages the dreams of itsaudience andgrants time for considering how,

why, and out of what those dreams emerge.

With no actors to lead us through a story, ourmost intimate dramas have room to breathe.

However, throughout the piece there aremany recorded human voices that emergefrom the nonhuman display, both ethno-graphic incantations recorded in PapuaNew Guinea in 1905, antiphonal singingby Columbian Indians, a traditional Greek

working song and personality-driven aninterview on French radio with Claude Lvi-Strauss, William S. Burroughs reading from

Nova Express, a television interview withMalcolm X. These voices occupy a paradoxi-cal function in regards to thingness. They areacousmatic sounds cut off from their originalsource and yet directly cited in the programand therefore historically traced. Dependingon an audience members knowledge, thetimbre and cadences of both Malcolm X andBurroughs are unmistakable and we are toldin projected subtitles that we are listeningto Lvi-Strauss. The ethnographic record-

ings are heard as such because they are songsin unknown languages (from my perspective)and are colored by the sonic qualities of earlyrecording technology, sounding voices that aremore distant and thin. And yet while the vocal-izations perform like reies from the archive,they can also animate objects, creating vocalicbodies5 of their anthropomorphic speakers andstands. Even where there was no visible speakerto attribute a voice to, Goebbels and his collab-

orators chose a distinct location in the sound-scape (and thus our perception of the space)for the voice to emanate from. For instance,

Malcolm Xs voice seemed to come from theright side of the audiences seats, rather than aspotlighted speaker onstage.

Unlike vision, sound is best understoodin its verb form, as a doing, a sounding. Itrequires movement and force (and an appro-priate medium to transmit the waves of itsdoing, like air), and implies life. The reveal-ing thing about a music theatre meditation onobjecthood (rather than a visual art one) is pre-cisely this relationship between object and thelife that facilitates its sounding. The recorded

voices, and their paradoxical existence as both

disembodied and rmly bodied in technology,reveal our innate vococentrism, the tendencyfor our listening to prioritize the human voiceover all other sounds (Chion [1982] 1999:5 6),as well as our propensity to anthropomorphizeobjects by hearing their soundings as voices.

We ascribe life-force to the sounding objectsthemselves if no outside force is immediatelyperceptible, and then ascribe voice to them asa way to understand them and consequentlybetter entwine them in a power/knowledge

dynamic. As Steven Connor explains:

The voice that is heard in the thun-der, the eruption, or the whirlwind, is akind of compromise formation. In thatit is ascribed to a god, or simply to God,the voice transcends human powers ofunderstanding and control; but the veryfact that it is so ascribed also makes itpossible to begin exercising control, inthe very considerable form of conferring

a name. To hear the thunder as a voice isto experience awe and terror; but to hearthe voice in the thunder is also to havebegun to limit the powers of that voice.(2000:25)

However, Stifters Dinge strives to stage a con-frontation with the unknown: with the forcesthat man cannot master (Goebbels 2008), andmanages to avoid that line where its expres-sion would degrade into mere symbolism or

5. Vocalic bodies are bodies formed by autonomous operations of a voice, as in the case of ventriloquism (see Connor

2000:35).


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even metonymy. The recordings often appearin the topography of the performance like therain does, as an object or environmental pro-cess an idea, a melody, a historical citation that is put into material and poetic play,rather than as a stand-in for human presence.However, this investigation of liveness andthingness is also seen to play upon the mobileracial line that objecties the human in the

Malcolm X sound bite.6 This racial contexthints not only at the mutability of denitions ofthe human, the object, and their dialectic, butultimately exposes these denitions as creatinga false binary, which, just the same, fuels powerdynamics.

The nale of the performance (which most

certainly inspired the title of the Guardianreview When Pianos Attack [Connolly 2008])erupts with the three layers of pianos, trees,and assorted industrial percussion rushing ontracks over the pools toward the audience, nois-ily producing their menacing soundtrack. Asthe rhythm changes and the collective heart-beat of the room slows, the pianos move slowlyupstage again, revealing a bubbling bog in whatbefore was clear water. I become fascinated

with the behavior of the bubbles: how they

sometimes grow, slide toward each other, andthen pop when theynally touch.

Throughout the performance there is a mix-ing of things that exist as instruments objectsthat a person could control and that becomeboth horric and uncanny when they appear totake control of themselves, like the pianos and as environmental processes the activityof objects moved by outside forces that in turnaesthetically display the objects materiality, likethe chemical change sparked when dry ice is

dropped into water. As things go, the stakes of

instrumentality are elegantly clear with musi-cal instruments, because they are created byhumans to be used. In Stifters Dinge, most ofthe scenic instruments are single tones or per-cussion: something dragged along tile on theleft side of the pool, two long pipes on the rightside, a single amplied string, a sheet of metal,etc. However, the pianos (the materiality from

which Goebbels began) are much more com-plicated. Historically, the modern piano and itsconsumer success are products of the industrialrevolution (see Ripin et al. s.v. Pianoforte).Beginning in the Classical period, throughthe Romantic and early Modern era, until therecent ubiquity of the personal computer, thepiano has been the dominant instrument in

Western music. And as with all technologies,the unique attributes of the piano have inu-enced Western society as much as we haveinuenced it. One of these inuences has beenthe development and subsequent pervasive-ness of equal temperament tuning, which wasdesigned for the piano and has since greatlyinuenced how music is written and how otherinstruments are played.7 Equal temperamenttuning was designed as a pragmatic philosoph-ical ideal to create a single uniform temper-

ament for the piano, so that music could beplayed in any key without retuning. It compro-mises the natural acoustics of physics for con-

venience and has ultimately altered what wehear as correct and the way music is sup-posed to be played. The prepared pianos ofStifters Dinge are, in a sense, intentionally out-of-tune and, as such, their sound displays acertain rebellion against the sound of humancontrol that equal temperament epitomizes toour accustomed musical sense.

6. The objectification of a human into a thing is also noted in a Stifter excerpt published in the program but not

included in the live performance. The quote refers to a shy young girl, the dark girl from Nutmountain, who runs

away from the others in the story, at which point a farmhand declares, Ill catch that thing ([1867] 2009). The

program contains a wealth of textual material to leave one pondering before or after the performance. In addition

to Goebbels program notes, the entire excerpt from Stifters Ice Story, and citations of the sound recordings,

projections, and the Bach, there are two pages of quotes not integrated into the live performance. Three extracts

from works by Stifter are interpenetrated by words from Jean-Paul Satre, Heinrich Mettler (who studied Stifters

work), and Michel Foucault (from The Order of Things, of course).

7. Equal temperament is a system of tuning where every musical interval has an identical frequency ratio. It is opposed

to just intonation, where the frequency of notes is based on the ratio of whole numbers. Just intonation allowsfor a different character in each key and a purity of harmonics, whereas equal temperament affords uniformity to

each musical interval. Western music now exists under the dictatorship of this one homogenized temperament

(Jorgensen 1991:4).


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The environmental processes exemplied

by the rain and fog harbor a different set ofquestions about humanity and control a sub-lime quality of thingness that spirals into oftenspiritual dimensions. This dialectic betweeninstrumental control and outside environmen-tal force sets the stage for an unexpected polit-ical dimension to naturally emerge from thepieces basic structure of inquiry. Many criticsand audience members began to think preciselyabout the human relationship to climate changeand the natural catastrophes scientists predict

humanitys irresponsibility has and will cause.One fortuitous inuence for this, at least in

the short New York run, was the simultaneousUN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, whichtook place from 7 to 18 December 2009 and

which had been declared by the Sunday after-noon when I saw the show an unfortunate fail-ure (see Vidal et al. 2009; Revkin and Broder2009). In an interview with John Schaefer

on National Public Radio (NPR), Goebbels

declared this a wonderful coincidence. Healso explained that the piece was not createdas a political statement, but that the ecologi-cal and ethnographic contexts came from thematerials themselves:

It came by working with the water, [...]it came by the wood and the metal andthe space in which we performed andrehearsed [...], which is a much better

way if you get surprised by the con-text yourself because then it means its

open also for all the different perspec-tives of the audience. [...] Im not thereto make a statement. [...] Im just passingthe questions which are actually raisedup by the material itself. (in Schaefer2009)8

Whether those questions found any answersor sparked new questions, or even exactly what

Figure 4. Heiner GoebbelssStifters Dinge (2007), at Park Avenue Armory, New York City, December

2009. (Photo: Stephanie Berger/Lincoln Center)

8. Goebbels has elsewhere stated: I doubt that an artist has much of an influence on the political relevance of hisartistic work. If art is too much on purpose, if its destination is too obvious, it loses certain qualities as artwork. [...]

I think its good that the artist does not completely control the political context of a performance (in Gourgouris

2004:2).


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those questions were, remains unknown anddepends entirely on the journey of each indi-

vidual audience member. It is in this way thatthe substantial human element of the piece isthe human observer. What one hears and howone listens,9 in what way one makes sense orallows non-sense, depends entirely on one-self, and it is in this interior play that the dramaunfolds (or doesnt). As Goebbels admitted, toa certain extent contradicting his own market-ing and exposing either ambivalence or ruse:When people say there are no humans inthe performance, theyre mistaken. Its peo-ple that are at its centre namely the audi-ence, who are empowered by it (in Connolly2008). Following the performance, I joined

the rest of the audience in roaming around themechanically sounding set and inspected itsdesign with avid curiosity, a great sense of sat-isfaction washing over me when I got a closerlook at the piano strings and understood whathad been done. However, it wasnt until I leftthe thing that I could feel how the piece pro-pelled me. Crunching through the snow withechoes of metallic songs accompanying melike ghost images, I departed from the Armoryand headed into Central Park for an old-

fashion snowball

ght with some friends. Atthat moment, there was no thing that felt moreappropriate or desirable than getting my handsdeep into the materiality of what had recentlyreinvigorated the land (and sound)scapearound me.

References

Bachelard, Gaston. [1958] 1964. The Poetics of Space.Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.

Bair, Deirdre. 1978. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New

York: Summit Books.Blesser, Barry, and Linda-Ruth Salter. 2007. Spaces

Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing AuralArchitecture. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bourassa, Alan. 2002. Literature, Language, and theNon-Human. InA Shock to Thought: Expression

After Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi, 6076. London: Routledge.

Chion, Michel. [1982] 1999. The Voice in Cinema.Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Connolly, Kate. 2008. When Pianos Attack. TheGuardian, 27 March. www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/mar/27/theatre2 (17 January 2010).

Connor, Steven. 2000. Dumbstuck: A Cultural Historyof Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goebbels, Heiner. 2008. Why I Made StiftersDinge.Artangel. www.artangel.org.uk//projects/2008/stifter_s_dinge/heiner_goebbels_on_stifter_s_dinge/heiner_goebbels_on_stifter_s_dinge (17 January 2010).

Goebbels, Heiner. 2009a. Heiner Goebbels. TheEuropean Graduate School. Heiner Goebbels/Videos.www.egs.edu/faculty/heiner-goebbels/videos/heiner-goebbels/ (7 February 2010).

Goebbels, Heiner. 2009b. Program Notes.Performance program. New York: Lincoln Center.

Gourgouris, Stathis. 2004. Performance asComposition.PAJ26, 3 (78):1 16.

Gump, Margaret. 1974.Adalbert Stifter. New York:Twayne Publishers, Inc.

Jorgensen, Owen H. 1991. Tuning: Containing thePerfection of Eighteen-Century Temperament, theLost Art of Nineteenth-Century Temperament, andthe Science of Equal Temperament. East Lansing:

Michigan State University Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. [2002] 2007.Listening. Trans.Charlotte Mandell. New York: FordhamUniversity Press.

Plato. 1997. Republic. Trans. G.M.A. Grubeand C.D.C. Reeve. In Complete Works, ed. John

M. Cooper, 971 1223. Indianapolis: HackettPublishing Company.

Revkin, Andrew C., and John M. Broder. 2009. AGrudging Accord in Climate Talks.New YorkTimes, 19 December. www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/science/earth/20accord.html (7 February2010).

Ripin, Edward M. et al. s.v. Pianoforte. In GroveMusic Online, Oxford Music Online. www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/21631 (8 February 2010).

Schaefer, John. 2009. Soundcheck: HeinerGoebbels. WNYC, 16 December. www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2009/12/16/segments/146325?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wnyc_home+%28WNYC+New+York+Public+Radio%29 (22 January 2010).

Stein, Gertrude. [1935] 1985.Lectures in America.Boston: Beacon Press.

9. To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity, and as if the sound

were precisely nothing else than this edge, this fringe, this margin (Nancy [2002] 2007:7).

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