Stifters Dinge

Music theatre performance Stifters Dinge by Heiner Goebbels at Holland Festival 2008.
Music without musicians. Theatre without actors. The acting area free of people for the whole seventy minutes. A ‘no-man’ show. Machines and computers cause objects to move and instruments to make music. A piano – live, but without a pianist – plays the Adagio from Bach’s Italian Concerto for harpsichord. We hear texts by William S. Burroughs and Claude Lévi-Strauss, but above all by the Austrian Biedermeier poet Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868). Humanity is no more than an extra figure in his poetry; the life of things – a branch, a pine needle – takes centre stage. The German composer and director Heiner Goebbels (1952) gives Stifter’s things a life that is at once threatening and full of magic within a setting of stones, lakes, ribbons of mist and pianos.
The result: a peep-show for grown-ups.