Choreographic Objects: Stifters Dinge

Heiner Goebbels’s Stifters Dinge is a performative installation, first presented at Théâtre Vidy Lausanne in September 2007 (recreated in Berlin, Luxembourg, London, Frankfurt, Munich, New York and other venues), in which sounds, amplified voice-overs, machinic and visual arrangements, objects and materials, instruments and sound machines, light and filmic projections become the performers or constitute what I will describe as the features of a “choreographic object.”

Heiner Müller such as Der Mann im Fahrstuhl and Die Befreiung des Prometheus, and the later Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten, Hasirigaki, Schwarz auf Weiss, Eislermaterial, Walden, Surrogate Cities, I went to the house but did not enter) and often combines a range of eclectic sources and musical genres embracing classical, pop, jazz and traditional music, as well as sources drawn from literature and anthropology. He is also a professor at the distinguished Giessen Institute for Applied Theatre Science and currently Artistic Director of the Ruhrtriennale in the vast industrial metropolitan area in West Germany. The setting for Stifters Dinge is decidedly industrial: Ambika P3 (a former concrete-testing facility) is often used as an exhibition site for art and architecture and has a raw structural appearance. Our entrance into the space is guided by Artangel's stage managers who lead us up and down across various temporary staircases until we gather at the top in front of a black curtain.
Hidden from view, the 'machine' is already sounding acousmatically: deep pulsating sounds are heard from beyond as we await the final descent into the 'house'.
Artangel had co-commissioned the initial premiere (with Théâtre Vidy Lausanne ETE), and now bills the second coming as a 'revisiting' of the work, offered in two versions, first as a free 'Unguided Tour', secondly as a ticketed performance. The tour provides audiences with an opportunity to walk around and explore the huge machine set with its stones, metal, barren tree trunks, pianos, water reservoirs, rain, fog, ice and hidden voices which seem to spread out over the entire ground floor of the warehouse. At one end there is a raked platform on which we take our seats for the performance, looking at three large flat basins constructed in front of the five upright pianos at the back, naked instruments revealing their interior What are these resonances like? From a listening perspective, the various movements of Stifters Dinge are clearly structured, as the environment is being prepared for its opening sequence of transformations by the two technicians. Before they come on, the sounding installation in front of us is idling, like a game waiting to be played, small thumping and screeching sounds are heard from five small speakers on the sides (with tiny LEDs that light up when the speaker speaks), three speakers behind us, and the subwoofers. The five prepared pianos are at the other end, stacked with upright branches of trees stripped bare of their leaves, one of the pianos conjoined to a copper plate quivering with vibrational touch of two small drumstick tools. Circuits on pianos have small flickering lights; four are upright whilst the baby grand to the left is turned on its side revealing its insides to us. This particular piano emits dry ice from time to time and is also joined to a 'plastic bag' instrument, a character that seems only to have a very small part. There are instruments on the walls to either side -tubular style to the left, and two wall mounted instruments to the right. Three white vat containers of water are positioned to the left of the three central flat basins lined in tarpaulin, with tubes leading out of them that would later deliver the water to the basins (once the tap was opened by the technicians). All along the right side of the basis runs a stone plate that is pulled across a line of flat square stones on a wire contraption with microphone, emitting a soft screeching sound.
Two technicians walk on, traverse the length of the space and disappear, re-appearing moments later carrying a large black rectangular sieve. Salt is systematically poured from two black containers -handled carefully by the two technicians, passed from one to the other and back in a choreographed way. One technician pours the salt into the frame of the sieve positioned at the edge of the first basin; the container is handed back to the other technician.
The two hold the sieve on either end and begin the process of sifting salt, a process that generates a subtle and grainy sonic texture as fine salty grains hit the tarpaulin surface, and an anticipation of what is to come. This is repeated twice more to complete the adding of salt to the three basins. The roaring, which we had heard earlier in the air, was familiar to us now. It was not in the air, it was close to us now. In the depths of the forest it resounded uninterruptedly, and came from the twigs and branches as they splintered and fell to the ground. It was all the more terrifying, since everything else stood motionless. Then all was silent again. We listened and stared -I don't know, whether it was amazement or fear of driving deeper into that thing…   The artists and researchers working on Synchronous Objects analyze and creatively redeploy spatial and statistical data from the dance, re-visualizing the kinetic dispositif, and thus remapping the distributed flows of the dancers' movements, providing tools that allow us to trace, re-imagine and re-draw spatio-temporal behaviors from the dance, experiencing the kind of complex sceno-choreography described here. The re-gathered and re-imagined objects thus also act as scores or scripting systems, potentially generating new knowledge (obtained from the measurements) about the hybridization of diverse materials and forces.
The Synchronous Objects project 'is actively pursuing the problems of mapping and measuring of distributed flows within a contemporary scientific framework', suggests architect Stephen Turk: Forsythe, through One Flat Thing, reproduced, might be said to be situating these ideas as a central feature of a post-humanist system of knowledge whose salient figure of study is the manifestation of a new type of statistical or probabilistic identity. This is an identity that is not an ideal humanist centered singularity (a self in the classic sense) but rather one that is conditioned by and constituted out of the flows of modern society; a society in which individual identity is increasingly distributed across electronic networks and broad ecologies.

Notes
(1) Composed in collaboration with Luis Frangella, who produced the film, and Maryanne Amacher, who made the recordings on tape, the original performance (1975) started with Cage reading the lecture-preface. In it he expresses his disgust with the institutions of American government. After that the work starts, the twelve men (in the score Cage specified that the composition is for '12 American-speaking men, preferably Americans who have become Canadian citizens, who also vocalize or play an instrument') reading and singing text fragments by Henry David Thoreau, and/or play instruments (ad lib.). In Part 1 this is accompanied by sounds (on tape) of wind and in Part 2 by sounds of rain. In the third part the lights in the performance-space are dimmed and the performers are accompanied by the film and the sounds of thunder. The film consists of Thoreau drawings, printed in negative, the projection resembling lightning (white on black). The multimedia stage work had been commissioned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1975 in observance of the United States bicentennial. See: http://greg.org/archive/2011/07/04/john_cages_lecture_on_the_weather.html (2) Sarah Nicolls Kingdom, a colleague in the Music Department at Brunel University, is at the forefront of recent experimentations with exposed, 'inside-out' prepared pianos, and in 2008 played several dismantled pianos -the instruments having the strings placed vertically above the keyboard, so that both the keys and the strings are immediately accessible from the playing position.
(3) Cf. William Forsythe, Suspense, exhibition catalogue, ed. Markus Weisbeck (Zürich: Ursula Blickle Foundation, 2008: 5). Along with researchers at The Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, Forsythe has also published Synchronous Objects (http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/), a web-based research archive detailing various recombinations of visual, descriptive and sonic analyses of a dance work, One Flat Thing, reproduced, transformed into a creative resource for exploring space making, movement, spatial composition, and the complex, multi-layered, 4dimensional construction of kinetic events.