About "Max Black"
The centre of the new music theatre piece of Heiner Goebbels will be the actor André Wilms with/for whom the work "Ou bien le débarquement désastreux" (ATEM - Theatré des Amandiers, Nanterre/Paris 1993) was created.
Actually MAX BLACK starts on the point on which "Ou bien le débarquement désastreux" stops: when in the last scene - after the expedition in foreign parts, the confrontations with african culture and music and the accomplishment of the text ‘Herakles 2 or the Hydra’ of Heiner Müller - the actor tries to note tabulary with crayon on the pyramid what was listed in the notebook of Francis Ponge about the pinewood to get an idea of what nature might be:
A forest of 40 years is called low high forest (with underwood)
A forest of 40 to 60 years is called medium forest
A forest of 60 to 120 years is called young high forest
etc.
The light is switched off, the musicians are gone. What remains in MAX BLACK is an explorer (scientist, physician, chemist, logician, mathematician, semiotician, linguist?) in his laboratory.
(No matter it will be like this or not) The light concept (which will be worked out together with the french artificer Pierre - Alain Hubert) consists in working not only with light but mainly the glare of fire, in setting off controlled proceedings of fire and in producing an unforeseeable mixture of surprise and duplication.
Every music - the material of sounds and noises - will be get started and set
off by the performer.
The stage is a laboratory for mental movements. The spectator can follow them
because e.g. a fuse will be started, chain reactions will be set off; because
André Wilms will play his own sounds, which he recorded previously, by
the sampler on his keyboard; because a rhythm will evolve from the sound of
a overthrown pot, which will establish the basis for a composition with the
next textual passage, which suddenly stops because sparks will arise from an
old tube-radio…etc.
The spectator will look on the actor how he tries to measure the immeasurable. They will help to solve the mystery like the one of ‘Barber of Tompstone’ or ‘The Death in Samara’…
The language becomes music and will once grow poetically, once it will dissolve in abstraction (e.g. when a mathematical formula will be put in music). On the other hand every usable musical sound will be concretely performed like the kettle or the balls thrown at the drums in Heiner Goebbels’ last music theatre piece "Black on White". But in the contrast to it (in which the musicians are the performers and the making of the music is the main aim of the scene), in MAX BLACK the demand is reverse: the actor will transform everything he does in light (fire), image (action) and music (sound).
By texts of Paul Valéry, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein
and Max Black Heiner Goebbels will create a textual composition.