DOMENICA 11 DICEMBRE 1994 - ORE 21
SALA A - PALAZZO DEI CONGRESSI
CONCERTO IN SCENA SU UN TESTO DI HEINER MÜLLER
VERSIONE FRANCESE
Regia
HEINER GOEBBELS
Attore
ANDRÉ WILMS
Batteria e voce
DAVID MOSS
Piano e tastiere
HEINER GOEBBELS
Suono
WILLY BOPP
Luci
MATHIAS PAUL
Produzione in collaborazione con il teatro am Turm. Francoforte. Artmobil
Eisler coined the idea of gesture music. Today this concept
has gone out of use, but Goebbles has his roots in this tradition: he is interested
in the theatrical effect of music in the interchange between stage and audience,
and in the reaction which derives from this. I am interested in this for professional
reasons.
Goebble's work goes against the simplification of normality. It is an opportunity
to transmit something in a different way than on stage.
Heiner Müller
Liberation of Prometheus is
a prose text which Heiner Müller has dropped into his playment, like an
erratic block a real stumbling block for the theater which cannot do it ice
with ordinary theatrical methods.
Whether I can manage it, I don't know; but I'm trying - with independent musical
means which, in the hierarchy of expressiveness, are not beneath the text but
equal to it (with song forms, collages, flashbacks and the kind of editing used
ill films)- to make at least two things audible: the great fascination I feel
at the unbelievable dimensions of work and time, fith and stench in the text;
and the new (since André Gide and Kafka) political perspectives of myth
interpretation with which Müller humorously and incisively endows the double
character of Prometheus: as firestealing benefactor of mankind and the privileged
guest at the table of the gods.
This enables me to make analogous association with other text by Heiner Müller
(for example from his play Der Auftrag) and let Prometheus drop 10.000 years
down (or up) ad a mid-fevel employee in an elevator on his way to see the boss.
Acceptance of oppression, nostalgia for the elevator, a longing for the beloved
eagle on the rock, all these are stronger than the quest for altered living
conditions.
Heiner Goebbels
Prometheus, who brought lightning to the humans, but did not teach them
how to use it against the gods because he sat at the gods' table and their meals
would have been less sumptuous if shared with the human,. was, either on account
of his action or his omission, and on order of the gods, fastened by Hephaestus
the smith to the Caucasus, where every day a dog-headed eagle returned to his
constantly regenerating liver to feed.
The eagle, which considered him to be a partly edible rock formation capable
of small movements and, especially when being eaten, of discordant song, emptied
his bowels over him. The faeces were his nourishment.
He passed them, in the form of his own faeces, on to the rock below, and so
when, after three thousand years, Herakles, his liberator, reached the top of
the unpopulated mountains, he was able, even from a great distance, to make
out the prisoner, glistening white bird faeces. But, repelled again and again
by the wall of stench, he circled the massif for another three thousand years,
while the dog-haeded eagle fed off the liver of the prisoner, so that the stench
grew to the degrae that the liberator become accustomed to it. At last helped
by a rain which lasted five hundred years, Herakles managed to approach within
shooting range. He held his nose with one hand.
He missed the eagle three times for, stupefied by the wave of stench which struck
him, he took his hand away from his nose to stretch his bow and involuntarily
closed his eyes.
The third arrow wounded the prisoner slightly on his left foot and the fourth
killed the eagle.
Prometheus, it is told, wept aloud for the eagle, his only companion in three
thousand years and his provider for twice three thousand. Am I supposed to eat
your arrows, he cried out, forgetting that he had known other food: Can you
fly, peasant, with your feet of dung. And he vomited from the stable smell which
had clung to Herakles since he had cleaned out the stables of Augeas, because
the dung stank to high heaven.
Eat the eagle, Herakles said. But Prometheus could not grasp the meaning of
his words. He also knew full well that the eagle had been his last link to the
gods, its dally pecking his remembrance of them. More flexible than ever in
his chains, he cursed his liberator, called him a murderer and tried to spit
in his face meanwhile, Herakles bent double with nausea, looked for the fetters
which bound the raging Prometheus to his prison.
Time, weather and faeces had made the flash indistinguishable from the metal,
and both indistinguishable from the rock. Now, loosened by the more violent
movements of the prisoner, the fetters became discernible. It turned out that
they had been eaten by rust. Only at his sex had the chain grown together with
the flesh because Prometheus had, at least during his first two thousand years
on the rock, occasionally masturbated. Later he must have forgotten even his
sex. The liberation left a scar.
Prometheus could easily have freed himself if he had not been afraid of the
eagle, unarmed and exhausted from the millennia though he was. His behaviour
during the liberation shows that he feared freedom more than the bird. Roaring
and foaming at the mouth, he defended his chains with tooth and claw against
the grip of his liberator. Once liberated. he howled on his hands and knees
from the torment of trying to crawl with his numb limbs,
and he cried out for his quiet place on the rock beneath the wings of the eagle,
where nothing moved unless shaken by an occasional earthquake decreed by the
gods. Even after he was able to walk upright again, he struggled against the
descent, like an actor who does not want to leave the stage. Herakles had to
hump him down from the mountain on his shoulders.
The descent to the humans lasted a further three thousand years. While the gods
rooted up the mountains, so that the descent to the humans was more like a plunge.
Herakles carried his precious booty snuggled like a baby against his Clinging
to the liberator's neck, Prometheus indicated in a low voice the direction of
the projectiles, so that they were able to dodge most of them. Meanwhile, screaming
loudly to the heavens darkened by whirf of rocks, he declared his innocence
in the liberation. There followed the suicide of the gods.
One after the other they hurled themselves down from the heavens onto Herakles
back and shattered in the rubble. Prometheus worked his way back onto the shoulders
of his liberator and assumed the pose of the victor who rides in on a sweat-bathed
horse to meet the cheers of the people.