Giovedi 5 aprile
Palazzo dei Congressi

ore 21.30
sala A Max Black
concepito, composto e diretto da Heiner Goebbels con André Wilms
Coproduzione: Théâtre Vidy-Losanna E.T.E., TAT Francoforte, DeSingel Anversa, Bayerisches Staatstheater/Marstall Monaco, Migros Pour-cent Culturel. Con il sostegno di: STEIM-Studio for Eletronic and Instrumental Music, Amsterdam e PRO HELVETIA

Venerdi 6 Aprile
Teatro Massimo Bellini - Catania

Ore 21.30
Piccoli - Pirandello, à partir des Géants de la montagne
con Michel Piccoli e Emmanuelle Lafon. Evento esclusivo realizzato per il Premio Europa per il Teatro in collaborazione con il Comune di Catania

Sabato 7 Aprile

Palazzo dei Congressi

Ore 21.30
Sala A Iets op Bach di Alain Platel, musiche J.S. Bach.
Con Les Ballets C. de la B e l'Ensemble Esploration, regia di Alain Platel
Con il sostegno del Ministero della Cultura della Comunità Belgo-Fiamminga

Domenica 8 Aprile

Palazzo dei congressi

sala A
ore 21.00 The Left hand of Glenn Gould
di e con gli Studenti dell'Istituto di Studi Teatrali Applicati \Giessen e fabrica\ Treviso coordinato da Heiner Goebbels e Andrea Molina

Su 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.

PICCOLI-PIRANDELLO
Da I giganti della montagna di Luigi Pirandello

PICCOLI-PIRANDELLO / da I giganti della montagna by Luigi Pirandello (PICCOLI-PIRANDELLO / from The Mountain Giants by Luigi Pirandello) was inspired by the workshop "A propos des Géants de la montagne" held by Klaus Michael Grüber in October 1988 with Michel Piccoli and the students of the Conservatoire National Supérior d'Art Dramatique in Paris.
It was the memory of this recent experience that made Michel Piccoli decide to return with I giganti della montagna to Sicily, Pirandello's homeland, when he receives the Europe Theatre Prize at Taormina.
The Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania, with its remarkable history, will provide a magnificent setting. It was here, in fact, that the idea was born to reinvent, in this unique venue and for this specific occasion, the wizard Cotrone's almost solitary journey rather than simply re-presenting "A propos des Géants de la Montagne" or creating a new production. Michel Piccoli's improvisation will build on this idea, this vision. It will be a flight of fancy, an act of friendship. A fleeting theatrical experience. Nothing more.
There will be only one performance of Piccoli-Pirandello on 6 April at the Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania, when Taormina pays tribute to Michel Piccoli.

Ballets C. de la B./Ensemble Explorations

Iets op Bach

The role of God the Father would not suit Alain Platel. He does not have much faith in forming one' s own church, with its own services. His creation is carried out in a variety of structures and with a variety of people. ' Bonjour Madame ... ' and ' La Tristeza Complice ' were born from the womb of Les Ballets C. de la B., but ' Moeder en Kind ' and ' Bernadetje ' , both in collaboration with Arne Sierens, came into being under Victoria' s wings.

And yet Les Ballets C. de la B. is his parish. He is officially its artistic head, although it still works like the collective it was - everything was shared communally. That used to mean there was a communal creative process: nowadays the members of the old collective challenge each other to create their own work, as has already been done by Hans Van den Broeck, Christine De Smedt and Koen Augustijnen. In such cases Platel never sets himself up as a patron saint; his credo is more like: ' sink or swim ' . But in both cases support is provided.

It seems it is only to a limited extent that his creations originate in his own mind. When rehearsals start he gives little to go on - there is no divine plan. It always embarrasses him; ' Bonjour Madame ... ' was based on 9 men and 1 woman. ' La Tristeza Complice ' on an arrangement of Purcell for accordions. There is of course always much more than that, presumed and hoped, but Platel withdraws to the position of Mr Not-Know-It-All, so as to leave space for the unexpected and the unconsidered. This time the starting point is the music of J.S. Bach. This is usually associated with technique and mathematics. Or with the scent of holiness and heaven, the cry for salvation, away from here. Platel wants to go down a third path: Bach as solace, as a voice for longing, need, rapture, rebellion and surrender, for everything human.

After a year and a half listening to everything by Bach, Platel has assembled his chosen few, which will be performed live, led by the cellist Roel Dieltiens. The ensemble of 9 musicians play the violin, viola, double bass, oboe, flute, recorder, organ, harpsichord and cello. Greta De Reyghere (soprano), Werner Van Mechelen (baritone) and Steve Dujardin (alto) will perform the vocal parts. This time it is not an arrangement - one does not fiddle with Bach. The music is even being played on old instruments. But authenticity is not a question of folklore; it still all comes down to reaching out to today' s audience by understanding the styles of the past. It is here, on the route of emotional response, that Dieltiens' and Platel's paths cross.

Platel would not know how to handle unresisting modelling clay, but he can deal with strong personalities who are ready to show the sharp side of their tongue. The 9 dancers, who come from anywhere and everywhere, have been trained in as many different dance disciplines. They include several from ' La Tristeza Complice ' (Minne Vosteen and Samuel Louwyck, and Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier who joined during the tour), a number of familiar faces from ' The Best Belgian Dance Solo ' , the competition that Platel set up (Lazara Rozell Albear and Larbi Cherkaoui), and several novices (Einat Tuchman, Lizie Estarás and Darryl Woods). The group is again completed by the presence of children (an adolescent and a young girl). The starting point is once again to establish a world of differences.

Within this world the dancers invest their own stories or invent new ones, when Platel gives them the opening, and he excludes nothing of what is discussed in the dressing rooms: Diana, Dutroux, Dolly and Died-in-the-name-of-God. It produces uncomfortable images, which arouse notions of unutterable things, and exude the odour of lechery and rankness. A sort of hell.

And where does Platel fit into all this? You will not come across him if you are looking for an unambiguous answer. It is never either / or. His world is not neatly divided into sheep and wolves, a man is also a woman, and a thing can never only be beautiful. He embraces contrasts and connects up extremes. And / and. Simultaneously. There is no winner or loser in this movement; there is just as little talk of reconciliation (the sustained conflict as a source of the good, the true and the beautiful, if there has to be a moral to the story). ' iets op Bach ' (A little something on Bach) proclaims itself a tumultuous marriage of heaven and hell.

Hildegard de Vuyst

The Left Hand of Glenn Gould

The title The Left Hand of Glenn Gould alludes mainly to the separation between sight and sound. This performance uses theatrical techniques to investigate an area that is not covered by traditional theatre, exploring a dimension that is familiar yet difficult to define: the human face. " The cinematic close-up treats a face like a landscape; it can be defined in terms of a black space and a white wall, a screen and a movie camera ... But the other arts, such as architecture, painting and even the novel are also brought alive by the close-up, which reveals all the possible correlations. Is your mother therefore a landscape or a face? A face or a factory? " (Deleuze / Guattari) The project does not answer these questions, but invites the spectator to participate in a similar kind of research. Music, dance, performance, video, live electronic sounds, and texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust were all elaborated during a workshop lasting several weeks, which produced an experimental theatrical sequence. The Left Hand of Glenn Gould is a theatrical project created by the students at the Institute of Theatrical Applied Arts at the Justus Liebig UniversitSt of Giessen in Germany, under the supervision of the composer and director Prof. Heiner Goebbels, with the collaboration of scholarship students from the Laboratorio Multimediale Fabrica in Treviso: video artists, designers, musicians and sound artists in the class taught by the Italian composer Andrea Molino.