Eraritjaritjaka and the Intermediality of Heiner Goebbels’ Music Theatre

Yesterday, I gave a talk as part of the "Frontiers +" Symposium: 'Music as Theatre, Theatre as Music' which this year features and celebrates the internationally acclaimed composer and director Heiner Goebbels. For anyone familiar with his work, the connection to why I should mention him in a blog on "the musicality of theatre" is evident. His work is strongly influenced by the idea that as a director he works like a composer, and as a composer, he works like a director, an idea he explores in more detail in the book on Composed Theatre I recently co-edited. My talk concentrated on the complex interaction of music and theatre and their perception focusing in particular on the dissolution of clearly definable borders between these art forms and their media using Heiner Goebbels’ experimental music-theatre production Eraritjaritjaka (2004) as a case study. The methodological considerations that precede the analysis are based on notions of intermediality and extend the idea of an intermedial relation that “consists in one medium representing another” (Schröter) into three types of relations, which I label metaphorically “Suchbild” (picture puzzle), “Kippfigur” (reversing ambiguous figures) and the “Schwellenphänomen” (liminal phenomenon). In my argument these notions are used to distinguish different forms of cohesion or fusion between music and the theatrical in relation to process and performance. Goebbels’ production consciously challenges and blurs boundaries of clearly distinguishable media, distinguishable genres and distinguishable performance modes. This talk is an excerpt from a chapter, in which I also look at similar intermedial movements in Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark. The chapter will be published later this year as: „Dancing in the Twilight – On the Borders of Music and Theatre”, in: Risi, Clemens; Karatonis, Pamela; Symonds, Dominic (eds.): The Legacy of Opera. Amsterdam: Rodopi 2012.