HEINER GOEBBELS

As a stage director, Heiner Goebbels knows better than almost anyone else how to embed his musical compositions within veritable Gesamtkunstwerke teeming with striking imagery that thrive on the performers’ improvisations. Created in 2018 for the Manchester International Festival to commemorate the centenary anniversary of the end of WWI, Everything That Happened and Would Happen proves no exception: objects, bodies, worlds, lights, space, and sounds arrange themselves in a succession of tableaus that create a polyphony of kaleidoscopic impressions, an open work that he calls “utopian”, one which lets each spectator form his or her own associations. What is it about? Nothing less than narrating the history of the twentieth century! Before our eyes, in a kind of monumental shadow theatre, four musicians (including an ondist) and twelve performers implacably resuscitate a humanity that seems bent on its own disappearance.

The work is inspired by Patrik Ouředník’s book “Europeana, a brief history of the twentieth century”; John Cage’s anti-opera “Europeras 1&2”; and the European Euronews channel “No Comment”.