Obscene Jester: the superstitious ethics of the auditor: heiner goebbels' stifters dinge @ the armory

In "The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader," one of Jorge Luis Borges' many small gems of critical essays, he writes,

The perfect page, the page in which no word can be altered without harm, is the most precarious of all. Changes in language erase shades of meaning, and the "perfect" page is precisely the one that consists of those delicate fringes that are so easily worn away. On the contrary, the page that becomes immortal can traverse the fire of typographical errors, approximate translations, and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process.

Transposed to music, this might apply to those pieces that withstand poor interpretation (or technique--Bach's 5th cello suite is certainly still a force to be reckoned with despite its many poor iterations on undergrad recitals, my own included), score errata (yeah, Kalmus, I'm talking about you), and unfortunate sound track to rom com sentimentality (Beethoven's cello sonata no. 2 in "Along Came Polly," say). And what Borges asserts as the strength within good literature, that aspect of it that transcends such mundane elements as sentence structure and innovative adjectives, also speaks through performances of composers such as Iannis Xenakis, whose music is often so complex and virtuosic that to be absolutely true to the score is to compromise some ephemeral element within it that indeed makes it as strong a work as it is--makes it, in Borges' assignation, immortal.

What matters in these performances, what, indeed, makes each performance something new unto itself, is the intervention of the body. It is specifically in the fallibility of the musician, a sonic reckoning with her own mortality in face of the immortal page, that defines a performance as "live"--in opposition to the digitized perfection of the recording.

But what of a performance predicated entirely on the lack of the body? What of electronic music that, in the dimly lit halls of conservatory recitals, would leave us in the uncomfortable moment at the end of a piece before an entirely empty stage, unsure of when or for whom to applaud? Stifters Dinge, by Heiner Goebbels and part of Lincoln Center's Great Performers Season and in collaboration with Park Avenue Armory, confronts these issues, and, in its mechanized perfection, offers both the sublime and something less.

Stifters Dinge, as the program notes describe, "is a composition for five pianos with no pianists, a play with no actors, a performance without performers." Beckettian in scope and structurally reminiscent of Ballet Mechanique and its own Futurist influence, Stifters Dinge "revolves around awareness of things, things that in the theater are often part of the set or act as props and play a merely illustrative role. Here they become protagonists." The piece is entirely performed by its own mechanics, yet while the Futurists used the then-recent cacophony of the Industrial Revolution as an intervention into notions of music (and theatre), Goebbels instead offers a Romantically inclined consideration of the intervention of technology into notions of nature and the unknown. Comprised of texts from 19th-century Romantic author Adalbert Stifter, Claude Levi-Strauss, William S. Burroughs, Malcolm X, and indigenous song from Papua, New Guinea, Columbian Indians, and women from the Greek island of Kalyminos, and referencing as well Bach's Italian Concerto and details of Paolo Ucello's tempura-on-wood Night Hunt amidst a bricolage of acoustic (though entirely mechanically produced) sound, Stifters Dinge is very much the "theatre of collage" John Cage hypothesizes in an early interview with Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner. And in its 80-minute assemblage of these not-quite-disparate elements, it is truly a gorgeous work of art. Yet, in the seamlessness of its parts, its Borgesian perfection, Stifters Dinge is also something else: something too easy, too pretty, leaving the audience to this experimental music-theatre not so much challenged as necessarily passive to the experience.

This is where the body falls out--not so much in the lack of organic presence onstage (though the two stagehands manipulating oversize sifters and tubage in the opening segments of the piece do contradict the intention of "a performance without performers") but rather the lack of a realization of one's presence in relation to the piece. Usually, the interdisciplinarity and multimedia that has become synonymous to experimental performance offers up some sort of reconsideration of the very idea of genre, creating something new in its wake. Here, though, the music and theatre and technology and image merged into what to me was more akin to installation art, and the fact of assuming a static posture rather than moving through the site frustrated and stymied my own experience. This does has something to do with the venue--the main hall of the Armory is so vast that, while I cannot imagine this piece performed anywhere else in New York, there was too much space left around it begging to be explored; something like the unexplored natural spaces the piece references in itself. But, I think it has more to do with the rather apperceptive conflict between how we negotiate different spaces of performance.

The notes describe Stifters Dinge as a piece that "takes [Stifter's] text as a confrontation with the unknown and the forces that man does not master, as a plea for the readiness to adopt other criteria and judgements than our own and even as an oportunity to come to terms with unfamiliar cultural references." It does all this, and the barren trees set between deconstructed pianos on the stage create themselves a paradox of the manipulated natural world. But, to my ear, and eye, what is most significant is the potential Stifters Dinge has to alter our understanding of contemporary music performance. That the unknown in this performance is the relation of the live to the technological and the explicitly disembodied presentation of a discipline, specifically, classical music, that is always already rendered disembodied in critical discourse. That is, the conflict here is between notions of live and technology: we're seeing a live performance completely mechanically performed and the aspect of the natural is in parallel conflict with the (conventional) notion of the live.

As the piece ended there was that same uncomfortable moment. It wasn't until Goebbels himself stepped up to the machines that the audience resumed a sense of security and self-recognition to begin a resounding applause. In its construction, Stifters Dinge is already immortal; whether it has a soul to lose, however, remains yet another unknown.

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