Heiner Goebbels works with Slovenian girls' choir: 'In the space between question and answer, imagination lives on

Thirty-eight singing Slovenian girls. We might expect something with colourful costumes against a backdrop of a sunny village scene. Instead opens the performance 'When the Mountain Changed its Clothing' with thirty-eight anxious adolescents in jeans or sweatpants and superhero t-shirts, groping their way across an empty stage. As soon as they open their throats, everything that ancient and modern composers have managed to create between angelic singing and atonal shuddering can be heard. Welcome to the universe of Heiner Goebbels, creator of hallucinatingly beautiful musical theatre.

The meeting between Goebbels and the girls' choir Carmina Slovenica did not come completely out of the blue. The choir, which was founded in 1964 as the Central Choir of Maribor and then mainly performed traditional work, has since 1989, under the direction of conductor Karmina Ŝilec, developed into a choir that mainly plays new music and shapes it into theatrical concerts. Silec approached Goebbels for composition and staging as early as 2007, but it was not until 2010 that he saw the choir for the first time. It made a deep impression: 'Those first few times I worked with them that year were so inspiring that I kept going further and further with them. That's how a programme evolved over the years. In the end, I didn't even compose that much music for them. I concentrated on the stage setting and the way they handled their material. We explored and developed new possibilities together. The girls also now often speak directly to the audience. That's new for them.'

Counterfeit authenticity

Performances with children and young people usually follow a familiar pattern. We often see collages of images and texts emerging from the young performers' own experiences. This performance also originally started according to that idea, Goebbels says: 'During the first rehearsals, we mainly did research. We had the girls tell stories on stage. These were a lot of stories, and often very beautiful stories. But I didn't want to imitate those stories in the performance. That would destroy them. I wasn't interested in that kind of documentary theatre either. That way you achieve a fake authenticity. Instead, I looked for other texts from the past: the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Texts that dealt with the same topics, but which had matured and been written down by real writers. So when they told a story about their grandfather, or stories about the war they had heard, and of course stories about their own childhood and their journey into adulthood, I connected that to the oeuvre of people like Rousseau and Gertrud Stein who were about the same questions, but at a greater distance.'

That distance is essential in Goebbels' theatre, which you may sometimes find a bit clinical, but which always ends up hitting you in the heart: 'We are not going to bring reality 1 to 1 on stage. I think theatre is most imaginative when there is a big gap between what you see on stage and what you yourself think and feel. You then have to bridge that gap with your own imagination.'

Imagination

According to Goebbels, putting the spectator's imagination to work is best done by filling in as little as possible yourself: 'Many of the texts are structured as question-answer games. I really like that, because even in that small space between the question and the answer, you get the space to put your own imagination to work while already answering the question itself.'

The performance was not preceded by a lengthy rehearsal process. Nor was that necessary in the way Goebbels and the choir worked together: 'They are enormously gifted performers. They pick up the tiniest nuances of tone and rhythm changes very quickly. They work independently and have an amazing sense of responsibility, but I never know in advance what they will do. I only give them a few rules, and they figure out for themselves what to do within those rules. For example, in the opening scene, they drag chairs, but that can be different every time. I told them not to lay down anything themselves. Surprise me, surprise yourself, I told them. And in the performance I saw yesterday, they did just that. There is a scene where we agreed that they would sit in a long row in front of the audience, but yesterday they suddenly appeared to have figured out for themselves that they would all look very angry at that. I hadn't seen that before, but I thought it was fantastic.'

Achieve maximum results with minimal effort, it can be done with musicians, according to Goebbels: 'It works the same with all these groups: Ensemble Modern, the Hilliard Ensemble or one such choir. They have found their own method of working together. If you say something to one, you immediately say it to all. They are quick at that. It's very different with actors. It's harder with actors anyway.'

Actors

Goebbels can explain that one. Are actors more difficult than musicians and singers? Are they too headstrong? He laughs: 'Perhaps not enough. The problem, or let me rather say, advantage of musicians is that they see their bodies as instruments. You tell them something once, and they do it. An actor is used to arriving at something through empathy. Everything you ask of an actor has to go through the body and mind before he can show it. That takes some time. You might also have to tell that actor three or four times because he is busy with other things. He is used to growing towards something in six weeks, and doesn't see his body as a tool. For the actor, the body is a means of expression, driven by emotions and psychology. With musicians, there is no psychology. That's what makes working with them so quick and easy. You rehearse an opera in a fortnight, and can recall it from memory after ten years in three days. You tell a musician something once, and then they can repeat it forever. That's not possible with an actor.'

With this difference in task perception, you can quickly achieve something with singers and musicians by forcing them into a straitjacket, but that is not how Goebbels works: 'My work always comes about very intuitively. There is no one way to understand the performance. Therefore, I never told the girls how I see the performance. That way, I let the differences exist. They must have a completely different conception of it than I do.'

Parents

At a concert in the home port of Maribor, it turned out that the children had not told their parents about the performance, whereas in other projects they always did. For Goebbels, this is a testament to the depth of his work: 'I'm sure it wasn't because they didn't understand. The work made a deep impression on them and I think they understood very well that it was all a very individual experience, which cannot be explained in a few general words. They knew it didn't work that way, which is why they didn't tell anything at home. That makes this an impressive document about things, which you can't just talk about.'

What those things are: again, Goebbels says nothing about that: 'I prefer to ask questions. In fact, with this performance, I created a space for you to give your own answers to questions you are not asked every day. And maybe there was an answer among them that you didn't expect.'