Heiner Goebbels’ latest performance draws on the thoughts of Elias Canetti. The result is a real theatre thriller where the spectacle of stage illusionism is in perfect harmony with the games played with the text, the video and the music performed by the Mondriaan Quartet.

What is Eraritjaritjaka about?
Canetti writes that in the language of the Australian aboriginals this is used approximately for the feeling when we are “filled with a longing for something lost”. The lapidarium (“museum of platitudes” compiled by Goebbels and Wilms from entries in Canetti’s diary tries to share with us in the language of the theatre the writer’s incisively intelligent vision: of music, our habits and vanities, cities, media, even animals… The author’s intellectual journey throws light on the problems of our age. The text is spoken by André Wilms with unrelenting austerity. The first words spoken on the stage are the confession of a person suffering from clarity of vision: “I have no melody to reassure, no cello as he does, no laments that no one recognises because they are so mysterious and their texts are so indescribably soft. I have only the accustomed words, these signs committed to yellowish paper, expressing the same thing for a lifetime.” Elias Canetti, Thoughts 1973–1985.
But in the course of the performance a connection, at times serious at others ironic, is woven between Canetti’s words and the pieces of music played splendidly by the Mondriaan Quartet. It is a tribute to the perfect and emblematic form of European art music, the string quartet, in which the greatest works of Johann Sebastian Bach and Maurice Ravel follow each other, as well as compositions by Gavin Bryars, George Crumb, the Russians Vasili Lobanov and Alexei Mosolov, and Heiner Goebbels.