Hashirigaki - Théâtre Vidy Lausanne

Saison 2011-2012HashirigakiDe/ By/ Von Heiner GoebbelsThe Guardian (EN)21.11.2002HashirigakiHeiner Goebbels’ music-theatre pieceHashirigaki is a virtuosic mix of cultures,sounds, and images. It fuses excerptsfrom Gertrude Stein’s The Making ofAmericans with songs from the BeachBoys album, Pet Sounds; and it isstaged for three female performers whoare simultaneously musicians, dancersand actors. That combination suggestssome kind of commentary on Americanculture, or a metaphor for contemporarymulticulturalism. Yet, in reality,Hashirigaki is much less about social orpolitical meaning than the creation of acompelling but elusive theatrical world.The show is full of magical musical andvisual moments.Seeing The Beach Boys’ I Just Wasn’tMade for These Times sung in Europeanand Japanese accents, played bya theremin and a collection of bells, andaccompanied by the original backingtrack, is a thrilling and weird experience.Yet this unexpected meeting of culturesemerges completely naturally withinthe context of the rest of the 75-minuteshow. In one sequence, the threeperformers, Charlotte Engelkes, MarieGoyette, and Yumiko Tanaka, transforma suite of Japanese and western instrumentsinto a miniature cardboard city:an organ becomes a skyscraper, andTanaka’s costume turns her into a towerblock.After a passage of ritualised violence,in which Tanaka furiously beats a metaldisc, the action morphs seamlessly intoa version of another Beach Boys track,Don’t Talk. Every aspect of the productioninhabits the same allusive universe:from Stein’s repetitive texts to Florencevon Gerkan’s suggestive costumes,which transform the performers intoeverything from giant, luminous eggsto boiler-suited workers. The theatricalrange encompassed by Engelkes,Goyette, and Tanaka is stunning. Theymake Stein’s texts sound genial andconversational, their actions and movementsare brilliantly coordinated, and Tanaka’smastery of a variety of Japaneseinstruments is spellbinding.From all of this diversity, Goebbelscreates an inexplicable but coherenttheatrical grammar, one that includeshumour and emotion. In one section, Engelkesand Goyette move in an undulatingwave across the apron of the stage,as they recite a text that muses on theniceties of language and pronunciation.After a long silence, a shout of Mexico!in a Spanish accent is bizarrely, butgenuinely, funny. Their version of CarolineNo is strange and moving, as theyaccompany their vocals with a delicateembellishment of finger cymbals andexotic percussion.But the most powerful sounds in Hashirigakiare those of the theremin: noisesof this ethereal, electronic instrumentencapsulate the mysterious world of thewhole show.Tom Servic