Eraritjaritjaka

Lincoln Center Festival 2006 presents the U.S. premiere of director Heiner Goebbels’ richly imagined and enigmatic music-theater work, Eraritjaritjaka, a production of Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne where the work was premiered in 2004. Eraritjaritjaka uses the texts of Nobel Prize-winning author Elias Canetti as the starting point for one actor’s vivid exploration of music and language, our habits and vanities, cities, the media, the animal kingdom, and above all the omnipresent and horrific power of order.

Eraritjaritjaka is an Aboriginal Australian expression meaning “full of desire for something that has been lost,” a definition that Canetti used in his 1992 book The Agony of Flies. Goebbels pairs Canetti’s elliptical texts as interpreted by actor André Wilms with conceptually-linked original music of his own plus works by J.S. Bach and a host of 20th-century composers, including Dmitry Shostakovich, Gavin Bryars, George Crumb, and Giacinto Scelsi, performed by Amsterdam-based string quartet, The Mondriaan Quartet. Music and words are then combined with real-time video and an evocative set and lighting design, to create an unpredictable world in which the audience will begin to question the work’s dueling extremes of light vs. shadow, interior vs. exterior, film vs. stage, and artificiality vs. reality.

Part of the Lincoln Center Festival.