Everything That Happened and Would Happen spans a hundred years of European history: its giddy contradictions, false promises and consuming crises. Taking the First World War as a starting point, the performance proposes a landscape of fragmented incident without differentiating the trivial and the supposedly meaningful. Together with 16 musicians, dancers and performers, Heiner Goebbels leads us to a storage depot filled with the props of the past, the burden of the present and the key to possible futures.
Part-performance, part construction site, Everything That Happened and Would Happen is an invitation to imagine an alternative history of the 20th century through the poetry of collaboration and chance. Patrik Ouředník’s novel Europeana – A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, John Cage’s anti-opera Europeras 1&2 and the European TV channel Euronews – No Comment are three interlinked sources of inspiration and, in each case, material is reorganized and processed into a constantly evolving panorama of contrasts.
Everything That Happened and Would Happen is an open invitation to reflect on what constitutes European identity, where it has its origins and what its future might look like; to imagine different versions of our past, present and future.
Heiner Goebbels, born in 1952, lives as a composer and director in Frankfurt am Main. He holds a degree in sociology and music and has composed for ensembles and orchestra. He develops music theatre pieces, scenic concerts, radio plays, sound and video installations. In 2012, his book Aesthetics of Absence was published.
He has received several international awards, including the European Theatre Prize and the International Ibsen Prize. From 2012 to 2014, he was Artistic Director of the Ruhrtriennale. In 2018, he received the first appointment for the newly established Georg Büchner Professorship at the University of Giessen.
