Hashirigaki

[Dave Monroe]

"If you think 'God Only Knows' is still the greatest
pop song ever written, then Heiner Goebbels' new
theatre piece will be 80 minutes of pure,
unadulterated delight. Unclassifiable ...
unforgettable ... The stuff that masterpieces are made
of."
—The Guardian (UK)

Hashirigaki, loosely translated from the Japanese as
"the act of walking, thinking, and talking at the same
time," is the first word of a renowned Kabuki play. It
is also the fittingly evocative title of postmodernist
composer and director Heiner Goebbels' captivating
work for the always-adventurous Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne
of Switzerland. For 80 nonstop minutes, three
virtuosic performers deliver an electrifying
cross-cultural fusion of sound, images, and movement
inspired by Brian Wilson's haunting music for The
Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds and the seemingly
disparate thrills of Gertrude Stein's devilishly
enigmatic 1908 composition The Making of Americans.
It's an experience at once bucolic and surreal, set
within a series of gorgeously lit tableaux. The mood
is lighthearted, infused with wit and touches of
mystery. 

Like Stein and Wilson, Goebbels revels in the
unanswerable question, and Hashirigaki is
time-spanning nexus for these three pioneering
artists-each captured at the height of their creative
powers, any of whom would be aptly described by Pet
Sounds' "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times."

http://www.bam.org/asp/bam_frameset.asp?PageID=www.bam.org/performances/Hashirigaki.asp

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