Max Black, or 62 Ways of Supporting the Head with a Hand

Max Black, or 62 Ways of Supporting the Head with a Hand is a very explosive work combining music and theatre, which unfolds like a chain reaction: a thought turns into words and then into actions, sounds, fire and smoke. The virtuosity of the restless actor turns all his experiments and actions into a fantastic soundscape. The stage is a laboratory for scientific research that falls outside of the boundaries of traditional scientific endeavour and at the same time offers space for a music theatre work that goes beyond classical genres and can be described as unclassifiable. Max Black is not a biography or a portrait of the influential philosopher and logician of the same name who was born in Baku in 1909 but is inspired by his famous essay On Vagueness, as vagueness is what art is all about. Goebbels abandons traditional dramatic form and discovers a world where machines, fire and electricity, noises and melodies tell their own stories and become instruments that weave a polyphonic tale.

• The Stanislavsky Electrotheatre
• Composer and director — Heiner Goebbels
• Text — based on the notebooks of Max Black, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Paul Valéry, Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Performer — Alexander Panteleev
• Sound design — Willi Bopp, Alexander Mikhlin
• Costumes — Jasmin Andreae, Anastasia Nefedova
• Lighting and set design — Klaus Gruenberg
• Live sampling — Vladimir Gorlinsky
• Premiere — 7 October 2015