A music theatre piece that includes dance:

Hashirigaki
By Tom Service for The Guardian
Thursday November 21, 2002

Heiner Goebbels' music-theatre piece Hashirigaki is a virtuosic mix of cultures, sounds, and images. It fuses excerpts from Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans with songs from the Beach Boys album, Pet Sounds; and it is staged for three female performers who are simultaneously musicians, dancers and actors.
That combination suggests some kind of commentary on American culture, or a metaphor for contemporary multiculturalism.

Yet, in reality, Hashirigaki is much less about social or political meaning than the creation of a compelling but elusive theatrical world. The show is full of magical musical and visual moments.

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This looks like a quirky and original piece of musical theatre. Sorry to miss it as I'm out of London:

Hashirigaki
by Geoff Brown for The Times


SO WHAT is this? Music theatre? Art installation? Semantics lecture? Post-Modern circus? You expect Germany’s mixed-media maverick Heiner Goebbels to smash pigeonholes, but even for him Hashirigaki reaches new levels of fusion. “Running, rushing, writing fluently, outlining”: those are the title’s meanings in Japanese, and throughout the 90-minute show sounds and images follow suit, running fluently, blending into a magical world where familiar objects, pop songs and words are deconstructed and made new......

What makes this circus so entrancing is the kiss of humanity supplied by the performers. Goyette, Charlotte Engelkes and Yumiko Tanaka are the heart of the show. Whether freezing in gymnastic display, rotating like mechanical dolls, or spindling out Stein’s serpentine sentences, they disport themselves with warmth, precision and humour.

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File under, "You can't please all the people all the time."

Dada kabuki no-no
Rupert Christiansen reviews Hashirigaki at the Barbican for The Daily Telegraph


Hashirigaki is the Japanese for "running, rushing, writing fluently, outlining", and it forms the opening word of a celebrated kabuki play. There is little more I can confidently tell you about this show, except to advise you to give it a wide berth.

It has been conceived, directed, and - in the broadest sense of the word - composed by Heiner Goebbels, a respected figure of the current Middle European avant-garde. Maybe he has something profound to say about the relationship between Eastern and Western culture, but only a braver man than I, Gunga Din, could venture a rational explanation of Hashirigaki.

"Rational" - that's the bugbear, of course. Goebbels doesn't bother with "rational", because rational is merely a boring bourgeois delusion.

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Hashirigaki
By By Gareth Evans for The Stage

A quite extraordinary journey through the poetic and imaginative potential of live performance, music theatre genius Heiner Goebbels' latest production is delicate and beguiling.

Fusing an exploration of the Beach Boys' ground-breaking album Pet Sounds with avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein's prose epic The Making of Americans, he delivers a sequence of stage pictures that delight and intrigue in equal measure. During 90 minutes, finely detailed minimalist tableaux - Klaus Grunberg's set and lighting designs are exquisite - alive to the rich effects of the smallest change in nuance and tone, create a world in which cardboard cities and hot air balloons flow seamlessly together.

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