Die Maschine oder: Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh

In 1968, Georges Perec wrote an audio-play about a machine tasked with analysing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous nature poem by using programmes with access to background information, quotes and the mechanics of language. Anita Vulesica transposes this linguistic experiment, which was based on ideas of how a computer works held in those times, to a pseudo-futuristic stage setting. Beneath an “Authority”, three “Memories” are arranged like a staircase, following the absurd instructions given by the relentless controlling instance. They count metrical feet and verses, alter and interchange the order of the words and letters – and gradually begin to rebel. The actors’ brilliant performances and Vulesica’s humorous staging demonstrates not only the analytical working methods of artificial intelligence, but also the workings of poetry – which does after all require the human and human fallibility. Because it is precisely in the moments when the Memories get tangled up in the de- and re-construction of the poem that the beauty of languages shines in its endless possibilities.  

Statement of the Jury

“Wandrers Nachtlied”: French author Georges Perec (1936 – 1982) used Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s probably most famous poem as the basis for his 1968 radio play “Die Maschine” (The Machine). Here it is electrical circuitry rather than human beings who communicate, and an authority called “control” disassembles the text into its individual components. Four human “storage devices” proceed to collate its metrical feet, reverse nouns and swallow letters. Anita Vulesica stages Perec’s linguistic experiment with a cast of six virtuoso performers who play with a kind of feverish zest. The director follows the author’s attempt at systematizing the world and yet she also demonstrates that within the fragility of words, there is a kind of magic that defies all definition. What emerges is a show full of dancing syllables, dealing with language as material, but also with power and resistance and with silence as a political force. An absurd pleasure, woven through with pauses of a weightless stillness. Funny, serious, trashy and, on occasion, pausing quietly o’er all the hilltops.

Tojuror Katrin Ullmann’s video statement on “Die Maschine oder: Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh” (in German)

ProgrammeBooklet (pdf, 4 MB)