©MatthiasZölle

Hamletmaschine

A Dance-Theatre-evening after a play by Heiner Müller

"Choreographer Daniel Goldin slowly approaches the complex theatre text of Heiner Müller. In this long, sombre prelude, he invents images that link up with the dance expressionism of the 1920s. Tthe group tableaux, but also a moment in which only fear-pale faces stare out from a cloth, are reminiscent of the dances of a Mary Wigman or Dore Hoyer. Once arrived at the text, Goldin treats it with astonishing assurance. The choreographer, using a theatre play for the first time as the basis for his work, develops an excellent feeling for the rhythm of Müller's text. By splitting it among several speakers, Goldin succeeds in giving Müller's text, which constantly leaps back and forth between different perspectives, an easily understood structure. ...The dance subordinates itself to the language, seeks for pictures to reflect the apocalyptic moods that Müller interweaves in his short text in countless associations. By combining dance and theatre, which are never in danger of falling apart as two different things, Goldin has succeeded in turning Heiner Müller's difficult doomsday scenario into a sensual experience that moves the audience."

Christina-Maria Purkert, Deutschlandfunk, Kultur heute, 12 April 2003


"Daniel Goldin is one of the few choreographers working in Germany whose dance theatre is politically motivated. So in Heiner Müller's play, he is far less interested in Hamlet's disillusionment with the world than in Ophelia's furore. Goldin develops magnificent scenes for his Ophelia figure, who is embodied by several dancers/actors: as a black angel of death, she rebels with her body against an invisible force, and as a gaudily dressed whore with stuck-on breasts, she ridicules Hamlet's declarations of love. Choreographer Goldin and stage designer Matthias Dietrich have followed Müller's complicated stage directions with remarkable accuracy and created a theatre of opulent images. In the course of the evening, a huge metal ship breaks apart, flooding the stage with flotsam and jetsam and other objects, until the people ultimately threaten to sink amidst the chaos. And where Müller in his text borrows quotes wherever he can find them, Goldin counters with a cleverly calculated eclecticism, undertaking a tour de force through the culture of the twentieth century, from Marilyn Monroe pose and Kurt Weill song to Apocalypse Now film associations. ... Goldin succeeds in enabling his dancers and actors to work indistinguishably side by side. While he mostly has Müller's lyrical and association-rich verses recited completely without emotion, in the dance choreography pain, rage and madness are allowed free and expressive rein. ... This Hamlet Machine is a wholly sensual experience, and at the end, everyone must decide for themselves whether it paints the apocalypse or promises chances for utopia."

Nicole Strecker, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Mosaik, 14 April 2003


"An overall impression full of powerful and intelligent pictures. A great achievement by the ensemble and by director Daniel Goldin."

Ursula Pfennig, Westfälischer Anzeiger, 14 April 2003


"Theatre is rarely so topical as Daniel Goldin's masterful dance theatre evening 'Hamlet Machine', based on Heiner Müller's play of the same name. Müller has finally arrived where, with his "five scenes" and after years of studying Shakespeare, he always wanted to be: In the pictorial world of dance theatre, with its distinctive symbols for the unspeakable inhumanity of this world from antiquity to the present day...Daniel Goldin creates image on image for each word in Müller's short text, which encompasses his concentrated, nameless fury at human impotence against the doings of the mighty. A great, moving evening."

Marieluise Jeitschko, Die Welt, 15 April 2003


"Goldin translates Müller's 'five scenes'...into a legion of highly aesthetic and highly frightening human pictures...The audience did not seem to want to stop applauding"

Marieluise Jeitschko, Gießener Allgemeine, 15 April 2003


"A premiere that will surely have left no one in the audience untouched. The dance theatre ensemble and six actors put on a 'Hamlet Machine' with utter brilliance and sometimes almost unbearable intensity. Daniel Goldin is outstandingly successful in mixing acting and dancing."

Petra Faryn, Die Glocke, 15 April 2003


"Goldin's 'Hamlet Machine' describes itself as "dance theatre", and it takes this description seriously. Neither of the two components dominates the other; neither detracts from the other. The performance transports the whole of Müller's not very extensive text. But Goldin fills out the texts, and especially the empty spaces between them, with a scenic fantasy of dance, physical theatre and choreographic pictures that are the equal of Müller's literary imagination. Right from the beginning, 'Hamlet Machine' comes across as a grandiose revue of death, riskily balancing between wit and cynicism, pleasure and disgust, provocation and blasphemy - and as sharp-edged as the axe that one of the Ophelias in punk outfit lasciviously strikes like a guitar. Goldin's choreography, in its most lustful moments a cross between the best of Pina Bausch and Johann Kresnik, contrasts the order of closed ensembles with the anarchy of parallel solo actions. Out of Heiner Müller's texts and the music added by Goldin and Thomas Wacker, in a blend of the sweet and shocking and a mix of pictures and dances, arises a one-hundred-minute dance work of a brilliance and malicious pace of a kind so far unequalled in this season."

Jochen Schmidt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 April 2003


"Daniel Goldin choreographs the relationship between 'Hamlet portrayors' and the other figures in a multi-layered weave. That brings dynamic into a piece that elsewhere all too often appears static and stuck in sombre profundity....Goldin stays close to the text, but uses the associative character of the original. And he invents completely new pictures, for instance bizarre tango duels"

Markus Termeer, taz ruhr, 17 April 2003


"A scurrilously grotesque picture book, an enthrallingly danced and occasionally even ironic doomsday scenario in which all the performers gave their utmost"

Matthias Menne, Radio Antenne Münster, 19 April 2003


"Münster' dance theatre evening, premiered (as chance would have it) just two days before the fall of Baghdad, highlights the cruel topicality of Müller's short text. It makes ingenious references to Kurt Jooss's anti-war ballet 'The Green Table' - which was also conceived in Münster some 75 years ago. Goldin translates Müller's Hamlet jabber in 'five scenes' into a torrent of life-burstingly theatrical, strident and sombre dance scenes, in the form of a brilliant mix of reality TV and poetry. The 16 dancers and actors live out Shakespeare/Müller's figures with enormous passion. Matthias Dietrich and Gaby Sogl (stage and costumes) together with Sabine Dollnik (dance theatre) and Horst Busch (drama) provide practical support for these the breathtaking world-theatre associations."

Marieluise Jeitschko, Die Deutsche Bühne, June 2003


"With his dance ensemble supplemented by actor colleagues, Daniel Goldin has ventured on Heiner Müller's Hamlet Machine and turned it into a "dance theatre evening". The stage, designed by Matthias Dietrich, looks raw, like an open wound, sometimes disembowelled, sometimes covered in rubbish. With his Hamlet Machine, Goldin presents an apocalyptic, doomsday revue, an earthy, life-bursting piece of theatre which in its best moments has something of the crudity and surprise of travelling theatre of yore and in its more trashy ones something of the gaudiness and slapstick of carnival. Goldin wittily cites the forms of politically motivated dance and theatre: the choir, which in this case becomes again what it originally was, namely a moving choir, Polish theatre, the graphic choreographic theatre of Johann Kresnik, and, in the portrayal of the female figures, genuine dance theatre.“

Katja Schneider, Tanzjournal, July 2003

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