Ressources.ircam

"A dead father would have been perhaps a better father. The best father is stillborn. Grass grows over the border ever anew. Again and again the grass that grows over the border must be torn out." The autobiographical tale by the author Heiner Müller, a suite of ten short episodes, opens with these terrible words. Like a child’s fairy tale, it remains impossible to touch the person imprisoned behind the bars of a camp who will eventually die behind the glass door of the contagious ward of a West Berlin hospital. Like a memory, with its perpetual rewritings, the author’s biography becomes hopelessly tangles with the destiny of Germany. Michael Jarrell has created a work where the violent harshness of six percussions, a sonorous historical image, welcomes the voices of three women with motherly tones, a narrator that wanders through the text and the shimmering electronics. The film, directed by André Wilms and presented for the first time during the premiere of this performance, follows the recitals.