The German-born composer and director Heiner Goebbels has returned to the enormous Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory with a work that was written to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. A composition not just in music but also in lighting, sound, and movement, Everything That Happened And Will Happen is as ambitious as its all-encompassing title implies: Goebbels aims to tell the story of nothing less than a century of European history — by not telling the story. He takes material from Patrik Ourednik’s 2005 novel Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, which weaves in and out of stories both great and small from the past 100 years.
Goebbels also draws on the daily feed of unedited, unmediated newsreels from Euronews, which changes each day and requires the piece to not just look back but maintain an openness to what’s happening right now. And finally, he draws on his own experience with the Armory’s vast space, which he memorably filled with a flock of live sheep back in 2016 for a performance of De Materie, the opera by Louis Andriessen that Goebbels staged and directed.
Everything That Happened And Will Happen fills the huge Drill Hall with light and dark, music and sound installation, actors and dancers, nods to history and a wondering glance at a Europe that is, once again, divided and conflicted. Performances run through Sunday, June 9.