Schliemann III

This year marks a milestone: two decades of uninterrupted artistic life at Peiraios 260. For its inaugural event at the celebrated venue constellation, the Athens Epidaurus Festival welcomes one of the most compelling figures of the European music and theatre scene, Heiner Goebbels.

Schliemann III is an invitation to inhabit alternative sites of experience, spaces that challenge and recalibrate our perception of History itself. The work takes as its point of departure the reconstruction of a plan of Troy, with its nine unearthed strata, drawn from the diary accounts of Heinrich Schliemann during his excavation programme that took place between 1871 and 1873.

Voices in Greek, performers, and musicians enter into dialogue with a heterogeneous tapestry of texts and sounds that includes pseudo-archaic declamations and passages from the Iliad, fragments from The Trojan – Hector Berlioz’s operatic reimagining of Troy – alongside folk songs, electronic sound samples, and pre-recorded compositions.

The result unfurls as a series of distinct “excavations”. The performance, together with its sources, does not merely allude to Schliemann’s quest to uncover the remnants of Troy, but further bears the imprint of various site-specific forms the project has assumed in the past: the original stage installation Newtons Casino by Michael Simon and Heiner Goebbels, first presented at Frankfurt’s Theater am Turm in 1990, and the later version, Schliemann's Scaffolding, conceived and presented in 1997 in collaboration with the THESSEUM theatre organisation in Athens.

In 1993, Goebbels also created the award-winning purely acoustic radio composition Schliemanns Radio. Now, together with several of his earlier collaborators, Simon and Goebbels return to the project to develop a new iteration, conceived as a parcours across the spaces of Peiraios 260 that resembles a journey through permeable historical layers.

Today, all these trajectories – artistic, historical, and geographical – align and give birth to Schliemann III, a richly stratified stage composition that treats History not as a fixed narrative, but as a continuous act of excavation, interpretation, and re-articulation.