Everything that happened and would happen by German composer Heiner Goebbels is a large scale three-hour performance with about 20 dancers, performers and musicians. It had its world premiere on October 10 as part of the Manchester International Festival and ran through October 21. The piece has received reviews from several prominent newspapers, including The New York Times and The Guardian.

The show explores the history of Europe since World War I and combines live music, performance and film. The principal influence for Goebbels’ take on the 20th-century history of Europe was Patrik Ouředník’s book Europeana. A Brief History of the Twentieth Century. The title of the piece comes from a quote in the novel while “extracts from Ouředník’s book are read by the cast in some of the languages into which it has been translated, or unfurled on a screen,” The Guardian has informed.

Patrik Ouředník (b. 1957) is a novelist, translator and essayist, linguist, author of books for children and adults. He is the recipient of the State Prize for Literature (2014), the Tom Stoppard Prize (2013) and dozens more French and Czech literary prizes. His Europeana has been published in more than 30 languages, making it the most translated post-1989 Czech book.