When the Mountain Changed Its Clothing

Producent Ruhrtriennale. Coproducer Maribor Theatre Festival Maribor 2012 – ECC and others

Running time 1 hour 30 minutes. No interval.
The performance is subtitled in English.

Première 25 September 2012, Jahrhunderthalle Bochum, Ruhrtriennale

Director, author of concept and music Heiner Goebbels
Vocal Theatre Carmina Slovenica, Artistic direction Karmina Šilec
Stage and lighting designer Klaus Grünberg
Costume designer Florence von Gerkan
Choreographer Florian Bilbao
Dramaturg Matthias Mohr
Sound designer Willi Bopp
Authors of texts Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Joseph von Eichendorff, Adalbert Stifter, Gertrude Stein, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marlen Haushofer, Marina Abramović, and Ian McEwan
Authors of music Johannes Brahms, Arnold Schönberg, Karmina Šilec, Lojze Lebič, Sarah Hopkins, and Heiner Goebbels

When the Mountain Changed Its Clothing explores the changes experienced by 40 girls from Maribor, ages ten to twenty. They confront us with stories and questions about the end of childhood. The old is no more, yet the new remains out of reach. On this threshold, they assemble to play seemingly harmless games, verses, songs, and create poetic, threatening images. In a mutual interplay of sovereignty and repression, the young singers move through the cycle of the seasons, constantly calibrating the balance of power relations among one another and especially between the audience and the stage.

"What do young girls dream of?” – "Of the knife and of blood.”
In 1995, this fragment of dialogue by French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet closed an early musical theatre work by Heiner Goebbels, Die Wiederholung [The Repetition]. It now represents the point of departure for his latest work of musical theatre.

Coproducers Maribor Theatre Festival – Festival Borštnikovo srečanje in the frame of  Maribor 2012 – European Capital of Culture (SI), Steirischer Herbst (Graz, AT), Festival D'Automne (Paris, FR), Grand Theatre (Luxemburg, LU), Kunstfestspiele Herrenhausen (Hannover, DE), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels, BE), Holland Festival (Amsterdam, NL).
Supported by Freundeskreis der Ruhrtriennale e.V.
The performance in Maribor is supported by the Goethe-Institut Ljubljana and the Embassy of the Republic of Germany in Slovenia.