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Ruhrtriennale 2014

Festival director Heiner Goebbels is creating the musical portrait of a metropolis with sounds from all over the world.

13.08.2014
picture-alliance/blickwinkel/S. Ziese - Ruhrtriennale
picture-alliance/blickwinkel/S. Ziese - Ruhrtriennale © picture-alliance/blickwinkel/S. Ziese - Ruhrtriennale

What would the Ruhr District sound like if it were a symphony? Visitors to the Ruhrtriennale can find out at the premiere of Surrogate Cities Ruhr. The cycle by festival director Heiner Goebbels is the musical portrait of an imaginary city, which he created out of texts, drawings and city maps and used sounds from Berlin, New York, Tokyo and St Petersburg. The original composition is being adapted appropriately for the renowned international festival in the Ruhr District: a former industrial plant in Duisburg is the stage for the moving city picture that French choreographer Mathilde Monnier has devised with 140 children, young people and adults from the former coal and steel region.

1,000 international artists

Surrogate Cities Ruhr is one highlight of the Ruhrtriennale, the festival which has been attracting musical theatre, dance, performance art, concerts, films and contemporary art to the industrial monuments of the Ruhr since 2002. Some 1,000 international artists are providing around 150 exciting cultural events and 30 productions. The focus will lie on works from the musical literature of the 20th century that were groundbreaking in their way, but are relatively seldom heard. These include, for example, De Materie by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, which has never been performed since its premiere in Amsterdam in 1989, and Neither, the only opera by US composer Morton Feldman, which is being directed by Romeo Castellucci at the Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum. Matthew Herbert, the “God of Electronic Music”, will invite listeners to a piano evening at Zeche Zollverein, the grounds of the former coalmine in Essen. A star cast – including, among others, the writers Salman Rushdie and Jeffrey Eugenides – appear in the symphonique movie River of Fundament, a collaborative partnership between British artist Matthew Barney and American composer Jonathan Bepler. The film tells an allegorical story of becoming and passing against the backdrop of American industrial landscapes, thereby spanning another bridge from the Ruhr District to the rest of the world.

Ruhrtriennale from 15 August to 28 September 2014

www.ruhrtriennale.de

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