When The Mountain Changed Its Clothing

This is a marvelous chance to hear some extraordinary choral work that is moving, mysterious and other-worldly. From a simple start of an almost empty stage When The Mountain Changed Its Clothing leaves a beautiful expanding and flourishing rich sense of spring full of promise. Perhaps ambiguously it is the promise in the life of women or a woman, perhaps a simple homage to womanhood or just a homage to spring and the life-cycle.

As the performance progresses we watch forty young women enter the performance space, set up the stage, change their drab costumes into something more feminine and bright and perform some texts in front of some simply designed projected imagery.  All of this they do mostly in unison as they sing like angels. 

Creator/Director Heiner Goebbels uses a combination of unexpected texts that in being presented in this context undergo a kind of deconstruction.  Being put into the context of such a streamlined seemingly unrelated bold theatrical piece endows what is being spoken with a sense of irony or at the very least allows for discrete interpretation. Two of these resonant texts are printed in the program; Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile Or on Education and Gertrude Stein’s My Last about Money.

Much of the music is traditional and very old including a textural Indian piece all presented with such glorious finesse by this very large a cappella choir. 

An unusual and unique experience – a true festival piece.

Highly recommended – but only a couple more shows – just go!

Suzanne Sandow

Image: ©Wonge Bergmann for the Ruhrtriennale