What is shown exists. What is not shown disappears. Opera Lab Berlin’s new music and dance theatre production reinterprets Steve Reich’s ‘It’s Gonna Rain’, ‘Come Out’ and ‘Piano Phase’, asking not what happens when history repeats itself, but what if it has never stopped.
Image gallery
Samuel Chalela Puccini
In 1965 in America, amidst the civil rights movement, racial conflicts and profound social upheavals, Steve Reich recorded the voice of the Black street preacher Brother Walter, who proclaimed: ‘It’s gonna rain.’ Walter’s words warn of an impending catastrophe and of the moment when escape is no longer possible. This warning became a loop: repeated, fragmented and transformed.
Sixty years later, Opera Lab Berlin reinterprets Reich’s ‘It’s Gonna Rain’, ‘Come Out’ and ‘Piano Phase’ as a piece of music and dance theatre. Through choreography and Reich’s radical musical experiments, the piece explores the mechanisms of attention itself: how repetition creates meaning, how visibility generates power, and how a centre of power emerges when attention is repeatedly directed towards the same people, voices and images.
1965, the present day and an uncertain future collide in a society trapped in a perpetual spectacle, a world in which reality, representation and surveillance are increasingly merging. Images do not merely document reality; they construct it. Repetition creates truth. Attention becomes power. Visibility becomes currency.
Who takes centre stage? Who is heard? Who is seen? Who belongs? And who is allowed to construct the reality that everyone else sees?
IN ENGLISH
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Participating artists
Francesca Verga, Omí, Evan Gardner, Ruben Nsue
Astan Meyer
