Surrogate Cities Ruhr

Kraftzentrale at Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord becomes a showplace for a large-scale work of musical theater. French choreographer Mathilde Monnier creates with 130 local performers and the Bochumer Symphoniker under the direction of Steven Sloane a choreographic work for Surrogate Cities, Heiner Goebbels’ seven-part composition for two solo voices and large orchestra. In his orchestra cycle, Heiner Goebbels sketches the portrait of an imaginary metropolis. The orchestra is understood as an image of society and a metaphor of a city. In the midst of the scene, it acts as a musical center of forces and part of the choreographed landscape.

Mathilde Monnier’s choreography for Surrogate Cities Ruhr was inspired by the mutual interplay of musical temperature and intensity. With children and young adults, adults and senior citizens, the choreographer explores their repertoire of movement and places it in a tense relation to music. In so doing, the participants help to create the choreography; their transformations in the urban space become images of collectivity and loneliness. Surrogate Cities Ruhr understands the variety of cities in the Ruhr Region as a polycentric metropolis and creates an interaction between the city and its residents that seems to break out of the purely musical sphere. The formless shape of the city becomes an event in the at times breathless, at times lyrical architecture of moving bodies and in the rhythms of the music and its orchestral gestures.

The music of Surrogate Cities, which has been performed around the world since its premiere in 1994, takes its impulses from texts, drawings, and structures of city maps, using sounds from Berlin and New York, Tokyo and St. Petersburg, or encounters historical-musical fragments and found pieces directly. The sampler plays a central role as the mode to digitally store this acoustic material. The more narrative parts are voiced by the virtuosic singer David Moss and American jazz vocalist Jocelyn B. Smith.

Mathilde Monnier, one of France’s most innovative choreographers today, sees dance in an inspiring interaction with other art forms. Since 1984, she has been developing pieces with international artists, performances, and installations. At Ruhrtriennale 2012, she was a guest with Twin Paradox und Soapéra, for which she was awarded the “Best of the Best” Prize from the Children’s Choice Awards.