etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

In 1965, amid the Civil Rights Movement, racial conflict and profound social transformation in the United States, Steve Reich recorded the voice of Black street preacher Brother Walter declaring: “It’s gonna rain.” Walter’s words warn of an approaching catastrophe and of the moment when escape is no longer possible. This warning became a loop in Reich’s work: repeated, fractured and transformed.

Sixty years later, Opera Lab Berlin reimagines Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out and Piano Phase as a new work of music and dance theater. Through choreography and Reich’s radical musical experimentation, the piece follows the mechanics of attention itself: how repetition creates meaning, how visibility creates power and how a center of power emerges when attention repeatedly concentrates on the same people, voices and images.

1965, the present and an uncertain future collide in a society caught in permanent spectacle – a world where reality, representation and surveillance increasingly merge. Images do not simply document reality; they construct it. Repetition produces truth. Attention becomes power. Visibility becomes currency.

Who occupies the center? Who is heard? Who is seen? Who belongs? And who gets to construct the reality everyone else sees?

Opera Lab Berlin has staged over 30 independent productions since its founding in 2013, working with more than 40 contemporary composers and 18 directors. With It’s Gonna Rain, the collective continues its mission to expand the possibilities of contemporary music theater to open space for exchange of diverse lived experiences.