KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: a story about a family and some people changing

Directed by Robert Wilson, Andrew de Groat, Cynthia Lubar, James Neu, Ann Wilson, Mel Andringa, S.K. Dunn, and others

Texts by Robert Wilson, Andrew de Groat, Jessie Dunn Gilbert, Kikuo Saito, Cynthia Lubar, Susan Sheehy, Ann Wilson

Music and sound by Igor Demjen

Performed by Robert Wilson and The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds

Performed from September 2 to 9, 1972 at Haft Tan Mountain, Shiraz, Iran

“I was interested in observing life as it is and how that was special. Someone baking bread or making a salad or simply sipping tea is what I found interesting...I had an idea to do a play that would be performed continuously for seven days, a kind of frame or window to the world where ordinary and extraordinary events could be seen together.  One could see the work at 8am, 3pm or midnight and the play would always be there, a 24-hour clock composed of natural time interrupted with supernatural time…I could not possibly write and direct a play that was seven days long so I created a big mega-structure that I divided into hours, with 24 segments a day.  I worked with an international core group of over 100 people and in the end we had over 700 people participating including local students, people I met in the bazaar in Shiraz, people who lived in the foothills who did not know man had been to the moon and had never been to Shiraz…I divided the play into seven themes over a week.  Day one took place on hill one, day two on hill two, so by the seventh day there were activities on all seven hills.  The participants were divided into groups and each group had a time slot and these would repeat and run throughout the week…I often think of this work as a cross section of people with very different political, religious, social, cultural background working together for an event that would happen only once, like a shooting star.  We were like a large family, evolving.”

– Robert Wilson, in a text for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition "Iran Modern" at the Asia Society Museum in New York City, 2013.