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Father Transition and Children Chorus
55th Oberhausen festival opens with a live performance

This year Oberhausen will open with the world premiere of a one-of-a-kind multimedia performance: “Father Transition and Children Chorus”. Written expressly for Oberhausen by Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya and Olga Egorova, who have achieved international acclaim as the artists behind “Factory of Found Clothes”, the piece features music written for it by the young Russian composer Vladimir Rannev and sung by the Oberhausen children’s choir “Klosterspatzen Liebfrauen”, conducted by Veit J. Zimmermann, along with appearances by actor Klaus Zwick and singer Karin Kettling. The debut performance will take place at the opening of the 55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen on 30 April.

Father Transition and Children Chorus is a social artwork and a musically demanding one – one that can take place in this form only in Oberhausen as it is based on interviews conducted with local unemployed fathers. The lion’s share of the piece is performed by the Oberhausen children’s choir “Klosterspatzen Liebfrauen”, while the actor playing the father, Klaus Zwick, and the singer Karin Kettling come from the Theater Oberhausen.

How does this all come together? The performance is like a small-scale opera: the huge head of a father, either one who’s working or one who’s unemployed, is projected on the screen, under which stand 20 children who sing their needs to the father. They hold men’s suit jackets (symbolizing the working father) and light-coloured t-shirts (for the unemployed father). The children don’t care what the father says and whether he is working or not. Their needs always remain the same.

The piece will premiere at the opening of the 55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, with a repeat performance shown on 4 May at 17h.

“Klosterspatzen Liebfrauen” is the name of the children’s choir that Veit Jürgen Zimmermann began to develop in 2000 in the then Liebfrauen parish, but which was only christened officially in 2003. The choir currently has 20 members, most of them from Oberhausen. The young singers are aged from 11 to 15 and have a repertoire ranging from Gregorian chants to musicals to gospel and jazz. To date the Klosterspatzen have performed mostly for their own parish of St. Clemens and at other parishes. They put on extremely successful musicals each year and gave the first concert of their own in 2008.

Factory of Found Clothes is the name under which Russian artists Natalja Pershina-Yakimanskaya (Gluklya) and Olga Egorova (Tsaplya) have been collaborating in St. Petersburg since the mid-1990s. They have made a place for themselves on the arts scene with installations and performances in which the “shed skin” of worn clothes frequently plays a role, along with the use of choral elements.

Vladimir Rannev is a composer, music historian and lecturer at St. Petersburg’s Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory and at the University of St. Petersburg. He graduated with a degree in composition in 2003, spent time living in Germany and England, and is now once again home in Petersburg.

Father Transition and Children Chorus
A performance by Factory of Found Clothes, St. Petersburg
Production and script: Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya (Gluklya) and Olga Egorova (Tsaplya)

Actor: Klaus Zwick
Voice: Karin Kettling
Choir: Klosterspatzen Liebfrauen, conducted by Veit Jürgen Zimmermann, Oberhausen
Music: Vladimir Rannev, St. Petersburg
Video: Carolin Schmitz
Curator: Christiane Büchner
Produced for the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

www.kurzfilmtage.de

Oberhausen, 28 April 2009

Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, tel 0208 825-3073, niewalda@kurzfilmtage.de