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

A vast and complex piece, subtitled “a story about a family and some people changing,” KA MOUNTAIN involved hundreds of performers and lasted seven full days. Created for the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of the Arts in Iran, the work was performed outdoors on Haft Tan Mountain near Shiraz. At the core of the action was the story of an old man who, after leaving his family at the base of the mountain, traveled upward toward the summit, stopping at various points along the way where different performances took place. Here Wilson’s expansive theatrical vision took on epic proportions. He included performers from a wide variety of backgrounds, age groups, and nationalities, along with a menagerie of animals and an eclectic assortment of costumes, properties and sets. Wilson employed these elements against the harsh and barren geography of Haft Tan Mountain to create a piece that seemed to recount the entire history of mankind. (Text by Joseph Bradshaw)

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