Musiktheater im Revier
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51°30′51″N 7°5′28″E / 51.51417°N 7.09111°E
 Musiktheater im Revier at night | |
 Interactive map of Musiktheater im Revier | |
| Location | Gelsenkirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany |
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| Construction | |
| Opened | 1959 |
| Architect | Werner Ruhnau |
| Website | |
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Musiktheater im Revier (MiR) (Music Theatre in the Ruhr) is the venue for performing opera, operetta, musical theatre and ballet in Gelsenkirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It opened on 15 December 1959; it is listed since 1997 as a protected cultural monument.
The building offers two performance spaces: the Large House (Großes Haus) with 1,008 seats and about 200 performances per year, and the Small House (Kleines Haus) with 336 seats and about 120 annual performances. In contrast to the building's outside cubic appearance, the auditoria use a more curved design.
The building was designed by the German architect Werner Ruhnau. The cubic outer shell of the Large House is formed by a 4,500 square metres (48,000 sq ft) glass facade, which gives view into the interior and the cylindric casing of the auditorium and its stairways, and the two monumental sculptures by the French artist Yves Klein.
They consist of one 7×20 m (23×66 ft) monochrome sponge sculpture in a distinctive blue ("Gelsenkirchen Blue") because Klein's International Klein Blue was unsuitable for the large walls: the acetone-based mixture evaporated, the paint lost adhesion and luminescence, and it was highly flammable. A second, slightly smaller work, is in blue and white. These intensely blue reliefs, which are visible from the outside through the glass skin of the building, inspired the city's graphic artist, Uwe Gelesch, to introduce blue as Gelsenkirchen's house colour. The Small House features a mobile by Jean Tinguely.[1] The building served as a location for the 1961 film The Miracle of Father Malachia by Bernhard Wicki.[2]
