A contemporary music-theatre about times in the dream world: TIME

The 74th Holland Festival, which continued throughout June, ended with the livestream of the music-theatre named TIME by the famous Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of the associate artists of this year's edition, on 27th June. 

TIME, a joint project of the Holland Festival - Amsterdam, deSingel - Antwerp and the International Manchester Festival, had its world premiere on 18th June at Gashouder-Westergas, which was converted from one of Amsterdam's old gasworks into a culture and events centre. 

©Sanne Peper

A woman blows a flute-like instrument and walks slowly across the stage filled with ankle leveled water. An hour later she passes again blowing the same instrument, but this time making more painful screams than before. The water through which she passes is no longer the clear water as before. There are dry branches in the water, stones of compacted earth, and there is a man's body in the water, bent like a rock.

In the realm of a dream that lasted 100 years, the man waits for the woman he buried 100 years ago, at the edge of the water, in the water, passing through the water. The man was next to the woman as she died. She said to him, "Wait for me, I'll be back in 100 years" and he waited. The contemporary music-theatre named TIME is about his 100-year long waiting.

The text of the music-theatre consists of "Dream", the first story of Soseki Natsume's 1908 surreal short story series Yume jūya (Ten Nights of Dreams), of the traditional Noh play KANTAN and of a fragment taken from the ancient book of Zhuangzi from the 3rd century BC.

The structure of the piece has sections separated from each other by completely blacking out the scene. In the beginning and the end, shō (traditional Japanese mouth harmonica made of bamboo) performer Mayumi Miyata portrays 'nature'. Dancer Min Tanaka, born in 1945, brings 'humanity' to life with great expressiveness and almost like a moving sculpture. He has a presence reminiscent of the old man figure in Akira Kurosawa's "Dreams".

Ryuichi Sakamoto says that in this project he questions the phenomenon of time and the relationship between man and nature: “We live and die. And after we die, our body becomes part of the next being. This is samsara itself, the cycle of life on earth. In dreams those temporal structures are not linear. Everything is condensed.” For this to be achieved, he creates an atmospheric soundscape that captivates even me as an audience sitting before the screen to watch the piece. The dominant element of this soundscape from beginning to the end is the thin sound of rain, like a drizzle falling on the leaves in the depths of a forest. Towards the end of the piece, real rain will also be made on the stage, and the sound of drizzle, which was immaterial until that moment, will also be visualized. The fragile sounds produced by the hitting of broken ceramic particles are another characteristic element of the soundscape that Sakamoto uses throughout the piece. He spatializes the soundscape by making it deep, with a string party that stretches time in its calm, slow and repetitive form. Just as the images on the projection screen are reproduced by their reflection in the water in front, and as the waves, which are highlighted by falling light from different angles on the water, are reproduced by reflecting on the screen behind, the music also deepens and spatializes by being reflected in space.

Director and visual artist Shiro Takatani, who first worked with Sakamoto on their first opera collaboration LIFE in 1999 and has produced nearly 20 projects together since then, was inspired by the magical traditional Japanese dance theater Mugen Noh while staging TIME.

The water element playing the leading role in Takatani's stage design, which he handles as an installation, reproduces the time lived in it by looking at the past and the future with the mirror effect. Takatani uses video projection as another dominant element of the installation. It is a tool where sometimes the motion at the stage is projected live, sometimes prerecorded images and designed animations are used, and sometimes the English translation of the Japanese texts appears. All of these are reproduced by reflection in the water. In this way, Takatani creates a dream world experience for the audience that seems to last forever in terms of time and space, without falling into mannerism, in a masterful and balanced way.

TIME will be staged again at deSingel-Antwerp in March 2022.

[The Turkish version of this article is published on unlimited.]