TIME by Ryuichi Sakomoto: how five quarters can flash by in a thousand years. #HF12

In a legendary episode of the SF series Star Trek, The Next Generation, for fans like me, Captain Picard is hit by a strange light signal from an empty probe. We then switch to a village to which the captain seems to have been teleported and see how he leads quite a life as a village wise and gifted flute player.

At the end, he dies a very old man, leader of a dying civilisation, and we switch back to the bridge of the Enterprise where he awakens from a coma that lasted a few minutes. He can remember everything from his life on the unknown planet, and finds an old flute on which he can play effortlessly. Something he couldn't do before.

Relativity

Why this insider story? Because it contains all the themes of Ryuichi Sakomoto's opera 'Time', now showing at the Holland Festival. In a nutshell, it is about the relativity of time. Time is more an experience than a fact, which is what we have been trying to fathom since Einstein. For the mindfulness session presented as an 'opera' that is Time, three ancient Japanese stories have been edited together quite simply. In those stories, time, and especially its decay, plays the main role.

In the performance itself, across the full width of the Gashouder on Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek grounds, little happens on the face of it. It is a meditation session with a bowl of water, a very old actor and ageless woman, and the occasional dreamy note, interspersed with sounds of rain. If you have been as stupid as me, to read the stories told beforehand, one and all can lead to the dream told being replaced by one's own sleepiness, as the surprise of the stories is already lost.

Kitsch

This is exactly where my own background clashes with the age-old tradition of a country that, despite all the globalisation, still seems to be on another planet. The pling-plong music may be undeniably related to the other work of Sakomoto, known mainly as a film composer, but in this dreamy slowness, with video images of drops and very slow movements of actors, the thought of kitsch comes to mind too quickly.

That is not the fault of the makers, for whom the imagery and music, plus the pathos in the absurdly minimalist acting, refer to a very different cultural idiom from what we know as Xenos-orientalism with our mimicked Pickwick tea ceremonies and imported Geishakimonos. So that reference is kitsch, I thought afterwards, and who am I to dismiss the Time event as such?

Other planet

It is actually wonderful that in this day and age, when all borders have been blurred, and you are a loser if you have not flown to Japan at least once in your young life, you can be confronted in the theatre with a world so alien that it seems to be otherworldly. At least 1,000 years have passed in Time in Amsterdam's five-quarters of an hour of official playtime.

According to the authors, you have then reached a state of enlightenment. With my second covid vaccination fresh in the upper left arm, I cannot wish for anything more beautiful. Though it may take some time before I really realise that. And I still can't whistle.