The Holland Festival is only halfway through and yet another firmly entrenched idea must already be binned. This time it is the belief that the Japanese Noh theatre form is a dead tradition, paragon of an island society turned away from the world. I am not a great connoisseur of Noh, but the single performance I experienced of it in the past, and those few Japanese films in which scenes reference it, reinforced that idea. 

And then in this Holland Festival, thanks to associate artist Trajal Harrell, there was that ode to Butoh, the Japanese answer to modern Western dance and a break with centuries-old Japanese traditions. Then came About Kazuo Ohno by Takao Kawaguchi along. Dancer Kawaguchi has been touring the world for 12 years with a copy of something uncopyable, namely the snapshots of butoh legend Kazuo Ohno. He shows butoh as a form, overturning the perception that butoh is precisely just feeling. 

Kawaguchi keeps repeating his message that we have no idea of Kazuo Ohno's inner world during his dance. No one can prove that during his performances, that old dancer was not thinking about washing dishes, a new sushirecept, or just not thinking about anything. According to him, Butoh is not much different from Noh or Kabuki. 

Death Ray

And so then came Otemba, the Japanese-Dutch-Indonesian opera starring Ryoko Aoki. Ryoko Aoki is a singer in the Noh tradition, and that alone is unique. Noh is Japanese theatre by men. This woman is special not only for that reason. Somewhat aided by her costume, and possibly a pair of platform soles underneath, she appears on stage at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam like a raging giantess, with a voice that skims the audience's scalps like a death-ray. She literally pushes you back into your seat. 

Otemba is a fascinating opera not only for its presence. The story, too, picks up just about everything we have experienced in the past centuries of colonialism and in ten days of Holland Festival. To the very Japanese music of composer Misato Mochizuki, Janine Brogt wrote a libretto that oscillates between banal businesslike and deeply poetic. In this, she is recognisable as the woman who, as dramaturge of Toneelgroep Amsterdam at the end of the last century, made the great successes of director Gerardjan Rijnders possible. 

Supreme Court

In the opera, we find ourselves in the Rijksmuseum's restoration studio where a conservator, interpreted by the fascinating Indonesian voice artist Kirana Diah, uses a scanning robot to explore the deeper layers of the famous painting 'Portrait of Pieter Cnoll, Cornelia van Nijenrode, their daughters and two enslaved servants' (Batavia, 1665) by Jacob Coeman wants to understudy. 

The story behind the persons on canvas turns out to be much deeper than initially appeared. Did we already know that the enslaved young man depicted is the later resistance fighter Surapati, the story of the Japanese wife Cornelia and the enslaved woman on the far right of the canvas is woven all the way to the Supreme Court in The Hague.

Deeper layer

Human contact, in opera, turns out to have more depth than what technology is capable of. In that respect, this opera in the Holland Festival also refers to the somewhat overrated opening performance Cyber Subin. In it, belief in technology and AI was also responsible for a disembodied performance. 

There was no question of disenchantment in Otemba - Daring Women. Here, the human capacity for theatrical imagination wins out gloriously over any technical invention. 

Good performers always seem bigger on stage than they really are. For Ryoko Aoki, this is true to an intensified degree. The all-female, fragile girl she turned out to be during the premiere drinks, fit at least four times into the vengeance goddess she shaped on stage. That in Japanese Noh theatre they have nurtured and continued to develop the technique to pull off such magic for centuries commands, above all, deep respect. 

In hindsight, it would have been better to open the festival with this spectacle.