While a collection of men-in-suits began sipping shrimp cocktail in fearful adoration around a huge orange war god at Huis ten Bosch Palace, a few dozen kilometres north, a gentle, hypnotic rhythm filled the Great Hall of Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg theatre. The swaying cadence sounded like Indonesian gamelan, but an Arabic tambourine also undulated through it, while African drums added a propulsive heartbeat. Did I hear an organ? Wasn't that marimba singing us to the Caribbean? And that singer's Japanese sound, how did her voice not flow together hallucinatingly with that African female choir?
The opera Ring Of Our Time, which had its world premiere on Tuesday 24 June, is another highlight of this year's Holland Festival. The musical theatre piece does everything right that has gone wrong elsewhere. The piece originates from World Opera Lab, founded by Utrecht-based Miranda Lakerveld, but bears the stamp of all the musicians, singers, designers and other creatives who collaborated on it. It is a collective project, and this time it really seems so: not one leader, but dozens of unique voices.
Unique consonance
The input from all corners of the non-Western part of our planet comes together in a way that makes full use of all the ingredients. Such an amalgam has been presented before during this festival edition, but in that piece of music, titled One Ocean, a watery western sauce was mixed in there that may have made the whole thing easily digestible, but also colourless.
In Ring Of Our Time, no Joppie sauce. Here, the musical jalapeños go together with cassava, couscous and za'atar, while in addition you keep tasting five-spice powder and trassi as clearly recognisable ingredients, yet there is only one dish on the table. Opposite the Hague's patatje war, we were enjoying three-star-level world cuisine.
Running water
This banquet begins as a creation story in which all the primal stories from the southern hemisphere in particular resound together, without drowning each other out. Big similarity is the primal mother and the role that running water plays in all these stories. To this, the rocking rhythm, which dominates the full two hours, adds something very natural.
In the colourful setting, the circle plays a major role. It refers to Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen. That story about the primal myth of the West, in which Rhine gold clouds minds, is counterbalanced by a story in which the river itself is the gold that gives life. So this opera began its life as a commentary on Wagner's western total art, and we get that right about three quarters of an hour before the end.
Climate change
At that point, the opera changes tone. The climate in the auditorium changes. What at first some still considered a soothing Novib calendar becomes a fierce indictment of European colonialism and the devastated ecosystems it has produced. The audience is served up a raw list of disasters. From the stage, which also reaches deep into the stalls of the Stadsschouwburg via a catwalk, it hits hard. So hard that some audience members, stepped on their tourist toes, leave the hall.
The accusation is, of course, justified, and 'the West' gets a fair shake for good reason. After all, in our West we are experiencing a cynical culmination of wealthy arrogance that does not shy away from mass murder to pursue private goals like 'honour'. One techbro suspends emergency aid to millions, while his colleague rents off the whole of Venice for a wedding party. Their move boss boasts of big bombs.
That the speaking and singing voices are all women's makes the artwork in Amsterdam meaningful. If we contrast the current chaos of men indiscriminately bombarding each other with this opera full of gentle powers of water goddesses, one cannot help but hope that one day we will find our way back to a world where women's voices are heard.
