When refusing the hour saves the day
Refuse the Hour is a chamber opera companion to South African artist William Kentridge’s five-channel video installation, The Refusal of Time. Composed by Kentridge’s longtime collaborator, Philip Miller, it recounts a tale that begins with the myth of Perseus and ends with Einstein’s visionary findings. Speaking backwards and forwards in the midst of a Dadaistic landscape, surrounded by spinning dancers, megaphoned singers, live musicians, and projected animation, Kentridge himself is the narrator, delving into the nature of time as he delivers a fragmented lecture about procrastination, myth, entropy, empire, and black holes. The Center for the Art of Performance presented Refuse the Hour at Royce Hall on November 17 & 18, 2017.
"When the celebrated South African artist William Kentridge created his installation “The Refusal of Time” for Documenta 13, the international exhibition in Kassel, Germany, five years ago, it proved such a draw that you had to refuse an hour or more to wait in line to see it. Through films, various contraptions, megaphones broadcasting competing soundtracks and off-kilter metronomes ticking time, Kentridge meant to show the unsuspected connection between the clock and colonialism.The exhibition happened to be in a grungy corner of the Kassel train station. As we stood aimlessly in line that hot summer of 2012, commuters, regulated by trains running precisely to the clock, rushed by in obvious disregard for our refusal of the hour. With Documenta’s intentional reference to the station in World War II having been a transfer point for Jewish prisoners sent to concentration camps, clocks and trains took on sinister significance.
The result is that the refusing of an hour or two symbolized political import in a way that an installation piece created for this environment could never quite reproduce elsewhere. It lasts a half-hour and has traveled widely, but at nice museums in New York, San Francisco or Salzburg, you spend a few minutes with it and then move on to the next thing.
To fully refuse the hour might seem better the job of opera, and thus Kentridge turned “The Refusal of Time” into a chamber opera, “Refuse the Hour.” That show has, itself, toured the world over the last five years and the clock has now run out on it. The final performances were presented by the Center for the Art of Performance UCLA at Royce Hall on Friday and Saturday nights.
“Refuse the Hour” fills in many of the blanks in “The Refusal of Time.” It adds scientific, historical and political context. Kentridge himself delivered anecdotal talks about time and its consequences, an amiable, professorial emcee. He surrounded himself with fabulous dance; potent singing, operatic and otherwise (mostly otherwise); multidimensional video imagery; quirky music; even quirkier machinery on stage."— Mark Swed, Nov. 19, 2017
Read the full article at the Los Angeles Times website.