Ellen Elmendorp Photo
In a back room at the Yale University Art Gallery last year, a half-record, half-video looking machine — the proper name is actually an anamorphic projection, which is what happens when 35mm film is transferred to DVD, and meets a cold rolled steel table and cylinder — sprang up during the institution’s exhibition on Contemporary Art/South Africa. Over eight minutes, viewers saw ripples, lines and semi-human forms rise up out of the white, slow-spinning cinematographic ground, and take flight as another dizzying suite of images began.
This weekend, these concepts and so many more will come to life in artist William Kentridge’s Refuse the Hour, a multimedia opera that explores the concept of temporality and space through performance. The piece dovetails with the artist’s internationally traveling installation “The Refusal of Time,” initially an installation for dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany.
In both the installation and the opera, one man — composer Philip Miller, Kentridge’s longtime collaborator and colleague — has played a focal role. Earlier this week, I had a chance to connect with Miller as he finished teaching a masterclass to students at the Yale schools of music and drama. During our short, 25 minutes, we spoke about his composition for the piece, a “strange combination of things … part a lecture, part opera, it’s got wonderful dancing … soaring visuals and video by William and his longtime collaborator Catherine Myburgh.” Our conversation is below.
New Haven Independent: I’m interested in how the work has changed and morphed not only since the original collaboration, but since it’s been traveling. A work, I guess, is relatively confined in its first state, but then you take it on the road, there’s interaction with the audience and it suddenly has a life of its own.
Philip Miller: Well, maybe what I should say is that the work has really two intonations — one is a installation which of course is something that is in an exhibition space with sound and visuals and this wonderful breathing, kinetic sculpture — and that has been a fixed thing that we developed over a period of time and now of course it travels … whereas the performance has, if fact, had a kind of … had different versions that have grown and developed literally from the very first time we performed it in Amsterdam over three years ago [for the Holland Festival] to its current iteration at BAM and now at the Yale theater.
I think that many things informed the process. The way the work has been created is through a series of workshops which had drawn out raw materials that have then been kind of refined and then refashioned into a staged performance piece. We have changed things as we’ve moved into different spaces; different theater spaces have made us look at it in different ways. We’ve also had the challenge of working sometimes with different performers — all of these changes have made this work develop, and I’m very excited about it in it’s current form from BAM. Many things that perhaps we weren’t clear about perhaps in earlier versions seem to have now become very clear. It’s found its maturity. It’s no longer kind of barely out there. It has all these different elements and we call it a multimedia opera, but it probably — it’s not easy to pin down what it is, but it kind of moves between all these different forms of art and performance.
I think just having the chance to perform this in America, we have a sense that … we think it’s going to stay the way it is for the moment.
New Haven Independent: But you’re open to changes, if they happen organically.
Miller: Always.
New Haven Independent: You’ve spoken previously about how the relationship between artist, filmmaker and composer, while in film is very much established, is still a little nascent in the contemporary art world. This work is so interdisciplinary. Of course you’ve worked with William before, but did this feel new and exciting at all?
Miller: It’s not new to me. Exciting, yes. I’ll pull that apart. It isn’t that new, because we’ve worked for 20 years together, which is a wonderful and rich collaborative time period to work. Initially, we started in a way that was more a conventional relationship where William as visual artist had made a sculpture and animation song with his visual drawings and he asked me to then compose music for the song. But over the years of working together more and more, the process … it shifted and changed in that we started to work kind of contemporaneously. William might have started off with a drawing and the drawing was sent to me and I would start to work on some ideas, some sounds and music, and a dialogue would happen. Sometimes William would edit to the music and sometimes I would write music to the songs. So it became much more of a conversation. That idea of collaboration in terms of video art making was sort of a development that grew out of years of working together.
Why it would be exciting now, as different from any other time, is that I … I feel that it’s the culmination of a wonderful process of working together. The culmination is because it pulls so many of these different elements together. It’s a very wonderful way that for the first time in quite a few years — we have done some other performance-type work — that we literally put together musicians and dancers and video, and all of these things started to all happen together. This is a great ensemble piece between myself, William and the video editor Catherine Myburgh … it’s exciting because it has brought together perhaps many years of process in which we’ve had these ways of working.
New Haven Independent: I’m interested, then, in the idea of narrative. You’ve described your own work in the past as sort of ‘outside of narrative.’ I’m coming at this from an art perspective. At the Yale University Art Gallery, they have some of William’s work, and I feel like it’s not easily digestible — you really have to look at it and think about it. I get really interested in where you’re taking the story in this piece.
Miller: The idea of narrative is something that’s very loose in the making process. I think William definitely has thoughts about where he thinks the work might go, in terms of filmmaking or stage-making, but he never comes with a very clear end idea defined in narrative. I think that allows for wonderful opportunities to experiment as a composer, it allows for an openness to where the music can go, and vise-versa. Yes, sometimes it’s layered, sometimes it’s quite difficult to completely grasp. But I think William is never wanting someone to say: ‘oh, yes. I understand this in all completeness.‘ I think he allows this openness. So in terms of my working with him in this way, it gives me a freedom to work off many different media — it gives us a chance to have a strong sense of each other and our abilities … without always having to ask questions.
New Haven Independent: In what ways is it new?
Miller: We’ve done a very lovely piece of late, a concert piece, called Paper Music, which stars the singers that are going to be in Yale this weekend. Where we took this concert was to really play with this idea of moving image, and drawing, and the mark-making we found in paper music …which of course also has a jazz connotation. For that piece we were talking about the question: What does it mean when you put on piece of music to a moving image, how do you read the image? How does that change the way we read image? And the same — how do we listen to sound or music when we put a particular image to the sound? It’s that ongoing series of questions that we ask each other as collaborators.
New Haven Independent: When the piece is performed, do you have an ideal audience member in mind?
Miller: Ha! My ideal audience is someone who doesn’t fear the work in that it feels difficult — and that allows a certain amount of saying: ‘I don’t need to know everything here, but I can come to it in a way that just feels … that I don’t have to worry about how I understand this work.’ That they can be part of something and enjoy the sounds, the images and won’t need to constantly try and find the narrative.
New Haven Independent: That could really be any listener. Do you have much interaction with the audiences after performances?
Miller: Yes. I speak to people. Generally people … they’re surprised at perhaps the humor in this. You know, people take a lot out of it from different ways. Sometime people talk about the emotions that come through from the music and the singing and the strength of the human voice. Some people talk about the relationship between song and image. I definitely have a sense that people are always surprised by it and don’t really come out saying ‘this is what we expected.
New Haven Independent: Interesting. Occasionally, I’ve spoken to composers and said: ‘Well, this is what I got from the piece,’ and they’ve countered ‘Well, then you heard it the wrong way.’
Miller: I’m definitely not that kind of composer. I really believe there are so many different ways one can process music and sound and I generally don’t think about trying to imagine what the audience needs to feel or think about s the prime objective. I express myself using sound and music and words, but i don’t try to have a message. I work in commercial film music as well, and in some ways that’s the opposite … where you absolutely have to really follow a very particular narrative line. When I worked with William in this freer way, I certainly enjoy the fact that I’m not always having to kind of message someone as how to feel or listen to the music. I don’t have what I would call a very particular compositional focus … I work often off so many different kinds of stimuli and approach composition quite differently according to the project.
New Haven Independent: All that considered, do you still have a feeling of excitement for these upcoming performances?
Miller: Oh, very much. It’s a very intimate group or ensemble or musicians who don’t come together that often … it’s a special thing when we get together. William’s own schedule is so busy that it doesn’t allow for long touring periods of months on end. So when we get together like this, it’s a really exciting thing and we tend to really enjoy it. There’s always joy and magic in those tiny little shifts that we do.
