John Hodgkiss Photo
When it begins with the story of Perseus, slayer of Medusa and unknowing fulfiller of bleak prophecies, Refuse The Hour presents itself as the kind of thing that will revel in narrative. A young William Kentridge and his father are on a train, itself barreling through space and time. His father has opened a book of mythologies — maybe Hamilton’s, maybe someone else’s — and begins to unwrap the story step by step, starting with the original prophecy from the Oracle of Apollo that Perseus, who is not yet born, will kill his father.
Even in his young mind, Kentridge can see it all unravel: Zeus’s shower of falling, glittering gold dust impregnating princess Danae, who is imprisoned in a locked room; Danae and her miraculous, improbable child tossed into the ocean to die; a seaside rescue on the island of Seriphos; young Perseus killing Medusa; a discus-throwing contest at which Perseus, pulling back one arm and throwing the disc with all his might, unwittingly launches a saucer that flies beyond the other competitors’ discs, over the stands, and into his disguised father’s head, striking him dead.
That is when the story’s improbability comes crashing down on Kentridge. He wonders: What if the king had sat in a different seat? Not disguised himself as a beggar is sackcloth and ashes? What if Perseus’ arm had been just a bit weaker? How can fate truly seem this easy, and how can it be unfastened?
This disbelief is the actual basis of Refuse the Hour, a multimedia opera that Kentridge and an exceptional troupe of artists brought to New Haven for two performances last week. Novel, pugnacious, and ultimately genius, the opera takes on a relentless but inherently human attempt to rewind the clock, to undo time itself as it keeps marching on.
To challenge and tempt temporal realities risks, of course, being Faustus in a box. But the way Kentridge works through the piece is utterly new. Like his multimedia installations, films, and stagings of Lulu in New York last week, which are very complex but not without narrative, the approach elevates the work to exquisite and mind-bending proportions.
There are, for instance, multiple attempts to control the forward march of time inherent in speech, song, and music. In an exchange that begins with a careful, choreographed discussion of entropy, opera singers Ann Masina and Joanna Dudley sing Berlioz’ “Spectre de la rose,” to each other. Masina belts it out, only for Dudley to parrot it to her backward, her voice shrill and tin-touched with the garbled words. Later in the performance, Kentridge himself struggles with sentences, the sheer force of the words sending him backward on the stage as they too come out in reverse.
There is also the exploration of literal forward movement in its most widely disseminated form — early film, itself obsessed with the mechanical tricks of the body and the eye as they played out across the flickering reel. On several zoetropes that play throughout the opera, Kentridge is stuck unwittingly in the same act: mounting and dismounting and mounting the same chair; walking forward on a street where he loses and regains his hat; being hoisted and carried on dancer Dada Masilo’s back. Paired with several recreated farcical French films in which time and space seem anything but relative, they are poignant in showing that, if time is absolute, we seem to have discovered a few tricks around it.
But the most compelling and mad of Kentridge’s temporal experiments is his quest to unravel Europe’s mass colonization of Africa — famine tactics against the Herero in German-controlled Sudwestafrika (Namibia), the mass capture and torture of the Mau Mau in British-controlled Kenya, and more — united around the tight and Drury-esque refrain “Give us back our sun.” As pages and pages of maps appear on a video projection behind the company, members morph into one dancing, dissenting machine, desperate to undo the evils of the 19th and 20th centuries before they strike, as predictable as a discus, again.
These drive home Kentridge’s obsessive, sometimes funny, sometimes not-so-funny point: Time doesn’t stop barreling forward for any of this. It only feels like that, because ultimately, we do.
Want to learn more about Kentridge’s work? The Yale University Art Gallery has a selection of his prints and video installations on display until January 2016. Learn more at the organization’s website.
