Refuse the Hour at BAM Harvey Theater

“Can we hold our breath against time?” Speaking backwards and forwards, to the unsynced ticking of giant metronomes, inimitable South African artist William Kentridge (The Magic Flute, 2007 Winter/Spring; The Nose, Metropolitan Opera) delves into a phantasmagoric investigation of temporality in this multimedia chamber opera composed by Philip Miller, a companion to Kentridge’s five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Documenta 13).

Amid spinning dancers, megaphoned singers, multi-instrumentalists, incessant animations, and a lone physicist, Kentridge himself delivers an elliptical lecture-performance on productive procrastination, myth, entropy, empire, and black holes. With choreography by Dada Masilo, video design by Catherine Meyburgh, and dramaturgy by Peter Galison, this delirious Dadaist cuckoo clock courses through time both operatic and cinematic, personal and collective, industrial and colonial, to tease meaning from the passing seconds.