Every discipline celebrates time
Tucked into the center of “Refuse the Hour,” the exuberantly inventive multimedia circus by William Kentridge that opened an alltoo-brief two-night run at ACT on Friday, Nov. 10, is an indelible verbal portrait of the artist in the act of creation.
Prowling the stage with notebook in hand, Kentridge depicts himself pacing similarly around his studio, trying to assemble his ideas amid a torrent of false starts and rethinkings. He throws together snippets of Keats, Gilbert and Sullivan and First
Corinthians, until his thoughts start to whirl together in what he memorably calls “a zoetrope of sound” and the stage erupts in a vivacious conga line.
That moment captures as well as any the zesty, anything-goes esthetic of “Refuse the Hour,” which is also — beneath its wondrous hodgepodge of theatrical, visual and musical effects — a probing meditation on the nature of time. But there’s no rule saying we can’t have fun along with our cosmology.
And “Refuse the Hour” is practically nothing but fun.
Kentridge, the virtuosic creative polymath whose portfolio includes everything from drawings and animated films to revelatory opera stagings, has assembled an equally free-spirited band of collaborators to help him shape this 80-minute intermissionless entertainment.
The show features the exquisite work of dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo, a compact physical cannonball whose body contracts and expands in scintillating bursts of joy. It includes the new-music diva Joanna Dudley, whose thematically apt signature move in this piece is to mimic the sound of music flowing backward in time. The gloriously full-throated singing of vocalist Ann Masina and the winning stage presence of actor Thato Motlhaolwa make invaluable contributions.
But there’s more! A Rube Goldberg contraption of drums and bells, suspended above the stage, signals the start of the evening. Kentridge’s signature video animations — a restless world of uncooperative inkwells, vintage ledgers, and abstract curlicues — combine with a variety of live-action film created in partnership with Catherine Meyburgh, including a jumpy blackand-white film recycling commedia dell’arte japes about infidelity through the cinematic palette of Charlie Chaplin. Philip Miller’s puckish, evocative score is delivered by an expert instrumental sextet.
Through it all, Kentridge presides over the proceedings like a hybrid of a ringmaster and a public lecturer. In a series of discrete chapters (each one announced by a title that sails across the screen like a 1930s movie marquee), Kentridge dips into everything from Greek mythology to the civic planning of 19th century Paris.
Time is the general rubric, and Kentridge connects it with easy mastery to astrophysics, art, remorse, politics and death. He discusses how the invention of photography made time stand still, and how moving pictures then made it possible to conceive of time running backwards.
He relates the problem of standardizing time across large geographical distances to the legacy of European colonialism. A riff on Einstein’s thought experiments concerning space-traveling identical twins is accompanied by a witty film clip featuring Kentridge in both roles, which in turn echoes the Marx Brothers’ famous mirror scene from “Duck Soup.”
For new music aficionados, this scene and others are apt to bring to mind “Einstein on the Beach,” Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s classic 1976 exploration of similar subjects. In fact “Refuse the Hour,” whether wittingly or not, comes off like a comic pendant to that vast and somber masterpiece.
Just as the ancient Athenians would append a short, irreverent satyr play to their tragic theatrical trilogies — coming at similar subjects but in a spirit of earthy, often sexual frankness — “Refuse the Hour” leavens the Einsteinian paradoxes of time and space with humor and a celebration of sheer, simple pleasure.
It’s an invitation that’s impossible to refuse.