Ryuichi Sakamoto is one prolific ghost. A year after his death, new work by the musician is still arriving in Japan.
“Time,” which Sakamoto co-created with artist Shiro Takatani, premiered in Japan on March 28 at the New National Theatre, Tokyo. The mixed-genre performance, conceived by the pair, incorporates sound by Sakamoto and visual designs by Takatani, who also leads Kyoto-based art collective Dumb Type. “Time” had its world premiere in 2021 at the Holland Festival, the Netherlands’ largest performing arts festival.
The piece follows on the first collaboration between Sakamoto and Takatani, “Life a ryuichi sakamoto opera 1999,” a performance that combined film and projected visuals with a live orchestra and occasional singers, conducted by Sakamoto.
Though “Time” was originally marketed as a “wordless opera,” Sakamoto later dropped the descriptor for the more sober “theater piece.” Though it’s not strictly speaking devoid of any words, none are sung by its performers. Dancer Min Tanaka stars, with additional scenes featuring dancer Rin Ishihara. Shō musician Mayumi Miyata opens and closes the 70-minute piece.
Intended to depict a struggle between man and nature, the narrative loosely weaves together three texts: “Dream #1” from Natsume Soseki’s collection “Ten Nights of Dreams”; noh play “Kantan,” adapted from “The World Inside a Pillow,” a Tang dynasty (618-907) story by Shen Jiji; and “The Butterfly Dream,” from the writings of Zhuangzi, one of the foundational texts of Taoism.
The three stories are spliced together episodically so that the narrative returns again and again, creating — not to put too fine a point on it — a dreamlike impression. Much of the action happens on a stage filled with a shallow amount of water (the actors were not quite ankle-deep in it), representing an element of nature that Tanaka attempts several times to cross by creating a dirt path by hand. With his slow and bewildered movements, the dancer depicts a man stumbling across the horrors both of nature and his own nightmares.
Tanaka reads from the texts in a pre-recorded voiceover. English translations drip onto a screen in the background, mimicking rain, rippling and dissolving somewhat illegibly, like poorly chosen text animation in a PowerPoint. The screen is not only a repository for subtitles; it also provides the visuals designed by Takatani. Trees, water, other figures, aerial shots of the Earth swirl behind the actors, and live projection of the action is also impressively layered in. Unfortunately, the film often bears resemblance to a stock image screensaver or the movie trailer for a climate change documentary, which distracts more than it adds to the music and Tanaka’s performance. What might have been cutting edge in multimedia projection 25 years ago looks outdated today.
This is a shame because there are a few moments when the film syncs with the narrative to a laser point, amping up the drama considerably. The climax is truly thrilling, an explosion of activity from the screen combined with live rainfall, which overpowers Tanaka’s small human form. From there, Miyata crosses the stage-pond for a second time, playing the shō, which fades into Sakamoto’s stirring ambient sounds of jangling, clinking and reverberations from a sound bowl, before the audience is brought back to reality.
Sakamoto died on March 28, 2023, at the age of 71. He was known in his lifetime as an unorthodox figure who nimbly crossed genres, making his mark as a member of the pioneering act Yellow Magic Orchestra, as a film composer and as a solo act.
The first year after his death has seen a swell of releases and events tied to the artist, a testament to Sakamoto’s collaborative and wide-ranging nature (and viewed cynically, perhaps an attempt by other parties to cash in on the media hype.) Two exhibitions, one late last year and one upcoming in December, are dedicated solely to his work, and two art festivals, one in Kyoto and one in Yokohama, have also included the late musician as a headlining artist. Following his death, director Hirokazu Kore-eda dedicated “Monster,” which premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, to Sakamoto, whose final score features in the film.
More than a purely “Ryuichi Sakamoto” sound experience, “Time” is a true collaboration and a visual and aural blur. It’s exciting that the performance should come to Japan, where the play’s conceptual roots in noh may be more acutely appreciated than abroad. (There were most likely elements lost on this reviewer, for example.) Still, it shouldn’t be the last note Sakamoto is remembered by. And judging by the number of works he was involved in even up until his passing, this seems unlikely.
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