“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” South African artist William Kentridge chants, pacing across a stage lined with silver megaphones and wooden contraptions rigged with bicycle wheels and pistons of his own design. As he continues this studio patter, a conga line forms behind him: It includes a mischievous dancer with a shaven head, a woman sporting a severe black bob and blue eye shadow, and a commandeering opera singer. These are just a few of the motley cast of characters appearing in “Refuse the Hour,” making its United States premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through Sunday. Billed as a “chamber opera” and “lecture-performance,” the work expands the cold and dry facts of the 19th history into an unruly, absurdist parade of loose historical interpretation.As in Kentridge’s 2013 five-channel video installation “The Refusal of Time,” originally shown at Documenta 13 and later at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard historian Peter Galison helped to shape Kentridge’s vision. Both share an interest in a period before digital technology and compressed information, when “very abstract things worked out in the material world,” as Galison has said. That attraction to the past plays out in the short lectures interspersed through the production, in which Kentridge considers the speed of light, relativity, the standardization of time, and colonial powers. Imagine space as an archive of images, he says in one lecture, riffing on the 19th-century German scientist Felix Eberty. In this paradigm, Kentridge muses, if you looked 2000 light years away, you could see Pontius Pilate washing his hands.More than rigorous historian, Kentridge is the tipsy professor after office-hours, conflating historical fact with fabulation and personal narrative. His lyrical lectures indeed are at their best when he strikes upon intimate observations, rather than reaching for abstract profundity and scientific plangency. He recalls, to poignant effect, the “utopian perfection” of rewinding film of his son throwing paint and pencils at his studio wall (In reverse, the son expertly catches the dispersed objects). In another personal moment, he remembers himself as an eight-year-old regretting the fate of Perseus, who in the Greek myth killed his grandfather in a discus competition. The young Kentridge wished only to call back the disc.But in the end, the artist is the least interesting part of the performance. Take the duet between opera singer Ann Masina, whose soaring libretto is fractured by the modernist clicks and blips — almost like an underwater sonic device — sung by the vocalist Joanna Dudley. In another episode, the cast erupts into a wild confrontation with the accelerating tempo of metronomes projected on the back of the stage, swaying against and shouting at the devices through megaphones. The principle dancer Dada Masilo unhinges her hips and moves with manic agitation to the contrapuntal rhythm of the brass-heavy band.Just by its title, “Refuse the Hour” sounds like it should stake out similar artistic territory to that of the avant-garde, who reject the aloof stance of the bourgeoisie. But here, with the Constructivist style of the stage props and dress, the revolutionary is merely aestheticized. The show offers us a creative maelstrom more than a coherent ethical or epistemological position. In this metaphysical variety hour, we never fully leave Kentridge’s fanciful studio ruminations.
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