A.M.

The Breathing of Tokyo
Composer and director Arnoud Noordegraaf on A.M.
An interview by Joep Stapel

Tokyo itself is one of the leading characters in A.M., the multimedia production by composer and director Arnoud Noordegraaf, a new version of which is premiering at the Holland Festival. For an entire night, we follow a boy and a girl on their ramblings through the city, searching for each other and for themselves. The music is a variegated collage of tone colours, city sounds, snatches of jazz and muzak, and in the midst of all this, the crystal-clear soprano of Mikae Natsuyama. Tokyo crackles, rustles and coos in this sensory reflection on identity and individuality.

JS: An earlier version of A.M. premiered in 2010 during November Music. To what extent is this a new composition?

AN: ‘Although the title has remained the same, for me it really feels like the premiere of a new work. When the Holland Festival asked me to make a new version of A.M., I was immediately enthusiastic, particularly because they guaranteed a live ensemble. Much of the film footage from the old version is also used in this new version, but I completely reworked the dramaturgy from scratch, together with the librettist, and then I set to work writing new music for everything.’

JS: Where did the first idea for A.M. come from?

AN: ‘I had already been toying with the idea of doing something with the work of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. You might say there is a certain stylistic affinity: depicting a situation very realistically while letting surrealistic elements shine through – that’s what I like to do, too. In 2009, I took a couple of Murakami’s books with me and went to Tokyo, where I wandered around for a week. I very soon got the feeling that the city itself is a kind of organism, which despite the enormous amount of people exudes a certain relaxation. You begin to feel you’re only a particle in a whole, one of the blood cells streaming through the veins of a gigantic being. At night the city is at rest, to be sure, but it continues to breathe. So I got the idea that Tokyo itself had to be one of the main characters in the performance. Murakami’s books soon disappeared from my satchel, because I began to soak up the influences that formed his work. Suddenly I could clearly see where Murakami’s atmosphere of everyday absurdity comes from, and I think that the scenarist and librettist Adrian Hornsby was very successful in capturing that ambience.’

JS: What is the story of A.M.?

AN: ‘The piece takes place during one night in Tokyo. That is the first meaning of the title, the nocturnal side of the clock. Besides that, A.M. refers to the first-person singular form of the verb ‘to be’. The structure of the play is determined by the encounter between a boy and a girl, who each then go their own way. The boy makes night-time recordings of the vending machines that are found everywhere on the streets in Tokyo, in accordance with his theory that all of the sounds of the city are captured within them. During the day there is too much noise for this. The girl wants to find out whether she is independent enough to spend a night rambling about the city on her own. Like Murakami, the two are searching for the form of their individuality, and for them this is a quest, almost a fight. The Japanese culture is strongly focused on the group, not on the individual. In our part of the world, it’s sooner the opposite: we are used to total individuality, and feel almost inconvenienced if we have to deal with a group feeling. That difference is something which intrigued me immensely, and by showing the tension between the group and the individual in Japan, we hold up a kind of reverse mirror to the Western spectator. Only at the end of the night and do the boy and the girl meet one another again, each of them an important experience the richer – and a part of that experience is that they have a bond with one another.’

JS: The images of people in night-time Tokyo are sometimes almost voyeuristic – and absurd, like the businessmen sleeping on the street. How did you film them?

AN: ‘We had a big video camera for the scenes with the actors, but on the street we took a lot of footage with digital single-lens reflex cameras. They are quick and flexible to use, and what’s more, don’t attract attention. Filming on the street in Tokyo is almost impossible; actually you have to block off the whole street and ask everyone who walks by for their permission. In the case of those sleeping businessmen, that was impossible anyway, of course. You see them everywhere; on Friday nights they go drinking with their boss, and the etiquette is that you can only go home after the boss has finished drinking. Evidently that’s often at a time when the last train has already gone, and since only the boss can afford a taxi, these people fall asleep at the station or even collapse totally plastered in the middle of the street. You don’t get robbed, not even when you are sleeping off your hangover and your laptop and your briefcase are lying around on the pavement. In Japan you don’t have that much street crime – again, this has to do with that feeling of collectivism. The Mafia are formidably organized, but you don’t see petty thieves.’

JS: The camera sometimes follows the passersby in such a way that you almost can’t imagine it’s still there – as if it’s the night itself that is looking.

AN: ‘Often the camera was practically invisible: when you have a camera lying on your knees, people don’t expect you to be filming. What’s more, in Japan you are expected to realize that you have to respect the privacy of others, so people assume they’re not being filmed. That’s how the scene in the Starbucks was filmed; for such things, you’re actually supposed to rent the entire place, which turned out to be very difficult, seeing as they are all open 24/7. So we did it guerrilla style, with the camera on the edge of our table, while the actors performed their scene three times over.’

JS: As A.M. progresses, the division between stage and film becomes blurred. What’s the relation between the film images and the live actions?

AN: ‘In all of my work, I look for a combination of film techniques and the possibilities of live music, which appeals to the emotions more directly. That’s also the case in A.M. All of the information about the story of the boy and the girl come from the film images, which are projected on screens that are set up at both sides of the stage, so that the audience continually has to choose where to look. The four live instrumentalists have a very central place, in the middle of the stage. They don’t have a specific theatrical role, but are a very obvious presence. The soprano, Mikae Natsuyama, can be part of the ensemble – there are five places – but she can also step out of the group and explore the rest of the space. And indeed, this, too, is an image of the individual who is questioning her place in the collective.

The soprano has an ambivalent role in the piece. The audience forms two walls of the space in which she is caught, making it subtly complicit in her confinement. Gradually it becomes clear that she not only has a musical role, but is also a crucial part of the story: she is the one who connects the two main characters and tries to bring them together. She is a cross between the chorus in a Greek tragedy, which comments on the action, and a kind of angel of the night, who tries to effectuate something within that story. In doing so, she constantly looks back, and ahead to the apotheosis of A.M.: the moment in which you decide who you are, where you stand.’

interview by Joep Stapel for the Holland Festival catalogue

© Holland Festival / Joep Stapel 2011

A.M. on the Holland Festival site