Perhaps it’s apt that a work inspiring sidelong thoughts about time should have started half an hour late. In fact, the hold-up at the UK premiere of Jennifer Walshe’s Time Time Time owed a little to technical glitches and a lot to the queue slowly filling up the warehouse-like underground space of Ambika P3 – numbers any promoter of contemporary opera would envy. But Time Time Time, a co-commission by the London contemporary music festival and the Serpentine Gallery, is only really an opera in the sense that it’s a big, bold coming-together of elements; it’s more a piece of musical performance art.
The room is in darkness except for a huge video screen at either end, a stage, and four single spotlit musicians, one at each corner of the audience. Centre stage, resplendent in emerald-green sequins, is Walshe herself – composer, co-writer of the text with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and the main narrator and singer in a series of vignettes playing with big ideas. The music doesn’t lead the rest, although sometimes it is more than just accompaniment: in an episode conjuring a primeval forest, the honking, snorting trumpet and saxophone compete and converse with the soundtrack’s jungle creatures. Mostly, though, they and the violin and double bass players provide ambience, improvising within a framework while the focus is elsewhere.
Walshe and MC Schmidt duel and duet in witty, wisecracking spoken musings, in accents floating from English RP to Walshe’s natural Irish to US valley speak. The video keeps returning to a beautiful imagined cross-section of the Earth; in between, it riffs on ideas of time experienced differently – a factory “producing” time; the wait for a pregnancy-test result; dinosaurs as visualised in Victorian models or stop-frame B-movies. Songs from harpist Áine O’Dwyer offer moments of relative stillness.
On the way in, we are all given a tiny fossilised ammonite. Think about what you are holding, is the unspoken directive: something that was breathing several geological ages ago. Nothing in Time Time Time itself manages to induce mental vertigo in the same way, but it’s an entertaining ride.
