This weekend, artist-filmmaker-stage designer-provocateur William Kentridge brings his chamber opera REFUSE THE HOUR to Royce Hall for two performances.

Both a five-channel video installation for Documenta 2012, and a live music piece for the Festival d’Avignon that same year, REFUSE THE HOUR—narrated by Kentridge and composed by his longtime collaborator Philip Miller—begins with the myth of Perseus and ends with the discoveries of Albert Einstein. Indeed, REFUSE THE HOUR, “wittingly or not, comes off like a comic pendant to [the] vast and somber masterpiece” Einstein on the Beach.*

With choreography by dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo, video design by Catherine Meyburgh, and dramaturgy by science historian and physicist Peter Galison, REFUSE THE HOUR takes its audience “on an elliptical journey to the outer edges of science, theater and art that is both playful and profound.”**

 

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE—REFUSE THE HOUR, Friday and Saturday, November 17 and 18, at 8 pm.

ROYCE HALL, 10745 Dickson Court, UCLA.

**cap.ucla.edu/calendar/details/refuse_the_hour

*sfchronicle.com/music/article/Exuberant-Refuse-the-Hour-celebrates-time

Dancer–choreographer Dada Masilo in Refuse the Hour, a chamber opera by William Kentridge and Philip Miller.

Photograph by John Hodgkiss. Image credit: Brooklyn Academy of Music.