‘Otemba’ about two ‘indomitable women’ is intensely charged, but also lovely and vulnerable music theater

If it is already difficult to understand people of a different generation, while you share the same language and culture, how can you ever penetrate the thinking and feeling world of people from the past, through all those layers who has put the time in between? In the music theater performance Otemba – Daring Womenwho went to the Holland Festival in World Première on Thursday evening, two women make an attempt: the seventeenth-century Cornelia van Nijenrode and the 21st-century Kirana Diah.

That is by no means simple, it soon becomes clear when Cornelia in one Night at the Museum-Sty -like scene from the list of her family portrait steps into the Rijksmuseum, where restorer Kirana is waiting for a faltering scanning robot to uncover the hidden layers of Cornelia’s painting. The half-Dutch, half-Japanese Cornelia-an ultra-rich VOC widow in Batavia that fights for her self-determination-sees Kirana from her slaved servants from Jakarta. This to the horror of Kirana, who, with her restoration, wants to do justice to one of those slaves who are also on the painting: Surapati, the later Indonesian freedom fighter. As Cornelia shares her life story, the parallels between the two women become visible. Both miss their mother and native country, feel displaced in the Rijksmuseum and fight for something in which they believe: in Japanese the loan word refers otemba to ‘indomitable women’.

Impressive range of emotions

A rattling harp, blown whistle vibrations, the watery enclosures of the Aquaphone: the music of the Japanese composer Misato Mochizuki (1969) is now floating between East and West, present and past, reality and intermediate world. Percussion and flute-the instruments of the age-old Japanese no-theater-are the core, supplemented with clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello and harp. They occasionally join the percussion: Felicia van den End, for example, sometimes taps on the hair while blowing and Ryan Linham sputtering rhythmic air sounds through his trumpet. Every now and then the percussion is brightly bursting, but always a hopeful, melodic motif returns that Kirana and Cornelia connect. In this way the show also rocks musically between incomprehension and recognition.

Zoom in

The two singers anchor the show with their charged stage presence. Ryoko Aoki (Cornelia) knows how to convey an impressive range of emotions with a mask-like face and within the contours of her Japanese no-recitation in the lowest regions of her voice, from sadness and homesickness to frustration and revenge. Or is that imaginative? After all, in the no-theater there is a major role for the imagination of the public. When Aoki switches to English at the end, her Cornelia seems to defrost. Vulnerable, she even becomes sweet. The Dutch-Indonesian soprano Bernadeta Astari (Kirana), in turn, makes it felt razor-sharp of someone who sees himself reflected in other people’s eyes, and the inconvenience of looking back.

Occasionally, scanning technologist Miro (bariton Michael Wilmering) also interferes with the game. He does not understand Kirana’s band with the painting and Cornelia simply does not see. His bickering with Kirana provides airy moments. But why is Miro constantly talking about AI? Okay, he represents the future and his scan robot occasionally makes himself heard with an all -seeing oracle voice. But he feels too much like a character who has been portrayed with coarse brush strokes, and whose perspective could have been filled in more detailed.

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