Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani: TIME Blu-ray

The “time” that could once be experienced only in the theatre is now preserved on film.

TIME is a work for which Ryuichi Sakamoto composed all the music and developed the concept together with Shiro Takatani of Dumb Type. It follows LIFE a ryuichi sakamoto opera 1999, performed at Nippon Budokan and Osaka-jo Hall in 1999, for which approximately 40,000 tickets sold out immediately.

After around four years of development beginning in 2017, TIME had its world premiere in 2021 at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, one of the world’s largest performing arts festivals, where Sakamoto served as an associate artist. The production received high acclaim in Japan and overseas.

The Japanese premiere took place at New National Theatre Tokyo on March 28, 2024, the first anniversary of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s death.

The audience enters a darkened space filled only with the sound of rain. From that very moment, the experience of the work begins.

Water shimmers like a mirror across the stage, while a screen displays intricately composed images.

Natsume Soseki’s Ten Nights of Dreams, First Night, begins with the words “I had such a dream.” Together with Kantan and The Butterfly Dream, these stories blend with the surrounding text, carrying the theme that runs throughout the work: time.

Through performances by Min Tanaka, Mayumi Miyata on the sho, and Rin Ishihara, sound, installation and visual art emerge in the theatre as overlapping layers of “dreams”, amid the interplay of light and water.

The accompanying reading material brings together Sakamoto’s handwritten production notes, stage photographs and an essay by Tetsuya Ozaki, presented in both Japanese and English.