A.M. is a feature length music theatre performance for speaking voice, soprano, five instruments prerecorded on sound tracks and a large video installation.
A.M. is conceived by composer and director Arnoud Noordegraaf, it explores the deep, mysterious and somewhat exotic heart of Tokyo city night life.
Inspired by the writings of much appraised best selling author Haruki Murakami, Noordegraaf dove deep into the city of Tokyo, to find the heart of this immense and dense city.
A.M. spans one night in Tokyo, in the ghostly hours between dusk and dawn. Different storylines of people wandering the streets for various reasons, run parallel in a narrative style that is both hypnotizing and metaphysical. Time, space, memory and perspective are cleverly woven together in a contemplation on human nature.
The dense way this city is built, and the tight social and cultural structure of it's inhabitants, make Tokyo into a great metaphor for society, be it in the East or the West. This giant ant hill represents in a way all ways in which we flock together and try to cope with one another.
Apart from Tokyo itself, Murakami’s writings form a great inspiration for this theme. His combination of humour, psychology, moral and a profound understanding of the human mind, are translated by Noordegraaf in a multi disciplinary work. Combining music, text and video, he rolls them into one within his composition.
This will result in a performance that is both theatre and sculpture, where décor and auditorium have merged, in a setting of tiny loudspeakers, a baroque soprano and over a hundred bare-boned TV monitors.
