A video and sound installation created especially for the outdoor patio of M WOODS (People’s Park) on the basis of the theater piece TIME, which premiered at the 2021 Holland Festival. TIME borrowed elements of “Mugen Noh,” a type of Noh theater based on dreams. In this form, Sakamoto further explored the asynchronism introduced on his album titled async and pursued the question, “What is time?” In a dreamscape inspired by Natsume Soseki’s Ten Nights of Dreams, the Noh play Kantan, and Zhuang Zhou’s The Butterfly Dream, different kinds of time intersect—a moment and an eternity, a fleeting sleep and 100 years lived in a dream—and an attempt was made to reexamine the concept and very existence of time. Also depicted is a human being exhausting himself trying to overcome nature’s overwhelming power.
TIME–déluge employs the déluge video appearing in the climax of TIME. Here, déluge stands to represent the awe inspired by nature whose power transcends human understanding—an emotion expressed in flood myths and legends found in all parts of the world. In such tales, civilizations built over centuries are swept away and come to nothing. With the sound of a Noh flute, played by the late Rokurobyoe Fujita the 11th, accompanying a large-screen projection of violently flooding water, filmed by Takatani on a high-speed camera, a dream world transcending time and space unfolds on a patio filled with water, set up like a garden.