Otemba - Daring Women

In her music, Mochizuki connects musical elements from different musical traditions from Japan and the West. With impressionistic, colourful sounds as a guiding principle, a new atmosphere and story emerge. 

The piece explores questions of identity, the impact of our colonial heritage, and shows women who go their own way, right through time, space and social class divisions.

In Otemba – Daring Women, each character sings in a style that fits their time and background. Mochizuki draws from her experience as artist in residence at IRCAM, the acclaimed centre for contemporary music in Paris. The singers inject their own cultural baggage and unique tonal colour: Bernadeta Astari is an Indonesian, classically trained soprano, while Ryoko Aoki combines traditional Japanese Noh recitations (utai) with contemporary music. 

The piece was inspired by the remarkable life story of the woman depicted in the painting: Cornelia van Nijenroode. She was the daughter of the Japanese woman Surishira and Cornelis van Nijenroode, a Dutch merchant in Hirado, the first Dutch East India Company trading post in Japan. At the age of 23, Cornelia married Pieter Cnoll. Four years after Pieter Cnoll died, Cornelia remarried with Joan Bitter, a disastrous decision, as Bitter was mainly interested in Cornelia’s money. The marriage quickly and irreparably deteriorated. Cornelia filed for divorce, which was highly unusual at the time. She went all the way to the Supreme Court to claim her rights in the first Dutch divorce case in which a woman demanded legal capacity over her own assets.     

Notably, the later Indonesian freedom fighter Untung Surapati is depicted on the painting as well. The Republic of Indonesia honoured him as a national hero in 1975, thirty years after the Republika Indonesia was declared.  

SYNOPSIS 

Cornelia van Nijenroode steps out of her frame and her own time to enter the 21st century and a different continent. There, she meets Kirana Diah, the Indonesian restorer working on the painting. Initially, Kirana is interested in the painting mainly because of Untung Surapati. But then Cornelia invites her to a nocturnal conversation on female untamability, how they view themselves and the other, on decolonisation and self-determination. For how do you look beyond the centuries at each other’s cultural reality? It’s a magic moment in the restoration process: a one-time nocturnal encounter that transcends the limits of time and space; between painting and reality, then and now, East and West.   

The encounter results in a confrontation between the characters and their life stories, which are radically different, but also show striking similarities. During the conversation, a ‘scanning robot’ is also present: an artificial intelligence supposed to serve as a neutral data analyst, but which turns out to have an own voice as well.