Last night’s performance reminded me of being a kid and hearing my parents talk, knowing it was about something important, but not able to quite understand what or why. Everything in the 4+ hours was clearly deliberate–all the choreography, stage effects, everything. Usually when we see a large group of people being very deliberate about what they do, it means something important, but, last night, what did it all mean? It took a while to get to sleep last night, as it was all still in my head; I think my brain was trying to sort through everything I had seen and make sense of it. Even though it seemed like so many things were abstract, and hard to define, I felt like I was able to connect with the performance, partially since I knew the why there were so many trains and clocks (if you don’t, go read Einstein’s book on his theory of special relativity), and also because I could see, in this opera without a plot, an overall exploration into different ways we perceive time, you know, how sometimes it seems like your watch stops and time pauses in space, and other times it merely seems to slow down, and the rest of the time we don’t really notice it at all. It seemed to me that the opera was largely about exploration into space and time. I still want to ask “what does it all mean?” but maybe that’s not the right question. If it was meant to be a story, it would have had a plot. It didn’t. It was more like a poem, a poem that’s not about rhyme and meter but about the sound of the words, only not just about the sound of the words, but the effect of choreography and colors of music. This means that some people will likely find it inaccessible, but for me, it was understandable enough to appreciate, and I wish I had a ticket to go see it again tonight. Thank you UMS for helping to bring “Einstein on the Beach” to Ann Arbor.

I was very impressed by all the performers. They all kept the work going. I could see that every detail was planned out. If you watched around you could see that everybody of the persons on stage was doing something to keep my attention. The scenes to which I probably played the most attention was the scene about the “Prematurly air-conditioned supermarket”. The words “the beach” finally hypnotized me to some extent. And then the image of the atomic bomb was also kind of fascinating to watch. I keep thinking about the couple in the last scene: for me they could be the last survivors of a nuclear war. But I also must admit that I sometimes thought that it is too long. Sometimes I expected that we move on to the next scene and then the music started again over and over again. So I needed definately my breaks. It was not a surprise to me that I saw people to fall asleep. All in all it was an interesting experience. For me at had the taste of a drug trip. Something you can do sometimes but not too often.