![Cal Performances at Home: Beyond the Stage. Artist talks; interviews; lectures; Q&A sessions with artists, Cal Performances staff, and UC Berkeley faculty; and more! Cal Performances at Home: Beyond the Stage. Artist talks; interviews; lectures; Q&A sessions with artists, Cal Performances staff, and UC Berkeley faculty; and more!](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/beyond-the-screen_web-header_1920x900.jpg)
Cal Performances at Home is much more than a series of great streamed performances. Fascinating behind-the-scenes artist interviews. Informative and entertaining public forums. The Cal Performances Reading Room, featuring books with interesting connections to our Fall 2020 programs. For all this and much more, keep checking this page for frequent updates and to journey far, far Beyond the Stage!
Major support for Beyond the Stage is provided by Bank of America.
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Beyond the Stage
Seeing Double: Danish String Quartet’s Doppelganger Project
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Seeing Double: Danish String Quartet’s Doppelganger Project
Doppelgänger project, an initiative that combines late chamber masterpieces with new commissions by four contemporary composers.
Mir graust es, wenn ich sein Antlitz sehe—
Der Mond zeigt mir meine eigne Gestalt
(It horrifies me when I see his face
The moon reveals my own likeness)
Chillingly, these words from Franz Schubert’s song “Der Doppelgänger,” taken from Heinrich Heine’s 1827 Buch der Lieder, depict an uncanny moment of recognition. Franz Schubert set this text to music in 1828—shortly before his death—as part of a collection that was published posthumously under the title Schwanengesang (“Swan Song”). Jeremy Geffen, executive and artistic director of Cal Performances, likens the song to “a Twilight Zone episode in four minutes.”
Heine himself left this poem untitled to intensify the degree of shock and surprise when the narrator realizes he is seeing his Doppelgänger, whereas Schubert clues us in to the troubled emotional atmosphere with the ominous chord sequence heard at the outset. Here, already, is a phase in the process of responding and remaking a source that we might call “doppelgänging,” in the spirit of the Danish String Quartet’s (DSQ) ambitious Doppelgänger Project, an initiative that reconsiders four of Schubert’s greatest chamber music compositions in the context of newly commissioned works, each given a program of its own.
The fuzziness around the German word Doppelgänger is intentional. On the one hand, the word is used simply to refer to a harmless lookalike (a person who can even be sought out online via image recognition apps or who can be conjured via rapidly evolving AI technology). But the mythic implications of this phenomenon reach deep into the psyche, providing an obsessive trope for the Romantics. (The novelist Jean Paul, a favorite of Mahler, has been credited with coining the term.).
The notion of deceptively identical appearances that can disguise polarities opens up yet another dimension embedded within the concept. One of Schubert’s own friends described the composer as having “a double nature—inwardly a kind of poet and outwardly a kind of hedonist.”
“I think everybody has an idea of what a Doppelgänger is,” says DSQ violist Asbjørn Nørgaard. “It can be a very mystical term filled with images and history and philosophy, but it’s also something that is a very physical thing.” Similarly, in the process of commissioning the four composers, the DSQ wanted to give ample leeway to each to interpret for themselves how to respond or react to the Schubert work with which they have been paired. “We only created the framework. They might choose to quote the Schubert piece or they might write something completely different. We didn’t know beforehand how they would respond to the challenge.”
Indeed, the responses have so far been remarkably varied in strategy and character. The DSQ launched their cycle in the fall of 2021 with a contribution by the Danish composer Bent Sørensen (born in 1958), in whose Schubertian title, Doppelgänger, they found a name for the entire project. Sørensen deliberately incorporated Doppelgänger-like gestures into his score—a product of the pandemic lockdowns—in response to Schubert’s vast final work in the genre, the String Quartet in G major of 1826 (D. 887).
Pige, by the Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski (born in 1970 and a former student of Kaija Saariaho and the late Louis Andriessen), entailed an even more overt reaction to its counterpart: Schubert’s best-known quartet, Death and the Maiden (D. 810, from 1824). The Danish word pige is an equivalent to Mädchen or “maiden” and suggests the new perspective Wennäkoski brings to her piece. Referring to the dialogue between Death and the young girl in the song from which Schubert drew for the slow movement of his D minor Quartet, she explains: “I wanted to include the young girls’s song in my piece, whereas Schubert uses only Death’s song.”
In April 2023, the DSQ continues the reverse-chronological sequence of late Schubert quartets with a program combining the A minor Quartet, D. 804 (Rosamunde), written earlier in 1824, with Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s intriguing new work Rituals. The Icelandic composer’s response to the DSQ’s commission represents the opposite end of the spectrum: instead of reacting to or commenting on the Schubert, Thorvaldsdottir opted for no explicit engagement at all, adapting her unique sonic language and use of atmosphere to the string quartet medium. Yet whether by coincidence or as still another manifestation of the uncanny tendency for Doppelgängers to appear where you least expect them, her use of repetition in shifting contexts suggests a resemblance with what Nørgaard calls “the ritualistic repetition of gestures” in the Rosamunde Quartet.
The fourth and final commissioned work, to be unveiled next season, is a string quintet by Thomas Adès, which will be twinned with Schubert’s String Quintet in C major, D. 956, from his final year. Why the geographical shift from the other three Nordic Sea composers? Nørgaard explains that Adès has a strong affinity for the music of this region, as the DSQ showed on their 2016 album Adès, Nørgård & Abrahamsen.
“On one side, we wanted composers we like to work with, who have a musical language that we like,” says Nørgaard, describing their criteria for choosing the Doppelgänger Project composers. “But we also wanted something new, something different.” In this way, the DSQ, who have burnished their reputation as excitingly fresh and insightful interpreters of the classical canon, have been opening up new horizons.
Assessing reactions midway through the project, Nørgaard singles out how Wennäkoski’s Pige was “very elegantly connected to Death and the Maiden in its commentary on gender roles—so that the performance of that piece became a comment on the very industry where the performance took place. It’s exciting to be able to make classical chamber music relevant by putting Schubert in a context so that the concerts become an open discussion—not just about the music but about the historical impact and cultural debates going on today.”
The Doppelgänger Project, according to Jeremy Geffen, resonates with the Cal Performances mission: “It is incumbent on any arts organization to move the repertoire forward, to create those works that in 50 years will be considered canonical. So this project very much aligns with Cal Performances, which has a history of taking risks in supporting new work. I appreciate so much the curiosity of our audience, as well as the fact that the DSQ are using their platform to lift up contemporary composers.”
Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator. Along with essays regularly commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, the Juilliard School, and other leading institutions, he contributes to the New York Times and Musical America and blogs about the arts at www.memeteria.com.
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Apr 14, 2023
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Bob Dixon on the Impact of Being a Volunteer Usher
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Bob Dixon on the Impact of Being a Volunteer Usher
“The arts are everywhere. We have to be able to see them, or hear them, or sense them… but we don’t do it unless we’re introduced.”
Interview of Bob Dixon. Video filming and editing by Tiffany Valvo, Cal Performances’ Social Media and Digital Content Specialist.
The vast array of performances and educational and community programs Cal Performances offers to our Bay Area community would not be possible without the dedication of roughly 200 volunteers who generously give their time and talents to support the live performing arts. To spotlight the pivotal role these volunteers play—and the passion that drives them—we sat down with Bob Dixon, who has served as a volunteer usher for nearly 30 years! Bob was described by Cal Performances’ current Volunteer Services Coordinator, Aidan Crochetiere, as “one of our most proactive and knowledgeable volunteer ushers” and an “invaluable resource,” particularly as so many processes were tested and changed during the pandemic. On behalf of all of Cal Performances, we want to offer a big thank-you to Bob and all of our volunteer ushers for the central role they play in creating and maintaining our Cal Performances community.
Transcript
My name’s Bob Dixon and I’m an usher at Cal Performances. And I’ve been an usher here since winter of 1994. I joined the volunteer program shortly after seeing Mark Morris’ Allegro. It just blew me away. And, I came to something else a week later and one of the ushers who I knew from where I worked—I was the director at the YMCA before I retired—she said, “Why don’t you volunteer?” And so I said, “Well, how do you do that?” She said, “Call this number.” And that’s all you had to do in 1994 was call in and there was an announcement about what shows were available.
Well, I think there were about 600 ushers, 700 ushers at that time, so there wasn’t much available. So I started with the SchoolTime and I fell in love with SchoolTimes. There’s something about the madness of bringing 1,800 children from almost preschool age to high school and getting them into a theater, and lights go down and there is this cheer that goes up, because they’re seeing something maybe for the first time, second time, something they don’t know what they’re gonna experience. But how they did it and how they enjoyed it, and just that sound was enough to make me sign up for more SchoolTimes.
What do you enjoy about volunteering at Cal Performances?
I think one of the joys here is the audience. One of the things I try to do as a volunteer is recognize the audience members, so there’s a number of people that come that I know by name. I’m told—I can’t prove this—that if I’m not here, people will come asking where I am. It’s rewarding that way. But to know that people are seeing what they want to see, they’re comfortable, they know if there’s changes in the house. It’s special.
And also you make friends. As I age, it’s very important to keep up social interactions. And the ushers here who’ve been here for a while and the ones who are now coming in, will find those same interactions where we check in on one another: “How are you doing?” “Where is so-and-so?” “I haven’t seen so-and-so in a while.” “Well I called her and she’s decided to do this.”
And the staff is so supportive of the volunteers. Not every place is, because they look at the volunteers as, well, “You’re here, you’re getting to see a show.” But here, there’s a real sense of, “How are they doing? Is there a reward for it in the sense of how it’s working for them?” And there’s feedback and there there’s a lot—an ability to go up and mention what’s right, what’s wrong, or make suggestions. So that’s what I’ve been doing for what, almost three decades.
What is special about volunteering on a university campus?
This is unique. And I don’t think people understand it until they’re part of it. The program, yes, is
part of Cal Performances, it’s managed by Cal Performances management, but it’s actually under the direction of people who were students and many are still students. And as an usher, I report to a student. That’s who’s going to tell me where I will work tonight and what I’m expected to do and who will check in on me.
As an usher who could be a grandparent or a great grandparent to one of these students, you sort of see them come in—I’ll speak for myself—but I see them come in and they’re a little nervous about having eight of their uncles, aunts, grandparents, and having to tell them what to do. And so the first few months, you sort of notice that. And by the end of the year, they’ve got it down. After two years, they’re managing 1,800 people coming in here, or maybe The Greek with 4,000 or 5,000, perfectly competent, and you just see the students grow. And I think that’s the reward, that’s a reward you get that you don’t get at other places for their volunteers.
What do you think is the value of the performing arts for audiences?
I think it’s something that takes them out of themselves and see there’s something to the imagination and to the way we breathe. That the arts are everywhere; we have to be able to see them or hear them or sense them, and, it’s up to us to do that, but we don’t do it unless we’re introduced to it.
So in a way, I wasn’t introduced to much except theater until college. That’s when I saw my first opera, that’s when I went to my first symphony… And that’s why the earlier we can do it, the better it is. But also the programs Cal’s got here for the students, the rush tickets and that sort of thing.
It’s there, it’s part of the pattern of my life to see this and hope more people do. And, the student ushers learn much. They’re my boss, the students who are our bosses here for the volunteers, they’re learning about the arts, too. Some are way into it. They’re getting masters’ degrees or doctorates, but some have never been to a performance. And so they go, “What should we see?” And every volunteer probably has a different answer for that one.
William Kentridge’s SIBYL: The Reassurance of Uncertainty
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William Kentridge’s SIBYL: The Reassurance of Uncertainty
Ambiguity and the algorithm as played out in SIBYL.
By Thomas May, Cal Performances-commissioned writer, critic, educator, and translator.
“There will be no epiphany.” “Wait again for better gods.” “You will be dreamt by a jackal.” “Heaven is talking in a foreign tongue.”
The oracular messages that course through SIBYL, the most recent performance work by the towering South African artist William Kentridge, tease with tantalizing ambiguity. They seem to wryly provoke an irresistible urge to twist whatever information is at hand into interpretations best suited to our desires.
That’s a primordial human instinct, of course: indeed, the ancient Greek myths involving oracles—an integral part of Kentridge’s familiar network of imagery—underscore the irony of playing into the hands of fate at the very moment we’re most convinced that our ingenuity has allowed us to elude it. But this behavior has newfound resonance during an era of curated data and populism-stoked skepticism toward voices of authority in science and the humanities alike.
The art of William Kentridge illuminates such fundamental impulses in a way that seems simultaneously timeless and trenchantly of the moment. His campus-wide Berkeley residency, which is taking place throughout the current academic year, is anchored around the US premiere of SIBYL (March 17–19, Zellerbach Hall). Cal Performances is presenting the work as one of the highlights of this season’s Illuminations programming on the theme “Human and Machine.”
“There are very few artists who excel in so many areas simultaneously,” according to Jeremy Geffen, executive and artistic director of Cal Performances. Referring to his protean accomplishments in drawing, printing, sculpture, film, and live music and theater performance, Geffen says that the internationally renowned Kentridge is “the perfect artist for a university”—and, in particular, for a campus-wide residency intended to appeal to students and educators across a wide spectrum of disciplines.
Complementing the March performances of SIBYL, Cal Performances is collaborating with the UC Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and the Townsend Center for the Humanities to highlight various facets of Kentridge’s wide-ranging work and further enrich campus-wide discussions around the “Human and Machine” theme. Employing the lecture format—another medium Kentridge approaches as a mode of artistic expression—last November, the artist presented To What End, an illustrated talk tracing the development of SIBYL. One week before the SIBYL premiere, on March 10, Kentridge will offer a live performance (joined by surprise guest artists) of the seminal Dadaist “sound poem” Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters. Then, on March 15, soprano Joanna Dudley will perform A Guided Tour of the Exhibition: For Soprano and Handbag, the one-woman absurdist play she developed with Kentridge as a protest against the “museification” of art works. And closing out the residency is a BAMPFA retrospective in March and April of Kentridge’s remarkable work as a filmmaker, where his use of animation has been especially innovative. [Related events added since the creation of this article include BAMPFA presenting Out of Africa: Selections from the Kramlich Collection, running March 8 through April 30; an Arts + Design Thursdays presentation of William Kentridge and Judith Butler: Video Art and Social Intervention: Forms of Life, March 16; and the Townsend Center for the Humanities presenting a UC Berkeley faculty and scholar panel entitled Reflections on William Kentridge, April 13.]
SIBYL, the centerpiece of the residency, is uniquely relevant to the “Human and Machine” theme. Whether the topic is data science, artificial intelligence, or the various geological sciences, “predicting the future is a subject of intense research at UC Berkeley,” says Greg Niemeyer, Professor of Media Innovation, who describes himself as a “data artist” and is also a member of the design committee for the Illuminations: “Human and Machine” programming.
“Think about the challenges of climate change,” Niemeyer continues. “We realize that we have to adapt, but we don’t know how. And so we look to science for ideas, but we also need to look to the humanities to figure out how we as humans can cope with the experience of change. And it is exactly this human experience that is at the center of William Kentridge’s production. It gives us a chance to reflect on how we as human beings, as individuals, relate to the major changes we’re facing.”
Illuminating Interactions between the Human and the Machine
In September 2019, Geffen attended the world premiere of Waiting for the Sibyl, the culminating second part of SIBYL, at Teatro dell’Opera di Roma. He determined on the spot to bring the project to Berkeley. “It’s at once compelling, profound, and funny, and in a sort of Shakespearean way is able to appeal as an entertainment on multiple levels simultaneously.”
Geffen moreover sensed a special relevance for Cal Performances’ spotlight on the interface between human and machine. SIBYL plays with the idea of the algorithm as the modern, technological counterpart to the ancient oracles and their messages for humanity. Kentridge’s work transforms the ancient myth that underlies its fragmentary narrative into “a metaphor for human interaction with technology—its expressive possibilities, but also the risks that come with those potential rewards.”
Likewise germane to questions about the interaction between humanity and the machine are Kentridge’s formal and technical methods. They privilege “old-fashioned” figurative content and analog processes over abstraction and digital sleight-of-hand. The pattern of drawing followed by erasure followed by further drawing that is a signature of his animated films, for example—including those shown in SIBYL—make the physical labor involved in creating the art visible, emphasizing a “handmade” quality that “carries the human imprint,” as Geffen points out. A characteristically Kentridgian paradox is that he uses technology to create these entities while seeming to disguise it—while at the same time encouraging viewers to question that technology.
The result is an overriding sense of ambivalence and uncertainty that not only stimulates critical thinking but fully engages the imagination. There is no predictable formula (the essence of the algorithm), no technological wizard-behind-the-curtain to explain how Kentridge produces his art—along with its unique mixture of intuition, poetic collage, and incisive political critique.
Intimations of the Sibyl
The process behind the creation of SIBYL epitomizes how so many disparate elements converge in Kentridge’s artistic practice. His early-career experiences in Apartheid-era Johannesburg, where he was born in 1955, revolved around activities in the theater (as an actor, director, and designer) and the studio (experimenting with multimedia, including drawing and charcoal and pastel prints as well as producing protest posters). This background naturally led Kentridge to incorporate the ultimate interdisciplinary genre—opera—into his prolific oeuvre. Over the past two decades, he has presided over stagings of repertoire such as Mozart’s The Magic Flute and the two operas of Alban Berg (Wozzeck and Lulu), as well as rarities like Dmitri Shostakovich’s early opera The Nose—in Kentridge’s treatment, a mordantly absurdist satire of totalitarianism.
While Kentridge was residing in Rome in 2017 to direct a production of Lulu at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, the company commissioned him to create a “companion piece” for its 50th-anniversary revival of Work in Progress, a short but potently modernist theatrical production by the American artist Alexander Calder that premiered in Rome in 1968. It combines balletic cyclists with his signature mobiles, all accompanied by a soundtrack of avant-garde electronic music by a trio of Italian composers.
Kentridge characteristically drew together several interrelated threads as he conceived Waiting for the Sibyl, his contribution to the double bill—much as Calder had done in Work in Progress, a kind of live performance testament to his aesthetic. Calder’s rotating mobiles reminded Kentridge of a series of sculptures he had created for Venice’s La Fenice to visualize the process of an orchestra tuning before a performance. As the sculptures turn about, the seemingly random pieces suddenly cohere into a recognizable (musical) image—but only for an instant. “So you have a chaos, and then a moment of coherence, and then further chaos,” Kentridge explains. That pattern—the transitory alignment of fragments into a moment of clarifying recognition that fades back into the surrounding ambiguity—is a central idea in SIBYL. Something about that moment seems to echo the “Eureka!” phase of the scientific method, which by nature cannot remain fixed knowledge.
For the Bargello National Museum in Florence, meanwhile, he had created a series of films with music by frequent collaborator Philip Miller to create a song cycle. Kentridge’s recollection of one of the songs, titled “Waiting for the Sibyl,” prompted him to think of the symbolic resonance of this ancient prophetess. The Sibyl has several manifestations as a priestess of Apollo, an oracular voice of knowledge from beyond the mortal realm. The most famous is the Sibyl at Cumae near Naples, the legendary passageway where Aeneas begins his journey to the Underworld to learn what his (and Rome’s) fate has in store. The prophetess also makes an appearance at a crucial moment in Dante’s Paradiso.
Kentridge’s imagination was specifically sparked by the Sibyl’s odd modus operandi: she would write her prophecies on oak leaves and leave them to be retrieved at the mouth of her cave at Cumae, where the winds would arbitrarily blow them about. This image of the swirling leaves reminded the artist of the revelatory rotations of Calder’s mobiles and of his own Venetian sculptures. The source oak tree in turn linked the myth to the artist’s longstanding reference to trees across his oeuvre: the tree and its leaves became an organizing image for Waiting for the Sibyl. Kentridge is fascinated by this process of assembling and recycling originally unrelated fragments and impressions into a new, unexpected coherence and compares the process with the mechanism of dreams as elucidated by Sigmund Freud.
Equipped with these ideas and intuitions, Kentridge embarked on what he calls “the real work” of creating Waiting for the Sibyl—which, significantly, entailed close collaboration in a series of workshops with his fellow artists back in his studio in Johannesburg. Together with a group of musicians, dancers, actors, and video artists, they collectively began an intensive process of improvisation. Much of the time, according to Kentridge, the work in theater is about finding the most effective answer to the question: “How can we bring the excitement that all the participants feel in those first improvisations and rehearsals onto the stage?”
Several years ago in Johannesburg, Kentridge cofounded an initiative he calls the Centre for the Less Good Idea, borrowing the name from a Tswana proverb: “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.” He explains that the Centre is based on a political and artistic anti-dogmatism. The sweeping political ideas of the last century proved disastrous, in Kentridge’s view, because they derived from people being “certain they know what is best for other people.” As a creative corollary, he asserts that the most creatively effective way to work in the studio involves “keeping a doubt and uncertainty about your first idea such that other things can come in and shape and inform it.”
Crafting Music and Libretto
Kentridge’s original commission gave him free rein as to theme while stipulating that his stagework should use pre-recorded music in lieu of an orchestra, chorus, and full cast of opera singers. But it became apparent early on that live music was an indispensable element. Several composers came to the first workshop during the improvisational stage of the creative process. Kentridge narrowed them to two, inviting Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd to stay on as the project grew.
Mahlangu is a renowned choral composer, singer, dancer, and choreographer who came to know Kentridge through the Centre for the Less Good Idea and collaborated with him on his 2018 “historical pageant” of forgotten African victims of the First World War, The Head & the Load. Also credited as SIBYL’s associate director, Mahlangu built a soundscape for the work together with his fellow singers by drawing on South African vocal traditions. Shepherd, a trailblazing jazz pianist, contributes original improvisations that complement and serve as a modern counterpart to the tradition-rooted vocal music. SIBYL has no written score, but the music is closely linked to the specific performers who are part of the cast. “The music is always the same every night,” says Mahlangu. “We may feel it differently, but it is set in the body like a ballet.” Overall, according to Kentridge, “if the music is working well, it adds a depth to what we see on stage that is, as it were, below the stage surface, below the immediate image.”
“I bring the traditional and the visceral and Kyle Shepherd brings the classical and the technical,” Mahlangu observes. “He’s an amazing jazz player who works a lot with African ritualistic sounds and aesthetics. I work in a very visceral way because I’m a choreographer. So, I make the singers move to discover the sound and work with their somatic memory to trigger certain things which we can respond to in movement. The dancers carry the music with their bodies.” Mahlangu adds that he adapted the ancient Greek concept of a prophetess into terms that make sense in a South African cultural context: “SIBYL is about a person who has spiritual power, so for this project, I invited singers who are spiritually gifted as well—people who have some kind of ancestral spiritual gift.”
There is no conventionally sung libretto in Waiting for the Sibyl. The text is projected as an integral part of Kentridge’s animated film, the words taken from a book of quotes he has been collecting over the years. These are sayings or poetic phrases that have captured his interest for one reason or another, ranging from African proverbs to brief quotes from writers in various languages, which are translated into English. (Only a few derive from English sources.) The sayings are overlaid on pages of old reference books, data sources once prized but outdated in the internet age. Kentridge transforms these texts into implied oracles that structure each of the work’s brief scenes. The process, he points out, “is not random, but it’s not planned.”
Following the Roman premiere of Waiting for the Sibyl, Kentridge discovered that it was not possible to tour with Work in Progress, its pre-existing “prelude,” because Calder’s sculptures and props were too expensive to insure and could not be copied. So, in its subsequent iterations, Kentridge decided to pair Waiting for the Sibyl with a film he was simultaneously making, City Deep, which has “indirect links to the idea of the Sibyl”—but in an expanded version renamed The Moment Has Gone, accompanied by a live score by Mahlangu and Shepherd. The Moment Has Gone (22 minutes) and Waiting for the Sibyl (44 minutes) together comprise Parts One and Two, respectively, of the work titled SIBYL.
The Moment Has Gone directly addresses the tumultuous transition in South Africa from Apartheid to a democracy still troubled by lingering social injustice. His depiction here of the greedy mine owner and property developer Soho Eckstein is contrasted with the fate of the “zama zama” miners (Zulu for “test your luck”) of South Africa’s informal economy, who toil in decommissioned mines, illegally and under perilous conditions.
Mahlangu says that the interaction between his response to social problems and that of Kentridge generates “an interesting conversation, with different points of view.” For The Moment Has Gone, he draws on elements of the all-male isicathamiya style (made internationally famous by the group Ladysmith Black Mambazo). This, he explains, originated as a quieter, “suppressed” form of singing “to steal a moment of joy when you have been removed from your homeland and put in places where noise is not allowed by white people.” Traditionally, isicathamiya is performed a cappella, but he and Shepherd are “breaking the rules and creating a new form” by combining the four male voices with piano.
Starving the Algorithm
Kentridge is intrigued by the fact that SIBYL’s catalyst, Alexander Calder’s Work in Progress, originated in 1968—famously, a year of momentous turmoil in Berkeley but also a year, he says, that emanated “a sense that questions were going to be solved and fixed, that a new world was possible,” suggesting “a kind of innocence and optimism that seem impossible 50 years later.” He finds that innocence reminiscent of the clarity of emotions recalled from childhood, when the “sense of injustice” burns with an intensity that doesn’t seem capable of being revived after we’ve become jaded.
What seems to attract Kentridge so strongly to the material he explores in SIBYL is myth’s paradoxical combination of childhood clarity—its innocent expectation of answers that make sense of the world—with a profound ambivalence. The consolidating image of the leaves in motion that drew him to the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl also conveys an underlying insight about the human condition. According to the myth, supplicants seeking answers to their problems could never be certain whether the oracular “answer” they retrieved was the “correct” one or a prediction intended for someone else.
“The fact that your fate would be known, but you couldn’t know it, is the deep theme of our relationship of dread, of expectation, of foreboding towards the future,” according to Kentridge.
The algorithm is the contemporary version of a fate we want to control but that ends up controlling us. “The algorithm is of necessity a highly authoritarian way of thinking about the world,” observes the artist, “because it takes statistics from a huge number of individuals the way a totalitarian state would and from that makes rules which it enforces with great assiduity against the individual. What the human offers is uncertainty, doubt—even while we all continue to use algorithms in our daily lives, to look at the weather for the day ahead.”
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New Events Announced in Artist William Kentridge Campus-wide Residency
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New Events Announced in Artist William Kentridge Campus-wide Residency
UC Berkeley and Cal Performances have announced added events, and specially priced tickets for students, faculty, and staff to participate in the campus-wide residency by world-renowned, multidisciplinary artist William Kentridge this spring. Dedicated to the work of one of the most respected artists of our time, the residency provides the campus and wider Bay Area community the rare opportunity to engage directly with Kentridge and his artistry via lectures, performances, and events that showcase the breadth and depth of his creative output.
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Soprano Joanna Dudley performs “A Guided Tour of the Exhibition: For Soprano and Handbag”
Specially priced tickets for UC Berkeley students, faculty and staff
Soprano Joanna Dudley will star in the performance art piece she created with William Kentridge, A Guided Tour of the Exhibition: For Soprano and Handbag, Wed, Mar 15 at 7:30pm at Zellerbach Playhouse. A block of specially reserved $10 tickets for UC Berkeley students go on sale on Tue, Feb 21 at noon; $15 tickets for faculty and staff go on sale Tue, Feb 14 at noon. Learn more/ticket info >
Tickets for William Kentridge’s Fri, Mar 10 performance of Kurt Schwitters’ Dadaist poem Ursonate at Zellerbach Playhouse will go on sale to UC Berkeley students for $10 each on Wed, Feb 15; $15 tickets for faculty and staff go on sale Thu, Feb 9 at noon. Learn more/ticket info >
Ursonate is currently sold out for faculty and staff. Add yourself to a notification list to be alerted if tickets become available.
Note: UCB students, faculty, and staff will need to join Cal Performances Email Club to receive the promo code for exclusive access to discounts.
Added Events
A livestream of UC Berkeley’s Arts + Design Thursdays class with William Kentridge and Judith Butler, Video Art and Social Intervention: Forms of Life, will take place on Thurs, March 16 at noon.
The Townsend Center for the Humanities will present Reflections on William Kentridge: A Conversation, a panel of UC Berkeley scholars exploring the art of William Kentridge. Details will be announced at townsendcenter.berkeley.edu.
Films Announced
Programs in BAMPFA’s expansive Kentridge film retrospective Orchestrating Time: The Films of William Kentridge include three staged operas, a documentary about the artist, his drawings for projection, many short films, and a gallery installation, March 8–April 30.
Video/Audio Recording
Free audio and video recordings are now available of To What End, the visual lecture William Kentridge gave at BAMPFA in November 2022 about the creative process behind SIBYL, which will have its US Premiere at Cal Performances March 17–19.
William Kentridge’s UC Berkeley residency is produced and presented by Cal Performances, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.
The Changing Orchestra Makeup of the Vienna Philharmonic
![](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/blog/2022-23/vienna-blog-1920x900-2.jpg)
The Changing Orchestra Makeup of the Vienna Philharmonic
Take a look inside the instrumentation of Strauss’ Alpine Symphony, Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides Overture, and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8.
Video by Tiffany Valvo, Cal Performances’ Social Media and Digital Content Specialist.
Transcript
The Vienna Philharmonic is considered to be one of the finest orchestras in the world and we are so thrilled they will be playing three separate programs at Zellerbach Hall on March 7, 8, and 9! And today, we’re going to explore the orchestration, instrumentation, and some fun facts about one piece on each of their three incredible programs.
Let’s start by setting the stage — literally.
The standard orchestra has about 100 players. However, this greatly depends on the piece being played and when it was written. The setup, like where the cellos sit on stage, for example, depends on the preference of the conductor and the ensemble.
However, in a standard orchestra the string section is made up of about 16 first violins, 14 second violins , 12 violas , 10 cellos, 6 double basses.
There may be a harp and a keyboard instrument added, although that’s very dependent on the piece.
The woodwind section has 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, and 2 clarinets.
You’ve got a brass section with 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, and possibly a tuba!
And then you have percussion and a timpanist — that lonely orange circle to the right.
Typically in the Vienna Philharmonic, the violins are split so that the first violins are on stage right and the second violins on stage left, on the outside of the orchestra. The double basses sometimes sit in the back of the orchestra in theater position, but likely at Zellerbach they’ll be on stage right behind the first violins.
Let’s talk about Vienna’s first program, which includes one of the most epic orchestral works written in the 21st century: Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony, written in 1915. It is one of Strauss’s largest non-operatic works; the score calls for about 125 players and a typical performance usually lasts around 50 minutes.
This work is considered a tone poem because it evokes the content of a story or landscape. In this case, the symphony is depicting the eleven hours (from daybreak just before dawn to the following nightfall) spent climbing an Alpine mountain.
Let’s talk about this orchestra of 125 people.
First, we will start with our strings. This may be larger considering the amount of winds, brass, and percussion we are about to add, but, we will keep it standard for now. To keep track, we’ve marked the original standard orchestra in black.
Okay, here we go. Excitingly, we’re going to keep our keyboard instrument, a celeste, and add a harp.
The woodwind section is going to double, with 4 players in each section. We will add a piccolo, an Eb clarinet and a bass clarinet, a contrabassoon, and, arguably most interestingly, a heckelphone!
The heckelphone is an oboe-like instrument that was first used in Strauss’ Salome. There are about 100 in the world, so it’s definitely not very common. What a treat we will get to hear one!
Then, we will more than double the brass section with 8 French horns (with 4 of those players also doubling on a horn-like instrument called the Wagner tuba), 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, 2 tubas, and a large amount of off-stage brass.
There are an array of percussion parts, including a wind and thunder machine.
To hear this many musicians on stage is an incredibly powerful experience. The sound will engulf you as you imagine your own Alpine mountain journey.
____
The second program features Brahms’ serene and supremely lyrical Symphony No. 2, introduced by two Mendelssohn works inspired by his travels in Scotland.
Let’s talk about one of those, The Hebrides Overture! This gorgeous 10-minute masterpiece evokes the composer’s 1829 excursion to a sea cave known as Fingal’s Cave.
Let’s start with our Alpine Symphony instrumentation and watch it drastically reduce for Hebrides… ready?!
This piece is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.
The themes in this piece portray the power and stunning beauty of the cave, in addition to the sea and rolling waves. A moment to listen for comes towards the end of the work when there is an absolutely gorgeous clarinet duet.
And, speaking of clarinets, one of the things that makes Vienna sound so special is their use of slightly different instruments. The clarinetists will be playing German/Viennese-system instruments which have slightly different keywork and are known for their rich, dark sound in comparison to the typical French system instruments heard in the majority of orchestras around the world.
The rest of this program will be an absolute joy.
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Now on to program number three! Yes, it includes just one massive, epic work: Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8, which happens to be his last completed symphony. He nearly finished his ninth, but died before it was complete.
The eighth symphony was first composed in 1887 with a second version being completed in 1890 and it was premiered by none other than the Vienna Philharmonic at the Musikverein in 1892.
The history that this ensemble has with this composer and music make it absolutely magical to hear them play it — it’s almost as if this music lives within their DNA.
The instrumentation for this work is also very large. Let’s start again with the Alpine Symphony setup and watch it minimize just slightly.
We will keep both harps.
The winds are now 3 to a section instead of 4.
We still have 8 French horns, with half still doubling on Wagner tubas. The rest of the brass is just reduced slightly with 3 trumpets and trombones and 1 tuba.
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To conclude this deep dive into the Vienna Philharmonic’s three upcoming programs at Cal Performances, we’d just like to say that seeing this ensemble with conductor Christian Thielemann will be the ultimate orchestral treat. As a matter of fact, it feels positively extravagant. See you there!
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Cal Performances’ The Look of Love Giveaway
The Look of Love Giveaway
Feb 1–7, 2023
We’re thrilled to announce a giveaway for a night out for two and the chance to see the Bay Area Premiere of Mark Morris Dance Group’s The Look of Love: An Evening of Dance to the Music of Burt Bacharach, Feb 17–19! This bright, energy-filled production is getting rave reviews, including the Washington Post‘s declaration that “Mark Morris’s tribute to Burt Bacharach is what the world needs now!” What could be better than a wistful evening of food, chocolate, and dance?!
This incredible prize package includes:
- Two (2) tickets to Mark Morris Dance Group: The Look of Love (choice of Feb 17th, 18th or 19th)
- A gift card for a 4-course dinner for two (2) at Alice Waters’ acclaimed flagship restaurant, Chez Panisse, on a night of the winner’s choosing
- A special gift set of handcrafted chocolates from Berkeley’s own award-winning chocolatier, TCHO
- A bottle of cabernet and a complimentary wine tasting for four (4) from Napa’s Titus Vineyards
- Refreshments at Zellerbach Hall including two (2) beverages and two (2) refreshment items of your choice
- Reserved parking near Zellerbach Hall
Entries accepted until Feb 7, 2023, 11:59pm PST.
Entries have closed. Winner will be announced soon!
Giveaway Rules
Entries accepted until February 7, 2023, at 11:59pm PT. Maximum one (1) entry on Instagram and one (1) entry on this webpage per entrant. Winners will be selected randomly and notified on Feb 8, 2023, via Instagram DM to the account from which they entered or via the email with which they entered. Winners will have 24 hours after notification to accept their prize, after which time it will be offered to another entrant. The Chez Panisse gift card is for a pre-set four-course dinner (vegetarian option available) and does not include alcohol. To redeem your gift card, please call Chez Panisse at 510.548.5525 to make a reservation. Reservations at a specific time are not guaranteed. The winnings of this giveaway cannot be sold or redeemed for cash. Proof of age is required to receive any alcoholic prizes, however the giveaway is not limited to those over the age of 21. In the event the winner is under the age of 21, an alternate non-alcoholic beverage will be offered. Cal Performances staff is not eligible to enter.
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