William Kentridge Residency

Making use of Kurt Schwitters’ original “Ursonate,” William Kentridge’s adap­tation is part performance, part lec­ture, and part symphony. Watching the Ursonate, however, can also make it seem as if it is none of these things.

On a raised platform backed by a full-scale projection, Kentridge takes his position at a makeshift podium. He opens a book and on the projection behind him, a book opens as well. This is perhaps the last time the performance takes the shape of a conventional lecture. From the opening line of the piece: “Fumms bö wö tää zää Uu, pögiff, kwii Ee,” the Ursonate launches into a symphony of audio-visual performance.

Kentridge, who addresses the audience in varying phrases throughout, is backed by stop-motion visual works of his own making, some echoing the words and phrases he is uttering, and others filling in for the gaps in our understanding. On a screen behind Kentridge, projected images of pages of text spin by furiously, rich with his trademark charcoal-drawn characters, including birds, horses, and human figures: soldiers proud and defeated, a rotund German general from World War I, and Kentridge himself.

There are text-based pieces flickering on and off screen, renderings of loudhailers morphing into still-life works, and dancers performing improvisational pieces of movement on loop. Kentridge’s own tool, his voice, adopts different tones and pitches throughout, and it is through this combination of seemingly random words and images that the lecture begins to make sense. Gibberish becomes impassioned debate while body language—the slight wag of a finger or the outward extension of the palms—helps form a compelling argument.

Ultimately, the Ursonate builds up to a frenzy before reaching the cadenza—a magnificent collapse of rhyme and reason. More polished than any vintage Dada performance, and richer in freely accessible humor, Kentridge’s Ursonate nonetheless pays homage to its predecessors by demonstrating how helpful the language of absurdism can still be in addressing a world that makes no sense. Amidst the noise, the chaos, and the explosions, conclusions are reached, or abandoned, before being revived anew.

The Ursonate is chaotic, but it also finds a place in the everyday. You could find versions of its form in a speech by a politician, or a talk by an academic. And while its contents may be left very much up to interpretation, the Ursonate’s univer­sality boils down to those very basic forms of communication, like the slight wag of a finger or the outward extension of the palms.

Guided tours in museums intend to give visitors a closer understanding of the artworks on exhibit. On the other hand, every text explaining a work of art auto­matically places it in the past, im­mo­bilizing and silencing it. This bold and innovative presentation, created by William Kentridge and soprano Joanna Dudley, com­bines live art, drama, film, and sculp­ture as Dudley conducts an immersive exhibition tour in which artworks are empowered to speak for themselves in direct defiance of museums’ tendency to prescribe fixed meanings to and antiquate their subjects.

The 42-minute chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl and the 22-minute film with live score The Moment Has Gone comprise SIBYL, a singular program of South African artist William Kentridge’s work—an evening in the theater of visual and aural alchemy unlike anything else.

Waiting for the Sibyl, created in colla­boration with choral director and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd, one of South Africa’s leading progressive pianists and composers, is a piece for nine per­for­mers that unfolds in a series of six short scenes, interrupted and revealed by the dropping and raising of the front curtain. The work incorporates signature elements of Kentridge’s visionary practice—projection, live performance, recorded music, dance/movement, and shadows cast by the per­formers against a hand-painted backdrop—to tell the story of the Cumaean prophetess Sibyl. She would write out a questioner’s fate on an oak leaf and place it at the mouth of her cave on a pile of others’ fates. But when you went to retrieve it, a breeze would blow up and swirl the leaves about, leaving you uncertain if you were learning another’s fate or your own. 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.

Unspoken throughout but hovering over the opera is the notion that our con­temporary Sibyl is the algorithm that will predict our future, our health, whether we’ll get a bank loan, whether we’ll live to 80, what our genetics will be. This certainty of an implacable mechanism that determines our outcome is juxtaposed against the desire for a more human connection to our destiny, an instinct to believe in the possibility of something other than the machine to guide us in how we see our future. The work is a profound, jarring, playful, and visually stunning meditation on what it means to be alive in our current moment in history, grappling afresh with humanity’s primordial task of making sense of the inherently tragic state of always knowing, yet never knowing, where our end will lead us; the cursed and blessed con­sciousness that makes us human.

The Moment Has Gone, which begins the program, is a new 22-minute film with live score by Kyle Shepherd combining piano and an all-male South African chorus lead by Nhlanhla Mahlangu. The film incorporates City Deep, the latest in Kentridge’s series of Soho Eckstein films, and sequences of Kentridge creating the work. In City Deep, the artist’s unique charcoal animation technique of successive erasure and redrawing conjures a non-linear story featuring his drawn alter ego Soho Eckstein, set between a municipal art museum (based on the Johannesburg Art Gallery) and an abandoned mining area at the edges of the city, where unofficial artisanal gold mining takes place. The action jumps: the museum collapses; Soho comes face to face with his fate; a solitary miner persistently works against his destiny. Interspersed throughout are images of Kentridge in his studio making the work—the act of creation, always itself an action (a futile one) against destiny.

Made at the same time as Waiting for the Sibyl, The Moment Has Gone incorporates phrases and ideas that reappear in the chamber opera, as well as an appearance by Sibyl herself.

Waiting for the Sibyl premiered at Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Rome in September 2019.