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Waiting for the Sibyl
PROJECTSA Defence of the Less Good Idea
To What End?
The project at Rome Opera, Waiting for the Sibyl, comes from an invitation from the opera house to make a companion piece to the 1968 piece by the American artist Alexander Calder, called Work in Progress. The 1968 piece is a beautiful, whimsical almost-happening of the era, with mobiles slowly turning on the stage, and groups of bicycle riders; but the signature mobiles of Alexander Calder are the heart of the piece. In responding to the invitation to do a second half of the evening, I wanted something that also had a sense of turning, of revolution, and of the lightness of the Calder. I was reminded of the image of the Cumaean Sibyl. My understanding of her story was that she lived in her cave near Naples; people would come to her with questions about their fate, and she would write the answers on oak leaves. There would be a pile of oak leaves at the front of her cave and people would come to get their answers. But inevitably there would be a wind which blew the leaves around – so you never knew if you were getting your fate or somebody else’s fate. It’s a beautiful metaphor of not being able to predict our futures. This idea of leaves blowing and turning, and uncertainty, became the connecting point for Calder’s moving, turning mobiles and something that grounds the piece with that turning but hooks into questions that I’m interested in today.
Waiting for the Sibyl
World premiere: September 11, 2019 at the Teatro Dell’Opera di Roma, Rome.
Concept and Director
William Kentridge
Music Director / Composer
Kyle Shepherd
Associate Director / Choral Composer
Nhlanhla Mahlangu
Costume Designer
Greta Goiris
Set Designer
Sabine Theunissen
Lighting Design
Urs Schönebaum
Projection Design
Žana Marović
Cinematography
Duško Marović SASC
Photography
Stella Olivier
Created and performed by
Kyle Shepherd (Piano)
Nhlanhla Mahlangu (Vocalist | Dancer)
Xolisile Bongwana (Vocalist | Dancer)
Thulani Chauke (Dancer)
Teresa Phuti Mojela (Dancer)
Thandazile ‘Sonia’ Rabede (Dancer)
Ayanda Nhlangothi (Vocalist)
Zandile Hlatshwayo (Vocalist)
Siphiwe Nkabinde (Vocalist)
S’busiso Shozi (Vocalist)
Produced by
THE OFFICE performing arts + film
Toured in association with Quaternaire
Waiting for the Sibyl is co-commissioned by Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg and Dramaten – Stockholm.
Sibyl
Making art is a uniquely human endeavour and an artist, the maker of art, is someone who distills what they feel and think about the world and expresses this visually. This requires one to read, to see, to listen, to feel, to question and be curious; to know, and yet to doubt; to have humility and to be brave.
William Kentridge does all this by creating ‘a safe space for uncertainty’, and his work instructs us in this.
All texts below are extracted from conversations and interviews with William Kentridge, or texts written by him.
History as collage is an important way of understanding the world. A single narrative always comes from a single viewpoint and there are always other viewpoints. I am sceptical of the certainties which come with a single narrative of history.
Excerpt from Six Drawing Lessons (Drawing Lesson 5: In Praise of Mistranslation), 2012
What is it that we do when we see?
In Johannesburg, we have dry winters. In summer we have heat, and thunderstorms in the afternoons. Our sublime arrives in the form of huge cumulus nimbus clouds that pile themselves up over the city. With every day, when we have a storm, a new mountain range, a new Alps, is built for us again. In that way the mine dumps can exist, be erased, be rebuilt, so from a clear sky the cathedrals of clouds construct themselves. We see two things in the clouds. Shapes: a dog’s head, an old man’s face with protruding chin, the back of a head on a shoulder. This is not our ability to see things. It is not an act of generosity to see them. It is about not being able to stop ourselves from seeing the shapes. The man’s head comes to you. Once recognised, you cannot stop yourself from seeing it. This is one element of the clouds. The other is the changing itself, their shifting form, an awareness of the engine in the clouds. Lying on one’s back, looking at the clouds in the late afternoon, there is a seed of understanding that a child gets, of the nature of provisionality. Something is growing within, changing the outside form, becoming itself.
I’m interested in machines that make you aware of the process of seeing and aware of what you do when you construct the world by looking. This is interesting in itself, but more so as a broad-based metaphor for how we understand the world.
How much do we need to understand or know of the world, to understand? You have, for example, an assortment of torn paper shapes. They rearrange themselves in the form of a horse. Fragments leave the screen, reducing the horse until it is made up of four pieces of paper – a neck, a back, two legs.
Making a Horse, video fragment from studio work in progress, 2021
I film my eight year-old son. He takes a jar of paint, a handful of pencils, some books and papers. He throws the jar of paint over the wall, scatters the pencils, tears the papers and scatters the shards. We run the film in reverse – and there is utopian perfection. The papers construct themselves, perfectly, every time. He gathers them all. He catches twelve pencils, all arriving from different corners in the same moment. In the jar he catches all the paint, not a drop spilt. The wall is pristine. His joy at his own skill is overflowing. Can I do it again, he asks? Yes. But first we have to clean the studio, clean the paint off the wall, pick up the torn paper, gather the pencils.
Excerpt from performance of Refuse the Hour, Cape Town, South Africa, 2015
To live with a tree for fifty years is a sign of privilege and surplus. To not need the tree for either wood or fire is a luxury. When I was nine years old we planted two white stinkwoods in the garden. All my childhood I waited for the trees to grow, to be strong enough to to hold a hammock. They refused. Twenty years later I returned to live in the house with my family and the trees were mature. Fifteen years later, the trees were magnificent. And then one of them was struck by lightning and died. The shock, not just the hole in the shade canopy, the gap in the garden, but rather the shaking of the belief that a tree is a gift for future generations or – if not for future generations – then at least for other people… its lifespan should be so much longer. How could the tree die before me? No. If the tree could die, how vulnerable are we or am I?
Excerpt from Felix in Exile, 1994
An essential quality of an artist is to have an openness to devour the world.
Excerpt from Lexicon – Greek/Latin 37″. Ref: 26/08/2010 (Drawing Lesson 45), 2010
Text extracted from conversations between William Kentridge and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in 2020, and from other text spoken or written by William Kentridge in 2020.
Over the last five months, it has a been a quiet and productive period inside the safe precincts of the studio. I am very aware of contrast between the calm and space for new work in the studio and the storm raging outside it.
I have been working on a series of films about how one makes sense of the world in the studio. Things which are obvious in studio practice, like uncertainty, doubt, provisionality, are not about the COVID pandemic. They are themes I have worked on for many years – but these themes in the outside world have become much more present in these months.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: Yours is an art of process, change, transition, erasures and redrawing, of grey zones rather than certainty and facts. You often work through a form of displacement. The drawing isn’t the final work, because it’s made for a projection, but at the same time, the projection is made to document the making of the drawing. So each element points to another element, displacing viewers’ certitude.
William Kentridge: As a white South African, my work comes from my relationship to guilt, to responsibility, to historical responsibility, to personal connection. But what you say about displacement, I think puts very clearly the fact that I address questions about the world indirectly by transforming them into questions of what one does in the studio. The work in the studio can show us what’s outside of the studio.
CCB: Everything you do as an artist is always about our times, but again, you do it obliquely, through a theme that’s often distanced geographically and historically from us. You recently exhibited Waiting for the Sibyl and other histories at Lia Rumma gallery, Milan. Your theatre project Waiting for the Sibyl premiered at the Opera House in Rome in September 2019 and was inspired by the mythological figure of the Sibyl, an ancient prophetess. You speak about the Sibyl in order to address our own times – the algorithmic society – the will to determine people’s futures through mathematical formulas or algorithms, AI and the cloud. Your focus is on what might be lost in the following equation: when the computer knows better than I do what I like or want, what happens to the self, to the “I”?
WK: There’s no good solution. It’s better to understand that there are “less bad” solutions and there are multiple approaches. “For once let us try not to be right” is a line from the Dada manifesto of Tristan Tzara. Think of the times during which he wrote that: during the First World War, midst everybody’s certainty about what was the right thing to do, the politicians’ certainty that led instead to a complete calamity. If that’s what was being right means, then let’s try not to be right.
CCB: During our current paradigmatic shift of values, there are a lot of people trying to be right. Removing public statues, for example.
WK: South Africa led the way in these questions of how to deal with historical relics that are monuments to terrible policies. Five years ago, we had the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign led by university students in Cape Town to remove a monument of the colonialist Cecil Rhodes. In London, in order to protect the statue of Winston Churchill, it was boxed in with wood. For me, that boxing in is in itself a very beautiful new sculpture about the problem. Before, you had a big bronze figure on top of a granite plinth and now you have a huge wooden plinth with nothing on top. And that makes us try to remember what the statue was that’s now inside, activating people’s memory. It also raises the question of why it was boxed in. So it creates a debate. For some people in Britain, Churchill is the great hero who saved the West in the Second World War; for many in India, he’s responsible for the famine in Bengal that killed three million people, virtually half the Holocaust victims. And this indeterminate position is made clear by this invisible sculpture in a wooden box. I think we need to find many similar provisional solutions to this problem.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: The other day I went to visit the Cerruti villa to see how the artworks were doing. I fear that they’re lonely. It had been at least three weeks since my previous visit. When I opened the door and walked in, I was shocked, blinded by the colours of the Modigliani. And when I looked at the Pontormo from afar, I could see every little brushstroke. I realised that I’d forgotten how to see. Our eyes have transitioned to a screen-based vision. That’s tremendously disquieting: to learn that one forgets how easily one forgets. Given today’s new technology, what are your ideas on the museum of the future? Are we at a watershed moment when we must fundamentally re-imagine its role? Are museums old-fashioned relics from the 19th and 20th centuries?
WK: For me, museums are places that mark your geography, and this has to do with the physical memory of being in a particular city, building, and room. This experience doesn’t exist in the digital format of the cloud where everything is somewhere and nowhere. Walking into the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam, going upstairs and turning left into the room with the Malevich paintings constructs a geography that connects me to my 18 year-old self, when I first saw those works. This is very difficult with the digital image. The physical fact of museums is vital.
There is a temptation to feel that everything has to be about the present moment in its most immediate form. But this is not a way in which I can work. There has to be confidence that the slow, long questions one works with are connected to the world as well as to the studio and let the slow steady work in the studio illuminate and give comfort to many of the conditions beyond it. This has been one of the central roles of art over millennia, and it seems as important now as ever before.
Selection by Anne McIlleron, October 2020
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The Nose
PROJECTSA Defence of the Less Good Idea
Learning from the absurd
A man wakes up to find that he has lost his nose. In 1837, Gogol writes a short story about the man’s attempts to find the missing proboscis and to reattach it to his face. Gogol considers the story that he has just recounted, concluding that it is a strange and improbable tale. Not only is it very odd for a nose to disappear from a man’s face, only to reappear baked inside a loaf of bread, but it’s even more absurd to imagine that he could persuade the newspaper to let him take out an advertisement looking for his nose. This is not about money. It is about the impropriety of the newspaper and advertisements for lost noses. “Why do authors write stories like this?” Gogol asks. “It’s no good for the country, although in truth it does no harm either…. But why write about it? Such things may happen, but they do not happen often.”
The Nose
Composer
Dmitri Shostakovich
Libretto by the composer with
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Georgi Ionin
Alexander Preis
Based on the story
by Nicolai Gogol, 1837
World premiere: Leningrad, Maly Theater, January 18, 1930
Production for Metropolitan Opera, New York
Premiere 26 February 2010
Conductor
Valery Gergiev / Pavel Smelkov
Director
William Kentridge
Stage directors
William Kentridge
Luc De Wit
Projection design
Catherine Meyburgh
William Kentridge
Set design
Sabine Theunissen,
William Kentridge
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