Bomb Magazine : Some Quickening of the Pulse: William Kentridge Interviewed by Ivan Talijancic

The visionary artist's live performance comeback.

Production still from William Kentridge, *The Head and the Load* (2022). Photo by Stella Olivier.

William Kentridge’s prodigious creative output as a visual artist, filmmaker, and theater and opera director has graced many of the world’s stages, galleries, and museums for several decades. I have keenly followed his work for many years, but when his production of The Head and the Load landed at New York City’s vast Park Avenue Armory in 2018, I found it truly revelatory; it was one of those rare productions that simply fired on all cylinders—a veritable Gesamtkunstwerk. I recently conversed with William about the creation of the show and its return to the stage after the pandemic ahead of the upcoming performances of The Head and the Load in Miami.

—Ivan Talijancic

Ivan TalijancicDuring a conversation earlier this year, you mentioned that the origins of The Head and the Load can be traced to a sort of a marching band procession you had been commissioned to stage along the banks of the river Tiber in Rome. Can you share how that particular work came about?

William KentridgeThere were many starting points to The Head and the Load. The most important was a project which I had done in Rome two years earlier, along a five hundred-yard stretch of the river Tiber, which contained eighty figures to make a historical frieze of triumphant and lamentable moments of Roman history. When this was finished, it was decided there should be an opening event to launch this mural on the banks of the river. The composer Philip Miller and I devised a double procession: the marching band with a choir of laments and a marching band with a choir of triumphs.

Each would start at the opposite ends of the stage, which was at the banks of the river, and go through each other. We worked with large-scale shadows thrown by light onto the walls by the performers so that they could be easily seen by the audience who were a hundred yards away on the other side of the river. This opening performance happened twice. On the first two nights, it was about half an hour long; in The Head and the Load, the procession is approximately seven minutes of the ninety-minute performance, one element of the piece rather than the heart of it.

When the invitation came to work at the Park Avenue Armory, I was thinking about the First World War as a theme, and from there it was a question of doing research, investigating, having workshops to work out the element of the First World War that interested me. A point of origin for the project was a production I worked on, a production of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. Although the script dates a hundred years earlier, we set the production as a premonition of the First World War.

In the workshops for Wozzeck, done in my studio in Johannesburg, I worked with a lot of singers and dancers who would never be in the final opera production in Salzburg or New York. After that workshop, I thought how terrible it was that the wonderful things that had emerged in the workshop weren’t going to be seen again, and it was very clear we were going to use those people in this new production. When we started The Head and the Load, we had many ideas that came out of Wozzeck, out of the ideas of war and brutality and poverty; although in the end, The Head and the Load was about discovering new historical material.

ITAfter seeing many works at the Armory, your production was the first that gave me the sense that its majestic scale used that venue to its full potential. What was the process of translating the site-specific Rome piece to what eventually became the theatrical work that is The Head and the Load?

WKWhen I was first invited to do a piece at the Armory, I brought the team that I work with—a costume designer, set designer, lighting designer, and in this case also composer, all of whom were working with me at the Metropolitan Opera. We went to look at the Park Avenue Armory’s fifty-yard stage and were daunted, even though the stage is miniature compared to the five hundred-yard stage in Rome. Then, we thought of the stage as a new way of watching the performance where you can’t take in the whole performance at once. The audience has to be very active, complicit in constructing the performance from the sections they do see, the sections they don’t see, foregrounded pieces, and pieces which disappear into the wings.

ITThis work is making its return to the stage at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami for the first time since Covid-19 struck. How does it feel to breathe new life into this production after the prolonged pandemic hiatus?

WKFor artists such as myself working in their studio, the eighteen months of not traveling was a kind of blessing. However, for all my colleagues who are performers or dancers or singers or musicians, it was calamitous. Not only were they unable to earn an income, they weren’t even able to practice their métier. So it’s enormously invigorating to be mounting this piece again, and to bring back many of the collaborations. There have been some tragic losses—particularly of one of our three lead actors, Mncedisi Shabangu, who suddenly died some months ago. There is a new person filling his shoes, which is a big task for that actor and for the rest of the company.

ITCan you share what a typical day of rehearsal for The Head and the Load may have looked like?

WKAll my theater productions have workshops in my smallish studio in Johannesburg in the garden of the house where I live with my family. That’s fine for doing the drawing for animated filming, building a model of the set, working closely with costume and set designers in advance. There’s a section of the making which is me in the studio doing drawings. The drawings are filmed, then I work with editors to start putting that into order. The drawing itself is a solitary activity, in the studio, always. When we gather people for a workshop, which may last ten days or twelve days and involves forty or fifty designers, actors, percussionists, videographers, editors, and assistants to make props or to work on costumes, ten of these people live in the house with us; the rest come from Johannesburg.

When we start with the workshop, I have some projected video material to play with and a text with some fragments of the libretto. The typical day might begin with an hour’s warm up: a dancer leading the physical warm up, a musician leading a vocal warm up, the rest of us either taking part or getting ready for the day. Then, we might look at a sequence, such as talking about wanting or not wanting to go to war, discussing how one puts that into the body. That will be primarily a session with the percussionist and the dancers finding the forwards-backwards movement, improvising.

What is important is finding core fragments in the improvisation when there’s some quickening of the pulse. Sometimes this means saying no when the movement of the soldier has suddenly become too balletic. What if it’s all just in the chest? We might do a session where people listen to objects. When picking up a chair, what is the sound that is hidden inside the chair? Is this a task for maybe a flute player, a cello player, a flute and cello together, or a voice? How does one achieve that moment when you hear the sound that we believe comes from the chair?

WKAt the end of ten days, we have a list of scenes which are intriguing and a potential order in which these scenes could happen. Then comes a period away from the work where designers work on costumes or set, editors edit things that we filmed, and the composer works with some of the musicians to expand on ideas that emerged in the workshop. I’d go back to both drawing and constructing a libretto. Then there’d be another workshop or a period of rehearsal when we put it on the stage as closely as possible to see: How do the projections work? What is the movement of actors across the stage? How do we get thirty musicians onto stage into position without it being a slow, elephantine activity? Do we put microphones under the stage to amplify the sounds of footsteps as they happen?

The activity gets broken down into many hundreds of practical tasks. Bit by bit, the piece gathers together. In most cases, the people performing it are the people who develop those moments in those roles in the processes during the different stages of making the workshop.

The Head and the Load will be performed at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of the Miami-Dade County in Miami from December 1 to December 3.

Article published on https://bombmagazine.org/

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Bomb Magazine : Some Quickening of the Pulse: William Kentridge Interviewed by Ivan Talijancic

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