The Sidney Morning Herald : The sensory experience examining our fascination with fate by Lenny Ann Low)

At the heart of William Kentridge’s Sibyl, which receives its Australian premiere this week, lies the timeless human obsession with wanting to know what life has in store for us.

The legendary South African visual artist, filmmaker and theatre director is fascinated by the dilemma that comes with lifting the veil on the future.

One example he points to is medicine’s increasing ability to predict the future for our health.

William Kentridge: “This idea of the uncertainty of fate intrigued me.”CREDIT:

“On the one hand, you know time is short,” he says. “You need to do what you can to avoid that fate. But it’s also a curse to live thinking, ‘Is it now? Is it now?’”

“When your nose is rubbed in the fate coming towards you, it can be very inhibiting. So, there is no good solution to knowing, or not knowing, our fate.”

Sibyl, to be presented as the closing piece of the Sydney Opera House’s 50th birthday celebrations, combines a film and chamber opera inspired by the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl, the priestess and prophet of the god Apollo’s oracle at Cumae, a Greek colony.

“You would go to her cave with your questions about life – ‘Will I survive?’, ‘How old will I be when I die?’,” says Kentridge, best known for his mesmerising charcoal prints, drawings, and animated films.

“You leave your questions at the mouth of the cave, and she would write the answers on an oak leaf. You’d go to pick up your oak leaf, but, as you got there, there would always be a wind blowing. So you never knew if the leaf you were picking up was your leaf or someone else’s.

“This idea of the uncertainty of fate intrigued me. But also the idea of the swirling leaves. And, of course, a leaf is also from a tree but also a page of a book.”

Leaves, trees, pages, moving chairs, a cast of nine performers and a host of questions, fill the projections and stage of Sibyl’s two parts.

The multilayered production brings together dance, opera, charcoal drawing and film.CREDIT:

The first, a 22-minute film, The Moment Has Gone, features charcoal animations created by Kentridge set to a live score by South African composer and pianist Kyle Shepherd, and an all-male South African chorus led by South African musician and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu.

The second is Kentridge’s chamber opera, Waiting for the Sibyl.

A collaboration between Shepherd and Mahlangu, with libretto written by Kentridge, this 42-minute theatre work merges animated projections, shadow play, song, dance and movement.

“There is a lot to watch,” Kentridge says. “My hope is that people allow their eyes to lead them and that they do not feel disempowered by having to see everything.”

Commissioned by the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in Italy, and premiered there in 2019, Kentridge’s animations come from his drawings, ink washes and sculptures along with book pages and letters.

Words and phrases in the chamber opera come from Hebrew, English and Russian poetry, and South African proverbs translated into African languages after workshopping with the performers.

Kentridge, ever passionate about collaboration, says dedicated workshop periods with the cast were vital for Waiting For The Sibyl’s development.

“It means the participants in the workshop are also the performers of the final piece,” he says. “They have agency in the making of it.”

Kentridge, whose wife, Anne Stanwix, is Australian, is looking forward to travelling here once more.

“It’s always been a pleasure being in Sydney,” Kentridge says. “Even if the result of the [Australian Indigenous Voice] referendum seems kind of inconceivable from a South African perspective.”

He is keen to hear the audience’s take on the work.

“There’s no message,” he says. “There’s no central thought I want people to arrive at. The hope is always that the work, in this case the chamber opera, is more intelligent than any of us making it.”

“If we knew everything the opera was going to do, it would be very dull making it. The hope is there’s more in it than we know.”

Sibyl is at Sydney Opera House, November 2 to November 4.

Article published on : https://www.smh.com.au