William Kentridge at Holland Festival 2012 - some questions
- By http://www.africaserver.nl/magazine.htm?art=a20120529141319496&taal=nl
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South African artist William Kentridge returns at Holland Festival 2012 with the world première of his latest chamber opera Refuse the hour. Kentridge is well known for his 2D keyframing animations, in which he makes the animations within one single key frame. His use of layers and his resistance to the linearity of time in his animations can also be found in his operas. InRefuse the hour, Kentridge combines dance and live music with some strange machines and projections of his own animations, which are mixed with live projections of the performance itself, creating a world in which time does not adhere to the laws of nature, but rather to the laws of Kentridge. William Kentridge (WK): There are several answers. First, biography. From high school through my time as a student at university and after, I had a dual interest in theatre and performance, and image-making. For a while I tried to separate them, thinking one had to concentrate on a particular field to master it. But I abandoned this purity fairly early on, when I understood the only hope for the work was the migration of ideas and images from one medium into another – etching into film, drawing into theatre, from theatre back into sculpture. I rely on the demands of each medium to provoke new images in other mediums. A kinetic sculpture can be the impulse for a dance. A monologue can be the provocation for a linocut. ASM: Occasionally you have stated that you are interested in a political art. You also have said that you never tried to make illustrations of apartheid. However, your work is often “ spawned by, and fed off, the brutalised society left in its wake”. Does that account for your theatre work as well? WK: Yes. ASM: How have visual arts on the one hand and theatre and theatre making on the other changed after Apartheid collapsed in South Africa? And why do you think so many young South African artists nowadays show such high quality and are attracting so much attention? WK: The ending of the Afrikaner Nationalist government was not the end of politics in the country. It is better understood as the end of anti-apartheid than the end of apartheid - which still continues in many ways throughout the country. Continuing inequalities, injustices, new contradictions in the society, are strong provocation for artists and theatre makers - who of necessity have to make sense of their lives and their world. The big change which followed the transformation in SA, in terms of art and theatre was that, the ending of the isolation of artists from SA. Ironically, this isolation during the apartheid years enabled a lot of work to develop on its own terms – this came from the very fact that it was not part of an international conversation. Now that we are part of a globalised art-mixture, it becomes harder for artists to find their own voice. But we are all still touched by the extraordinary and always surprising crises and contradictions we live in. The energy of a society threatening to fall apart, but still holding, must come through in music, theatre, and images. Holland Festival - Refuse the Hour Frascati - Refuse the Hour (in Dutch) BIOGRAPHIES William Kentridge (1955) is an artist and theatre maker from South-Africa, whose work is permeated by political interest. In 1976 he graduated in Politics and African Studies at the University of Witwatersrand. Between 1976 and 1978 he studied at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, where he subsequently taught for two years. In 1981 and 1982 he studied mime and theatre at the ?cole Jacques Lecoq in Paris. He was one of the founders of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company in Johannesburg. In 1989 he made his first animation, entitled Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris. In the years following he made 8 more films that accompany the end of the apartheid system, the first elections and the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in trying to show the complex tensions in a postcolonial memory, including Felix in Exile, Ubu Tells the Truth and Automatic Writing. His animated films are characterised by their keyframing technique, which gives them a sense of the passing of time, expressing a notion of things that are left unsaid, but can easily be felt. In 1992, Kentridge produced his first theatre project Woyzeck on the Highveld, a collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company. He directed a well-received production of Mozart’s Magic Flute in BAM in 2007. For this performance he also designed the sets and costumes. In 2010 Kentridge played the Metropolitan Opera in New York with a radical vision of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Nose. Later that year the Holland Festival in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam presented a short, multimedia performance entitled Telegrams from the Nose. Since his participation at Documenta X in Kassel in 1997 Kentridge’s work has been shown at (solo) exhibitions all over the world. The charcoal drawings of his animations are very popular in the art world, especially in the United States. In 1999 and 2004 Kentridge received the Carnegie Medal. In 2010 he received the prestigious Kyoto Prize.
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