William Kentridge
What Have They Done with All the Air?
William Kentridge - What Have They Done with All the Air?
- We have William, my good friend William Kentridge on. William is very well known to the art world. He is a rockstar and I’ve known William for many, many, many years. William is madly busy, so I’m really with huge thanks William, for making time for Lockdown University. So before I hand over to you, I just wanted to tell our audience, you haven’t met you before, a little bit about you. William Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg and works across mediums of drawing, writing, film, performance, music, theatre, and collaborative practises to create works of art that are grounded in politics, science, literature and history, always maintaining a space for contradiction and uncertainty. His work has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s and can be found in the collections of art museums and institutions across the globe. He has directed operas for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Skyla in Milan, English National Opera in London, the Sydney Opera House, and the Salsburg Festival. His original works for stage combined performance, projections, shadow, play, voice and music, and include “The refusal of time,” “The Head and The Load,” and “Faiting for the Sybil.” William Kentridge is the recipient of, honorary doctrines from several universities, including Yale, Columbia, and the University of London. Prizes include the Kyoto Prize, the Princess Austria Award, and the Premium Imperial Prize and an Olivia Award in 2023.
So I have been buying William’s work. I think William, I bought from your very first exhibition in, I think it was 1980, 81-82, somewhere around there, maybe 83. And yeah, and I’ve always loved your work, found it so poignant and beautiful. And for those of you, you can see behind me, I have a whole room of of William’s work. And I have to say, William, you, William has made me famous. So when I say the people say, “Do you know William Kentridge? And I say, "Yeah, actually I do.” “Do you know him personally?” I say, “Yes, I do.” They’re like, “Wow.” So William, honour and privileged to have known you all these years, very proud of what you’ve done, your huge, huge success and a million thanks for joining us today. Today you’ll be talk, you’ll be talking to us about your current show in, at the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town. Is that right?
That’s where we’ll begin. Yes.
Great. So thank you William, over to you.
Thank you so much, Wendy. And to all of you who I can’t see, but assume are there behind your screens in different parts of the world. I want to start with talking about cockney rhyming slang. You know, this is a familiar thing in which you describe something in terms of a rhyme. So you don’t say stairs, you would call the stairs, apples and pears. So you don’t say, “I’m going up the stairs.” You say, “I’m going up the apples and pears.” And meat and your feet, or not your feet. They are plates of meat. So obviously it’s about an inside knowledge, but it’s also a kind of a joke of what are the relationships. So you think of a waiter who says, “I’ve got to get off my plates of meat.” But it gets more complicated because what happens is that the rhyming reference, that’s which tells you what it is, disappears. So when you say the stairs, you don’t say apples and pears. The pears tell you stairs. You just say the apples. And the person doing it has to know what’s the corollary of apples. It would be pears that would be stairs or you don’t say, I’ve got to get off. If your feet are, you’re exhausted, you say, “My feet are killing me.” You don’t say, “My plates of meat to rhyme with feet are killing me.” You just say, “My plates are killing me.” And what I’m interested in is that missing and alighted reference, which would make sense of the phrase. So what I want to talk about today really are the drawings that are on this exhibition and everything that’s hidden of where they come from. That’s been, that falls off the perch. That’s not visible in the final drawing. It’s a way of understanding a kind of prehistory of each drawing. And there’s a prehistory of a drawing both in the literal sense of a sketch, and then it gets expanded onto the sheet of paper.
But it’s also a prehistory in terms of things you’ve even forgotten. Unconscious thoughts which are sitting at the back of your head, which come into the drawing. And with a drawing or an artwork that’s fairly obvious that there are things behind it, the idea, the thought. But what is not always obvious is that all the thoughts, all the understandings we have of the world also have a kind of prehistory we’re aware of or not aware of, of things we’ve taken for granted or things we’ve learned or things we’ve learned and forgotten, like the rhyming of the stairs and pears. So I’ll begin, I think by showing you briefly around the exhibition. I’m in Cape Town at the beautiful Goodman Gallery in Cape Town. I live in Johannesburg. So I have journey down this morning and we are starting to arrange the drawings and sculptures in the space, and the exhibition will open in a few days. I was expecting to do this talk to you in my studio in Johannesburg, but that was date was set before the timing of the opening of the exhibition. So here we are, things to be gained and things to be lost. So I have a camera on my phone and I’ll walk around and hopefully you can see what my camera’s seeing, even if I can’t. Okay. Can we switch across? Okay. So drawings still on the floor, but primarily the exhibition consists of a series of drawings on green paper. These green drawings of jungles or gardens. Some of them have texts, “The world is leaking,” “We shall call for the sun and it will not rise.” “The old wound dries, it bleeds again,” and so on. They’re done with a mixture of charcoal and Indian ink on the green paper. “What have they done with all the air,” which I think was what the talk was called. And there are also various portraits that you’ll come to later. Edouard Glissant is the man we are looking at here, who is a philosopher from Martinique.
This is Suzanne Cesaire, the wife of the great poet, Aime Cesaire, also a writer from Martinique and various other less possible and plausible characters that are shown in the, this central figure, in fact is a portrait of Josephine Bonaparte, the white wife of Napoleon, who also came from Martinique and Marshal Petain, the leader of the Vichy, French neo-Nazi government, and of course Andre Breton the surrealist. And she is Anna Seghers, a novelist. So, this is the heart of the work I want to talk about of these drawings of gardens and jungles. Practically they’re made with references to photo collages of my garden in Johannesburg and also various 18th and 19th century engravings of Martiniquan jungles and bush. There are other works on the exhibition that we may or may not have a time to talk about these aluminium sculptures, which is aluminium covered with oil paint and bits of text from a cashbook from Palermo in Sicily. But I think if we stick to the green drawings, they’ll be instructive as to what we are doing. Okay, we can. This is Chris who’s helping me here with the technology part of the talk. Okay, we can, thanks. So in the studio, for a project to begin, there generally have to be, there generally has to be two things. There has to be a process in the studio, which calls to be used, a technique, a medium, is it going to be a charcoal drawing? Is it something that’s suggested by working with clay or with metal? There has to be some kind of thinking in the hands, not just thinking rationally, intellectually.
There has to be a medium in which to address a question. And very often this medium precedes the question. Sometimes the medium makes the question itself, but very often there’s a meeting between the processes of the studio and something coming from the outside world and where they meet, if there’s a sufficient spark, then a project starts to happen. In the case of the drawings I’m making, they all relate or they come out of work on a theatre project called “The Great Yes, The Great No.” This project is under construction. It’ll be ready or it needs to be ready at the middle of next year. It has its opening date set for the 7th of July in Arles, at the Luma Foundation. So there’s anxiety enough about we have a date, we have to be ready on that date. And the theatre project is what in fact was the outside spark for these drawings. But I want to go back one stage further and talk about the spark for the theatre project. And that came from a project also several years back, which was a film for a Shostakovich Symphony. And to make this film, we needed to find a way of extracting actors so that we could place these actors inside a constructed world, an artificial world of the set for a film that we were going to make. So it wasn’t a live performance, it was actors who were going to be in a film. And to do this, a common technique is to film performers against a green screen because the green is not in the human colour of human flesh or in a white shirt. So you can film it against a green and then take the green out. So the first clip I’m going to show is a question of how or why or this process. This was a project for Shostakovich Film that started about four years ago. And while making the film, which you’ll see kind of the process of it, I was really interested in what would it be if one worked with that technique, but on a stage with live performers. But let us begin with the clip. What is all this green? What does it all mean?
This isn’t green, this is invisibility. We film ourselves on the green and then we subtract the green, we cut it out, and then we can be anywhere like a, Ha! In a quarry or an execution site or in an old Soviet museum full of all the historical exhibits or in a municipal swimming pool. Is this a way to proceed? To what end? Well, eventually to find where we are. But at the moment just to say we’re inside a film for a Shastakovich Symphony, the symphony that was first performed just after Stalin’s death, so we can explore that whole history through it. I mean, you won’t let this era pass you by or Here, in a theatre, an adjunct to the Soviet Museum where I suppose at least we can escape to the studio for a moment or not. I mean, I’m starting to feel nauseous. We hope to find a way of constructing a cardboard history, a collage of different impulses of the skills, taking all the fragments, the whims, the energy of everybody in the studio and seeing if we can bring together some sense of history as a construction, as something that we make and understand rather than just discover. So, this is the green screen and the green sheet of paper. Normally you would buy a commercial and it’s a very ugly green, a very bright billous green. But in our case, in the studio, we’d painted sheets of paper with this acrylic green and put it all over the studio and then kind of fell in love with the greenness of it and decided in the theatre project we were going to start, not the film, but the theatre project. We wouldn’t use the green as invisibility, but we would use the green as a backdrop.
So already something that had started the apples and pears, we’d taken out the rhyme and we were stuck with the green without its final purpose. And we started using the screen, thinking about it as a backdrop, both as a projection surface for the new theatre project, but also as a kind of painted backdrop. So there was a drawing done to act as a backdrop for the screen, for the theatre project. So the second clip we are going to look at is a short time lapse of the painting of the theatrical backdrop, which of course is much larger than these drawings. Much rougher, much cruder and done with a lot of haste. The drawing isn’t quite as fast as it looks in the time-lapse, but it was done fairly rapidly because we needed to test how it would work on the stage. Number two, we can play clip number two. I’m trusting that someone will shout if you can’t see or hear the different clips. Even though we played it before. Okay. We’ll try it again. Let’s see if it works. Okay, if it doesn’t work, we’ll, okay, we’ll go to the next clip. Okay, I’m afraid that particular clip is a different format. So I will show you another clip of which we used in testing it out on the stage. It’s a couple of minutes of a workshop we did of the production. So the to, before I show the clip, maybe to talk a moment about the production, I’d spoken about the meeting point of an idea in the studio and an idea from the outside world. And in this case, the meeting point had to do with kind of choral singing, but it also had to do with the meeting of this thinking about greenness and projection on green and a lush jungle kind of terrain together with an idea which met at halfway. And this idea was an article I’d read written by a friend, Aricitus, which was about a boat journey from Marsai to Martinique in 1941.
Won’t you shut the door, Chris? In 1941. So 1941, France is occupied by the Germans and they set up a neo-Nazi government under Marshal Petain in Vichy. And there’s an attempt by many refugees to escape from France, whether they be Jews or communists or homosexuals or undesirables. And Marsai was the place they tried to leave from and the last ships were going to Martinique. So it was a way of thinking both about migration and forced migration across the world. It was a way also thinking about the movement of surrealism from Europe to the Caribbean. And what was a particular interest and is a particular interest to me is this tiny island of Martinique. Now Martinique is a tiny island. It’s about the distance from Johannesburg to Pretoria, but from this tiny island have come an astonishing ray of poets and philosophers. And I was particularly interested, or I am particularly interested in the poet Aime Cesaire and his great poem, “Notes of a Return to a Native Land” and his school pupil Frantz Fanon, better known for what he did in Algeria as a psychoanalyst years later.
But these two people whose work, and in fact the wife of Aime Cesaire, Suzanne Cesaire, had this very strong relationship to Paris and French culture and thought, and a strong desire to establish a different way of thinking outside the French metropolis in the antilles, in the Caribbean. Martinique, if you’re sailing west from France or from Europe, Martinique is virtually the first island you hit in the Caribbean, this tiny dot. It’s made so much money for France out of its sugar that in the late 18th century, in fact, France was happy to swap all of Canada for this tiny, tiny island. But at any rate, what held me there was the story of the ship’s journey and this movement of thought from Europe to the Caribbean, away from a kind of rationalist European thinking, to the processes of surrealism, which rely much more on the unconscious, on dreams and have as a counterpart to the mechanised world of Europe, a much more organic world of the Caribbean. Hence the idea of one of the sets of images needing to be this verdant lush jungle. Not to say that’s what Martinique actually looks like, it’s the idea of this lushness that I was interested in. So that became the basis for the theatre. So we’d come from this idea of this journey into the idea of the theatre, from the theatre into the wanting to do a painted backdrop and from the painted backdrop into this idea of continuing that exploration in the drawings which are on exhibition here today. But maybe to give you an idea both of the theatrical work and how the green backdrop is used, we’ll show you clip number three, which should work.
Whoa, hold onto your hats. There’s a new wind blowing now. Is this my grave? Or is, is this the womb of my mother? Two, four.
[William] And standing by and it’s gone. Yes. Luke, sit in your chair. That’s nice to see you, William, going around the back. Masks up. Remember to show us your skirt, the pamphlet in your skirt and the other side. Trotsky? Yeah, not yet. Stand in the middle. And Stalin and chorus, stand and sing. Tony stillness. Movement and pauses. And after this Lenon is going to die. Keep on singing, quiet. Lenon, getting ready to die. Two men, yes.
Hey! Name Joseph Stalin. Date of death, 5 March, 1953. Occupation, the Chairman of the Central Committee of their Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Every time someone gets met at, he sticks out his chest for a medal. Midnight comes with a knife. Where is he now?
So this was to show the painted backdrop, which was drawn of that jungle. It had a sequence in looking at the political world in Europe at the time, which was of course after Trotsky had been chased out by Stalin. And it was going to be a sequence in which we saw Trotsky in the Caribbean or in Mexico and Stalin chasing him and Diego Riviera and Frida Carlo. But this was like the rhyming slab. In the end, I’d done the drawing, we’d put it up, we’d rehearsed a section. At the end of the day I said, you know what? I think none of this is going to work in the production. So the backdrop has been abandoned. The presence of the Soviet revolutionary leaders, they’ll be much more minimal. They come in as kind of a figure in the background, passengers on the ship that we see, but don’t have the same presence. So what’s left of that big backdrop with that whole impulse in fact are these set of six or eight landscape drawings and drawings of the portraits of the people on the ship. The texts in the drawings and maybe I’ll talk a bit about those texts. Before I knew I was doing a piece about this journey from Marsai to Martinique, I’d been interested in working with a chorus of women singers. There were singers that I’d come across at the art centre we have in Johannesburg called the Centre for the Less Good Idea and that we can talk about separately. But at any rate, I’d known when I started this production that I wanted this chorus of these remarkable singers. And I started gathering texts for them. I wasn’t sure how they would be used or what they would be about, but there were lines of poetry from many different sources that struck a chord.
And I put them together in a commonplace book, in a notebook like this, of different phrases that are written down. And then when the production begins, those phrases are typed out and cut out and spread on the table and then not taken randomly. It’s not a surrealist process of picking something out of a hat and seeing what chance presents, but it is a process of seeing what is there and how the lines which have been chosen for or just chosen almost randomly over several years start to coalesce into a possible meaning. And that’s the way the text of the chorus was put together. And then a secondary character who at the time I thought was a kind of character of death and now was turned into the captain of the ship, a kind of fairly sneak fellow, mixture of the captain and a Charon, the ferrymen of the dead, carrying people across the Atlantic rather than the River Styx became a character and the word started to coalesce onto these people. And later on came the text of Cesaire, some texts of Fanon and other poets from Martinique. But to read you for example, the first text of the first chorus, and it goes, “Now the House of Justice has collapsed, there has been wrong done. I ask for right. You whom I could not save, listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech. No foreign sky protected me. No stranger’s wing protected my face. I ask this bed, I ask this chair, why? Why is this age worse than others? You whom I could not save, listen to me. Disaster has fallen on everyone everywhere. Why is this age worse than others? Misfortune flows as from a water main. Shake the heart of this burnt out epoch. I take a brick to show how beautiful my house once was. Sing sorrow, but good will out in the end.” So that’s the text that the chorus of women sing at the beginning. And the authors, which I now see, we have footnotes in the script. And the first text there has been wrong. Now the House of Justice has collapsed, there has been wrong done. I ask for right, is Ese Callis from the humanities. Then there’s some lines by Milosz, the Polish or Lithuanian poet. Then from Anna Akhmatova, then of Vladimir Mayakovsky, and then from Yury Olesha, then from Bertolt Brecht, finally from from Iskoola from Agimano. So there’s a sense of all the different writings and words being allowed a space. And what this has to do with is it has to do with the belief in the category of recognition above the category of knowledge. Well, firstly, I’m not a poet and I’m not a writer. So there’s no way that I can write the libretto, but I also don’t want to hand the libretto over to someone else. It needs its strangeness. These other poets that are able to find phrases and have found phrases more than I can understand. Let me just check, that technically, is this working?
[Chris] The issue with-
The issue with-
[Chris] It keeps dropping-
The sound?
[Chris] The wifi-
The wifi.
I switched to YouTube. I have 81-
Apparently we have a wifi problem. So are we going to stop?
[Chris] No, just need to switch it. Let me switch networks. Should just maintain, swap over. Possibly.
Okay, we are having to change network to try to get a better wifi. So apologies for this delay. Are they still hearing us now?
[Host] Yes, we can hear you fine.
[Chris] Ask them if the signal is dropping.
Tell me if the signal’s dropping, give it a shot.
[Host] We will let you know. Everything seems fine right now.
[William] Okay, that’s important.
[Chris] It’s not our wifi then we’ll continue as is.
Okay, we’ll continue as we are here. So the text comes, so it’s about the category of recognition. Now this is also for me, one of the vital processes of the studio. There’s somewhere in which you can know exactly what you want to do and you carry out the work with this knowledge. You start at the top and make your way to the bottom. Or you can allow the categories of doubt, uncertainty, and provisionality to take a place in the studio. We’ll say, I’m not sure where this is going to end or how it is going to go, but I have this impulse of this green paper of drawings on green paper these characters and these phrases, they’re not random, but they’re not planned. So the text finds itself somewhere between something that’s constructed and something that is found. And that’s the terrain in which I find a lot of the work needs to happen. And what that means in a wider sphere is that this process in the studio, which is very obvious in the studio, you start making a line and you draw a horizontal line. It’s just a horizontal line, but your brain also immediately starts to interpret it. Oh, there’s a sky above and ground below and the line becomes a horizon. So there’s both what you think you’re doing and what you recognise over and above what you had planned to do. So there are kind of intelligences and ways of apprehending the world and making sense of the world that we can’t resist. It’s not a brilliance that one can see a sky and a ground divided by single line on a sheet of paper. It’s that we can’t resist doing it.
There’s something in us that needs to make sense of fragments. You half hear a phrase and you imagine what it could have been or might have been. If you are struggling in a language, you half understand all the words you don’t understand. Don’t just stand there as emptiness. You imagine what might have been said or if you can’t quite hear you mishear what someone has said. There’s part of you that rushes to fill that void and fill in what might the word that was missing or a thought that might be missing. And that’s a kind of a common process of the studio. And what that suggests is that what we take as a finished fact, this drawing of a landscape of a garden behind me as we see it here, in fact is always a willful construction, not of rational thinking, but of this element of us that needs to try to make sense of the world. And that’s the terrain that the studio kind of excels in. It’s the natural process of the studio. And what that suggests is that the way of apprehending the world, we all have to do, making sense of fragments, saying we understand history and what we do is we take different fragmentary stories and pieces of facts and dates and construct a possible history. What that does is it shows that the uncertainty and the doubt that is central to the studio practises are also ways of understanding the limitations of our understanding of the world and our certainties about the world, and makes a long-term argument for doubt, for being careful about being too certain on any judgments and understanding that all of these understandings of all of our understanding of different parts of the world are constructions that we make from incomplete fragments. I’ll show a final, just to fill you in a bit more on the theatre piece before I start taking questions or show you other fragments of the exhibition. But this is like a four minute trailer that we’ve made to show to theatres to try to persuade them to show the theatre project, which is only half made. It’s fragments filmed at the last workshop we did in my studio in Johannesburg and shows a bit further the ideas of the and the style of the play. “The Great Yes, The Great No.”
We’re on board a ship, the captain Paul Lamel from Marsai bound for Martinique, June, 1941, refugees escaping from Vichy, France.
[William] Surrealist, communist, Andre Breton, Claude Levy Strasse, the anthropologist, and onboard the ship also is the captain who in fact is Charon, the ferryman of the dead, who not only are transporting these people across the Atlantic, but is able to call up historical characters from the past and even some from the future to reflect on the shift between Europe and its colonial past.
Well, on the day I was born, God was sick and could only pick at his food. But with a little Schnapps, you can forget the world.
[William] He calls up the great Martinican poets and philosophers, Aime Cesaire, Suzanne Cesaire.
[William] He calls up the philosopher and psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon, the Nardal Sisters. Even calls up Josephine Bonaparte, Napoleon’s wife who came from this tiny island of Martinique. We have a duet of Josephine Bonaparte and Josephine Baker, another transatlantic voyager.
Hold onto your hats, there’s a new wind blowing now Two four.
I feel ridiculous in their shoes, in their tuxedo, in their dress shirts, in their collars, in their monocles, in their bowler hats.
We are looking at the shift between a rationalist view of the world and the openness that the surrealists suggest and bring and that is there in the poetry that comes from Martinique, of a different world, of a different world to be made.
The boat is filled also with the music of a chorus of women, with the ship’s band, which plays a range of music from cafe music to Martiniquan Bele, a dance form, not dissimilar to dance forms of music from southern Africa where the whole cast and production is made.
At the end of the day, there is so little wind. Citizen, what have they done with all the air? Miscarried dreams and nowhere to put them. Air stagnant, unbroken brightness of a single bird. I’m the worst of all my brothers and yet I’m the one who weeps at night.
We use the ship, the ship of fools as a way to allow all questions to bubble and find potential answers.
Well, so much for the theatre project, it’s always complicated to know, does the theatre project, is a theatre project, are the drawings made in the service of the theatre project? Or is the theatre project an enormously complex, cumbersome way of arriving at a suite of drawings, which are obviously what remains after the performances have finished? There’s, for me, always been an interesting migration of images across forms and the possibility of that movement, or that openness of a drawing starting in one form, becoming a sculpture, becoming an etching, returning back to a performance has been an important way of working over the last 40 years. When I began, I assumed one should just make drawings or just make theatre. And it took me a long while to understand that in my case, not in all cases, but certainly in my case, there was so much more to be gained by the cross-fertilization that happened of allowing all these different forms to bubble at the same time. I think that’s enough of a first statement of a where we are. And I’m happy to continue the discussion in relation to particular questions any of you might have. I don’t know if questions have come through, but I’m happy to answer them if they have.
[Host] Sure, there are a few questions. So I will ask now.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: The first is from Miriam. It asks, did you ever meet Lucian Freud?
A - That’s an easy one. No, I did not ever meet Lucian Freud. I would like to have, but I did not.
Q - [Host] Great, William, could you clarify for us who we is that you refer to when you talk about doing works in the studio?
A - Okay, so the studio, there’s a kind of balance between the drawings and the work on the drawings and also the work on animation, which happens in the studio in which it doesn’t help to have anyone else in the studio. So that’s a solitary activity, the making of the drawings that you see here. But as soon as it starts to be either sculpture or printmaking or work on the stage, suddenly it shifts and we are in the world of collaboration, which is to say not a series of technicians carrying out instructions from me, but the work itself being shaped by the possibilities of the skills and the temperaments of the people that I’m working with. So in the theatre project, I’m the director, I’m the constructor of the text, the maker of the animations, but there’s a huge team around who is part, not just of carrying out instructions, but also contain within them the energy of the authorship of the project as it develops. And in that there has to be an openness all the way through. Not that everyone’s suggestion makes sense or that everyone’s suggestion is not a democracy in that sense of everyone’s voice being equal, but there’s an openness to people seeing things that I hadn’t seen, finding connections, finding the less good ideas. I start with an idea, a very strong idea, but very often while working through, there are things that occur at the edges, at the side which we need to follow, which show us a different route into something. So when I say we, it’s generally referring to the works which are done with collaborators in the room, which would be the workshops, the making of the theatre, the theatre projects. In the case of the sculptures here, if it can be made with paper or a bit of wax, then I can do it. But as soon as it has to get transformed into bronze, or in the case of the coloured sculptures into aluminium and steel, then other participants and other parts, other members of the studio team are vital. It’s not possible without them.
Q - [Host] Thank you. Sally is wondering who does the movement, who collaborates on movement in the video of the theatre productions that you showed?
A - Well, in the, this case, and in most cases, the participants themselves are chosen, some of them for what they, what I’ve seen before of them as dancers, some of them as formal choreographers. But in this case, Tulani Chowke, who is, plays many different roles. He was played Josephine Bonaparte, sometimes Josephine Baker, he plays Lenin, he falls asleep on the piano. That’s his choreography under my direction. So for example, he might be collapsing and let’s say, “All right, what really works best is if you’re collapsing from the side of the piano, then we can see how you fall onto the keys of the piano.” And say to the pianist, “I want your right hand to keep playing the melody, and with your left hand, I want you to simply pick up his arm and drop it off the keys and go on playing.” I said to him, “As soon as she’d done that, see what happens if you fall across all the keys.” “And see then Tundi, how are you going to play on top and around him?” But so there’s again a conversation and the collaboration not possible for me to do the movements myself to demonstrate exactly how I want it done. But it’s also not the same as saying, “Oh, do the dance and that will be the choreography.”
Q - [Host] Can you say the name of the theatre project and when it’s available to see and where?
A - So the project is called “The Great Yes, The Great No,” which it comes from in fact a poem by Cavafy, the Greek poet. But in our case, I had the title before I knew what piece we were doing. And so while working on it, I’ve been kind of wanted the title and felt stronger about the title, but have been wondering what the great no and the great yes is. And in fact we discover in the final chorus of the piece, there’s a contradictory lines being expressed. On the one hand, one of the lines from the final chorus, let me find it here. “You’ll find no other country, no other shore, love no city. Cities are soon rubble, do not love people. People soon perish or they’re wronged and call for your help. It was always too late to save you.” So that’s one kind of the great, no, I guess. And the great yes is another line. “Everything changes. You can start afresh with your very last breath. The world is out of kilter. We will reset it. The seven times disunited will be united the eighth time.” And so our task, which you only discovered while rehearsing or trying to work out this final chorus was, how can we get those two lines to be coherent and happening at the same time? In other words, an optimistic view of the world and a pessimistic view of the world to hold equal weight. And to say that in fact we are on this line between them with both futures unfolding before us. And that has to do with trying to find the right balance. We haven’t found it yet between two different voices a soprano and a mezzo, who can hold those two lines, so you hear different, two different thoughts at the same time and can see the two different texts on the screen. So “The Great Yes, The Great No.” It opens at the Luma Foundation in Arles, it’s part of the Opera Festival of Aix-en-Provence, which is in July, opening on the, I believe on the 7th of July next year in the city of Arles at the Luma Foundation. And thereafter, it’ll be going to many places in North America and in Europe we hope.
[Host] Great.
When it gets finished.
Q - [Host] Thank you. Do you see yourself as a playwright as well as an artist?
A - No, I don’t see myself as a playwright because that involves sort of sitting down and writing the script. I’m a reluctant playwright. In other words, I’m responsible for getting the librettos together of these original works that we do. But I absolutely rely on the good writing of many, many other people, lines of different poetry, fragments. So I’m a reluctant writer. I see the making of the text a bit like the way one would make a drawing. Starting somewhere in the middle and making the process of making the drawing, the process of discovering what the drawing is at the end. And the texts are assembled in the same way. I’m reluctant to ask a writer just to write the libretto because I know I’ll chop it up and destroy a lot of work that they’ve done. So these other lines, which are taken simply as single lines is a more comfortable way for me to work, but I’m not a novelist. So the narrative arrives at the end and it’s not a thriller, it’s not a plot driven piece. There’s an arc, a trajectory, from the embarkation to the disembarkation with the journey across with the storm and the doldrums. And hopefully there’s an energy and a journey that we all follow on this ship.
Q - [Host] Great, what would you describe yourself as a developer of the dada techniques?
A - I think the thing about the dada, so the dada were working what it’s now 180 years ago, approximately, you know, during the first World War, they were trying to do something that was trying to stop art, an anti-art movement. But of course what happened is all they did was enormously enlarge the possibilities of what an artist could do. So every visual artist working in the world today has a debt of gratitude to the Dadas. If you’re a poet, it’s quite difficult to persuade someone to say, “Well, my poem today is going to be this drawing. I’m a poet, but my poem will be the stars.” Whereas if you’re a visual artist, no one blinks. If you say, “Well, I’m going to do a performance, I’m not actually going to make an oil painting, or I’m going to do the sound installation.” All of these possibilities were opened by the Dadas saying, whatever that happens in the context of art, can become art in this form. So yes, the wildness and the processes of the Dadas are still extremely present and strong for me. I think in many ways they’re still, it’s an area of thinking about the world and of making art that is still open for so much investigation and use by different artists.
Q - [Host] Great. I have a question here. Given your celebration of uncertainty, what are your absolutes?
A - What are my absolutes? I’m sure there are, but I would be, you know, the common absolutes that everyone has, protection of family, protection of friends, these kind of things are absolutes. Responding against evil where one sees it, but even in that context, understanding how limited our view is and how partial our view is, it doesn’t stop on having a very strong response and a necessary response. But as you know, what happens is very quickly, certainty has to transform itself into rage and to louder and louder shouting, hoping to get your point across. And what one is left with is the rage of certainty rather than any argument that can be expressed in that moment. I mean, it’s very clear when people are adamant, how soon any kind of reflection disappears.
Q - [Host] Great. I have a question here from Pamela who says, she’s Pamela, the German puppeteer. You work together at your house in Joburg on “Return of Ulysses.” She says, where is the connection between the Russian revolutionaries, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin and Martinique poets?
A - Well, the, I mean, there’s a thin connection, which is one of the reasons why they were that big long scene was taken out of the production. But there’s a very important one, which was with Fanon and the poets. There was the, and the ongoing debate, which exists very much today, about whether the way of understanding stratifications in the world are understood as economic, of questions of class as Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky all would’ve argued or whether questions of race become and identity become more important as some of the poets would’ve argued from Martinique. So that debate, which is very present and directly addressed in someone like Frantz Fanon is the question around that. And that is very much all the question that goes through South Africa through many questions of decolonization or questions about the weight of colonies. So in that sense, for me, it’s still for me a very present question, but we either have to make that clear for the people watching the play or the characters get a much more secondary role, which is what’s happening at the moment.
Q - [Host] Great. From the assembly of quotes you read out, I get the sense that despite all the negatives, they end in a somewhat optimistic note, would you say that this applies to current events? That’s from Erica.
A - I think that what we trying, what I explained at the end of trying to hold together is that double view of understanding the people that say, you know, one of the lines in this apropos of people in refugees and migrants, although that was written centuries ago, where you are, you know, where you are coming from, you are not wanted, where you are going to, you are not be welcome. That’s a condition of many people in the world fleeing from one war or another. The sense of where you left, it was better, where you’re going to, it’s going to be worse. That the sense, you know, living in South Africa of things going from bad to worse in terms of infrastructure, electricity and equality, poverty as we know. But at the same time, and it be wrong to ignore this, also, there are extraordinary projects of goodwill, of positivity that are being done at the same time. It’s not to say one is right and the other is wrong. To see only one way and ignore the other gives you a very force view of the world and vice versa. So the piece of trying to hang on to both of those possibilities seems to me vital. But the primary optimism, certainly for me as an artist in the studio is the activity of making, the idea of making irrespective of the subject matter, irrespective where you say this has a pessimistic message in the piece, the activity of making always for me has an optimism deeply built inside it, to make something rather than nothing. To have the need for other people to see something that has been made for that connection to other people through the external drawing that comes from you, but is beyond you once it is made.
Q - [Host] The last question I’ll give you is about the piece behind you. It’s asking about the significance of the red dots in the piece behind you.
A - Gosh, I think they came initially ‘cause there was a red sheet of paper in the studio next to the green paper I was drawing on, but they like kind of points of, you have the drawing and then you have the meta information, as it were, the comments on the drawing. And so the red dots are almost like a pinpoint saying, figure one, figure two, note A, note B, and the texts in the drawing “Agree overall, a dark and feted era.” “The old wound dries, it bleeds again.” “I’m still alive. It may soon be a sin.” “I understand I’m in your dreams.” “Through a wound in my chest, God peers at the world.” So in a way it’s like making a note, like as the comments do in it, the thoughts that are appearing. In which case, I suppose the drawing of the jungle is also a kind of drawing of one’s brain and the different synapses and points of connection between things. But this is me now trying to interpret the drawing after I’ve made it. I wouldn’t trust my interpretation too much.
[Host] Great, thank you. And in addition to all of the questions, there are many comments thanking you for your presentation. Wendy, I’ll hand it over.
[William] Well, thank you.
Well thank you so much. William, your practise is so diverse and it’s almost like with many of the projects that you are certainly your recent project. You’ve been ahead of your time and I only wish that I had you here with me in New York so we could wander around my apartment pointing at the different images so that we could really span a whole period of time. What I’m also astounded by is how your projects feed into themselves and how a a small event in one project becomes a central character of our entire new body of work. You know, whether it’s piece of text or colour or even a mistake, as you say, as you just pointed out, you remain alert and excited to possibilities in all kinds of directions. You know, and just to answer that question about the negativity, I think this is a beautiful way to live in a truly energising way to confront the complexity of what’s going on today. So I just really want to thank you for sharing your incredible, imaginative, creative, and intellectual genius with us and I want to welcome you to Lockdown University. Thank you very much for giving up your time, spending it with us on a Sunday. And, yes, please send my love to Ann and to the family and I’m so looking forward to seeing you soon. Thank you to everybody else for joining us today. And Emily, thank you as always. Thanks for that.
Thank you. Thank you.
[Wendy] Thank you.