William Kentridge More Sweetly Play the Dance

William Kentridge More Sweetly Play the Dance

EYE Filmmuseum nai010 publishers

William Kentridge More Sweetly Play the Dance

Edited by Marente Bloemheuvel and Jaap Guldemond

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EYE Filmmuseum nai010 publishers

Sandra den Hamer Foreword EYE Director EYE is extremely proud to present an exhibition and publication devoted to the intriguing work of South African artist William Kentridge.

Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg) rose to promi­ nence with his remarkable animation films and large-scale installations composed of film, sound, music, drawings and objects. In addition, he is active in theatre as a director of operas and multi-media performance pieces. His wideranging body of work includes obser­vations and reflections on the world, in which he con­ stantly searches for ambiguity and reveals the confusing complexity of society in serious yet humorous fashion.

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For EYE Filmmuseum, Kentridge developed More Sweetly Play the Dance, a new work featuring a 45-m-long frieze of moving images, accompanied by music by the African Immanuel Essemblies Brass Band. It is a visually stunning succession of passing people in a charcoal-black landscape, people carrying objects, pulling them along, as they do in age-old processions and marches, or in endless streams of refugees.

The museum is also presenting the immersive, eight-screen film installation I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine (2008), based on The Nose,

a short story written by the Russian Nikolai Gogol in 1836. The installation features a remark­able sound­t rack by Philip Miller, full of references to con­s tructivist experiments by the Russian avant-garde, to Soviet cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, and to the provocative social satire of that era.

Finally, the presentation includes Other Faces (2011), the tenth and most recent film from the series Drawings for Projection (1989-2011). In this gripping work Kentridge deploys his dis­ tinc­tive stop-motion technique, in which he films his powerful charcoal drawings, rubs them out again, alters them, and films them again. In the series Kentridge focuses on the various sides of himself, as personified in the entrepreneur/ capitalist Soho and his opposite, the poet/lover Felix. As in many of his works, the story takes place against the background of contemporary Johannesburg, with its pervasive legacy of apartheid.

The creation of More Sweetly Play the Dance forms the point of departure for this publication.

First, curator Jaap Guldemond offers a short introduction to the project. Then William Kentridge explains his motives in an insightful essay, discussing the context in which the piece came into being and reflecting on the substantive

Foreword

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background to the work. The photographs that accompany this essay were taken during the workshop held at his studio in 2014 and give a good impression of the preparations and record­ ing of the work. We see the artist here as the stimulating director of a large and com­plicated production with an extensive crew in the studio, the place where the works are created and develop meanings. Also included are images of the early stages in the develop­ment of More Sweetly Play the Dance, which show his experimentation with light and with various charcoal backdrops. The eventual work is presented on the foldout in the middle of the book and on the cover. Finally, a separate appendix features a colourful parade of images of processions, demonstrations, friezes, marches, parades, refugees, treks and caval­ cades from various periods of history and from many parts of the world.

We would like to thank the artist for his trust in our museum and the excellent cooperation.

Throughout the project he and his highly professional studio under the direction of Anne McIlleron have been of great help. We would also like to thank our various partners. First and foremost, the Lichtsicht – Projection Biennale in Bad Rothenfelde, Germany, where the new work More Sweetly Play the Dance will be on

view this autumn, on a huge wall of blackthorn brushwood. We would also like to thank our financiers and partners, especially the Ammodo and the Dutch BankGiroLoterij. Last but not least, we are grateful for the collaboration with the Holland Festival and the Dutch National Opera, where Kentridge’s production of Alan Berg’s opera Lulu will premiere this summer.

In directing this piece, Kentridge drew inspira­ tion from the many silent films of the 1920s and 1930s from the EYE collection.

Illustration Credits

The photographs on pp. 2-47 were taken by Stella Olivier during the workshop for More Sweetly Play the Dance, Johannesburg, 2014 The images on pp. 49-63, 82-93 and the front cover are video stills from intermediate stages from More Sweetly Play the Dance, Johannesburg, 2014 The cover flaps and the leporello feature video stills from More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015

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William Kentridge More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015 8-channel video installation with four megaphones, sound HD video 1080p / ratio 16:9 duration approximately 14 minutes Video editing and construction: Janus Fouché Music composition: Johannes Serekeho Music performed by the African Immanuel Essemblies Brass Band (under Bishop R.E. Sefatsa) Vocals: Bham Ntabeni, Moses Moeta Percussion: Tlale Makhene Sound mix: Gavan Eckhart

More Sweetly Play the Dance

Jaap Guldemond

More Sweetly Play the Dance is the wonderful title of the work that William Kentridge made at the invitation of EYE in Amsterdam and the Licht­sicht – Projection Biennale in Bad Rothen­ felde, Germany. The piece is a frieze measuring some 45 m in length, a band of moving images that depicts a never-ending procession. In Bad Rothenfelde, where the work will be presented in the open air, the frieze will be many times bigger. A seemingly endless parade of people pass by on the huge frieze. People carrying baskets on their heads, people holding surplus household items in their arms, people dragging along huge amounts of card­board, plastic or pieces of metal in trolleys. And dancing figures or people carrying images of saints on long wooden sticks as in a protest march. Kentridge shows the figures as shadows that are not completely dark but, occasionally, reveal all sorts of details and colours. It is a sombre yet vigorous procession that we encounter more often in Kentridge’s work.

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Two important aspects of Kentridge’s art come together in More Sweetly Play the Dance. The first is his use of the moving image, which seems

to reference very early, primitive or even precinema techniques: silhouettes and simple charcoal drawings. It is, as he puts it himself, ‘stone age technology’. The second is the depic­ tion of groups of people ‘on the move’. As early as 1999, Kentridge made a so-called shadow procession – for the Yerebatan cistern, a wonder­ ful under­ground water reservoir in Istanbul – featuring countless figures who form something of a catalogue of people ‘on the move’. People fleeing from hunger, from floods, from violence, from poverty, from sickness. People protesting against political regimes, against corruption, against economic exploitation. People unfor­ tunate enough to fill the newspapers and news bulletins every day. These are images that Kentridge comes across not only in the media, but also closer to home in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The silhouette processions continue the themes set in motion with the charcoal-drawn animation films that Kentridge started making in 1989 and that established his reputation. His short stopmotion films Drawings for Projection (1989-2011) depict South African life during apartheid and the period that followed. A recurring protagonist in many of these films is Soho Eckstein, the proto­­type of an old-school capitalist from Johannesburg who moulds his surroundings to

More Sweetly Play the Dance

his benefit, enabling him to boost his wealth and power, all the while unscrupulously abusing and exploiting workers and natural resources.

It is interesting to note that Soho Eckstein is clearly modelled physically on Kentridge him­ self, despite the fact that he is regarded as a particularly humane and ‘progressive’ artist and whose parents were well-known anti-apart­ heid lawyers (his father defended Nelson Mandela at the Treason Trial in 1956). Kentridge’s family, Jews originally from Lithuania, played a prominent role in South African life for a long time until many of them emigrated during the apartheid era. Writing about these films, art critic David Brody noted that it seemed that Kentridge ‘conducts, one may say, his own Truth Commission’. By giving Soho Eckstein his own features, ‘Kentridge implicates himself in order to redeem us all’.1 On the relation between his work and the political reality, Kentridge is explicit: ‘I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings.’ No political dogmas, prin­ciples or overtly political art.

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‘The imper­atives of what you take from the outside world into your work will filter through: the work will show who you are, and if there is

truth, in Plato’s belief in the absoluteness of the word and reason, he also notes that this ‘com­mitment’ to enlightenment, this appeal to enlightenment, has led to enormous misery in history, with examples such as Robespierre and the French revolution, Pol Pot’s ‘enlightenment project’ in Cambodia and Lenin’s and Stalin’s ‘improvement project’ in the Soviet Union.

But of far greater importance in this light is the nine­teenth-century colonization project in Africa, in the guise of bringing light to the Dark Continent, which, according to Kentridge, is a gruesome working out of the impulses of Plato’s Cave. In other words, the enlightenment that stems from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave leads, figuratively speaking, to dark shadows.

a political interest in you, that will come through in your work. But to start with a political mani­ festo is a very bad way of approaching art.’2 The work that Kentridge made for the under­ ground cistern in Istanbul – Shadow Procession, 1999 – foreshadows his use of comparable silhouette processions, of which More Sweetly Play the Dance is the most recent example.

Without doubt, Kentridge’s choice of so-called silhouette images refers to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In this famous passage from his dialogue about the state, Plato tells of a group of prisoners who are shackled in a cave in such a way that they can only see the shadows of the people passing the entrance to the cave. Since they have never seen anything else, they assume the shadows they see are ‘real’ people, objects or things. Those eventually set free from their chains will learn that the ‘real’ reality is out­side, and they are obliged, according to Plato, to return into the darkness of the cave with this knowledge and liberate the other prisoners from their ignorance. He, the philosopher king, has a duty to bring enlightenment to the others.

Knowledge, Plato asserts, is directly linked to power, and this is the point where Kentridge diverges and charts his own course. Not only does Kentridge question belief in an absolute

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Kentridge counters this with a ‘belief’ in uncertainty and ambiguity. A belief in the gaps between the words, the hesitation. He links all these issues directly to the working process in the studio. Or, as he himself expresses it, a belief in ‘the need to arrive at a meaning, without the medium of language and logic – in fact, in opposition to it’.3 In this same light, Kentridge talks of the silhouette image as an ‘in-between image’ of recognizing and knowing. He is interested in the silhouette image because it refers to images that are already known, but it differs from them to the extent that the observer

is compelled to turn these ‘reflections’ into a form, into a meaningful image: ‘The very lean­ ness of the illusion pushes us to complete the recognition – and this prompts an aware­ness of the activity, recognizing in this activity our agency in seeing, and our agency in apprehending the world.’4 More Sweetly Play the Dance makes wonderfully clear how we as observers fill the gap, how we make the shift from the mono­ chromatic shadow to the colour of the object, from its flatness to its depth, both literally and figuratively.

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Notes David Brody, ‘Taking the World by Drawing: William Kentridge and Animation’, artcritical: the online magazine of art and ideas, 16 June 2010, http://www.artcritical.com/2010/06/16/williamkentridge-and-animation/.

Sean O’Toole, ‘William Kentridge, Three projects in Johannesburg, Confessions of an optimist’, Mail & Guardian, 7-13 November 2014.

William Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 14.

Ibid., 29.

If We Ever Get to Heaven Occasional notes on More Sweetly Play the Dance William Kentridge

He that fled his Fate: a journey of sixty years.

While he was going it awaited him, seated at the gutter-side.

And it said, ‘Come let us eat, my dear friend!’

And when he asked, ‘Who is it?’

It said, ‘Am I not thy Fate?’

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African proverb of unknown origin, sitting in the studio for the last 30 years

Blackthorn A message has come into the studio, via email, from Bad Rothenfelde, a small town in Germany.

There is a wall 412 m long, 10 m high. The wall is made of blackthorn brushwood piled high – the remnants of a salt-works. Saline water from a nearby spring is run over the branches, which leach out impurities and increase the salinity of the water. The branches are whitened in the process. A calcium encrusted rough white sur­ face is the result. There is an invitation to make a projection on this wall. Projectors and speakers are already installed. This is intriguing both for the strange projection surface offered and for the scale and elongated format of the screen.

The ground plan, the photos that arrive with the email are pinned to the studio wall.

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Marble Blocks

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There is a project already underway in the studio – another frieze, this time for the darkened marble walls of the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, from Ponte Sisto towards Castel Saint Angelo, a 500-m straight section of the river with walls 10 m high. This frieze will be a series of drawings made using the bacteria and pollu­ tion that have darkened the marble stones.

Stencils of figures will be cut out – 10-m-high stencils – and the wall around and between each stencil washed with high pressure hoses, leaving a trace of dark figures against the white of the newly cleaned marble. A frieze viewed by walk­ ing along its length. The subject of this frieze is Triumphs & Laments. Pinned on the studio walls are prepa­ratory charcoal drawings of heroes and victims from Roman history. Dead Remus (from a fifteenth-century engrav­ing), the head of St Theresa in ecstasy, Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in the Trevi fountain, the dead Pasolini (from a newspaper photograph), the widows of Lampedusa, a sculpture of Cicero.

The question of image and theme shatter into the practicalities of the making, moving between the concrete offer of the project, the walls, the themes the walls suggest and logis­ tical steps to work on the walls.

In the Roman project, I will unwind Trajan’s column. What would it be to take figures that we normally see in the scroll spiraling upwards and unfurl it along a continuous expanse? Soldiers, generals, heroes; but also prisoners, slaves, defeated armies.

In Bad Rothenfelde the question is how bright are the projectors, how loud are the loud­speakers installed along the promenade along which people walk down the extent of the wall?

Yet, we have in both cases a sense of the possi­ bility of extended space, of the viewer being unstable, and moving down the image, rather than the more familiar state of a static viewer and a moving image. An idea of a procession and of the frieze starts to take hold. This halfformed image – a mental projection onto the imagined walls – is formed and fed by magnetic attraction between a world of images already held in memory and the possibilities (and limitations) suggested by the physical material of the project: the surface of the walls, the technique of arriving at the image. Do I film actors? Draw figures? Tear paper figures? Make cardboard puppets? What is the technology through which the work will be presented?

Thinking with a Fresh Eye Another beginning. An invitation arrives from EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam to do an exhibi­ tion. There is one beautiful, strangely shaped, long gallery. It has many pleats and folds. It immediately suggests not simply an extended projection, but rather an uneven extended projection – like the folded pages of a leporello book. The Bad Rothenfelde project merges with the possibilities of EYE. There is the prospect of imagining the piece both inside and outside.

The Bad Rothenfelde site offers an expansive scale (projections 10 m high). EYE offers a more intense environment, with closer control of sound, light and projection surface. Both spaces are in my head as the project unfolds.

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Yet another beginning. Janus, the computer wizard in the studio, comes in saying he has equipment used for playing computer games.

He wants to see if we can use it as a simple way of recording movements of people without the need for blue screens, without the need for electrodes and wire frames, and use this as a kind of rough animation. He sets up a camera on the floor, stands with his arms akimbo until the computer program recognizes there’s a figure in front of it, and does some simple move­

ments. The computer follows his movements – a schematic fine line on the screen, that moves as he does. We record the movements.

We need to translate this into a drawing, so a simple stick figure is made, almost a schematic skeleton. In a very rough and crude approxima­ tion of the movements that Janus has made, the stick figure on the screen repeats his move­ ments. There is a lot of leeway in the ligaments between the neck, the elbows, the knees and the feet. The computer is not good at learning its task, at recognizing all the movements of the body, and every now and then the head of the skeleton figure flies off at a tangent when a complicated move is made by the dancer. The computer gives up and we have a jumble of sticks and lines and bones of the collapsed figure, until the computer gathers itself, recon­s tructs the figure and continues with the dance. The very imperfection of the computer program is the point of interest. I am put in mind of the collapsing figures of Disney’s skeleton dance from 1929. This is one of the great moments of animation history. There is an inventiveness in the relation of the dance of the skeletons to the music. The transformation the skeletons undergo suggests that all is possible.

Thinking with a Fresh Eye

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My task immediately becomes to make a drawing of the elements of a skeleton – to see how well or how imperfectly the computer can make it dance. A day is spent making crude paintings of skeletons, working with a fat brush with an imperfect point and Indian ink on pages of a dismantled dictionary. The skeletons are crude. Some without arms, some with thin ribs, some primarily with a large spine. I remember a photograph from Nicaragua in which the lower half of a body is intact but all the top half of the body has been picked clean by predators and vultures and one has the revealed naked spine standing up from the trousers of the dead person. When we have solved the question of the computer being able to recognize the figure, when we have a sense of the translation of the figure into the drawing of the skeleton, the crucial question is of course the dance itself.

All members of the studio are given a chance to perform in front of this motion-capturing eye of the computer’s camera and we see how these translate. At this stage it is not a question of choreography, but rather a process of learning the grammar of the machine.

We discover very quickly that the obvious way in which we dance, starting with the shoulders, elbows and hands, stops us seeing the actual movement of the figure. One needs almost a

stillness of the upper torso and a slight move­ ment in the hips and legs and knees and a small movement in the shoulders. The movement captured by the computer functions to magnify small gestures, to make one focus on a minute act in the same way that a person lifting a cup of tea to their lips is of no interest, but a puppet performing the same actions makes the idea of the drink, the thirst, the cup, enormous.

I have worked with Dada Masilo, the South African dancer, for The Refusal of Time, in which a duet was performed between her dancing and my texts and thoughts about the nature of our attitude towards time. The pleasure of the work, of the interaction and of what that duet became, made me hunt for another project to work on with Dada. In another corner of the studio was this absence, a desire to continue the explora­tion of working not just with a dancer, but with Dada’s specific move­ments.

I have an idea now of a skeleton and more to the point a skeleton dance, not trying to repli­ cate what Disney did but certainly having that in the back of my mind. Where or how can one use it? Ideas of projects multiply at this point.

Is it going to be a film just of a skeleton dance, a remake of the Disney film, much as I had remade Georges Méliès’s Journey to the Moon?

Is it going to be a section of a larger film?

Can the skeleton sustain a project on its own?

I remain to be convinced by the move­ment. The imperfections of the computer trans­lation are seductive, but the project itself is pushed if not right out of the studio, then to a back corner.

But nonetheless there starts to be a gathering of energy in the studio. The two walls, one in Rome and one in Bad Rothenfelde, the skeletons, the idea of a frieze.

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Der Tanz ist aus Meanwhile, I am working on a production of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, based on the plays Erdgeist and Pandora’s Box by Frank Wedekind.

At the end of almost every scene of the opera there is a body lying on the stage. Three of Lulu’s husbands, various lovers and in the end of course Lulu herself dies. At the end of one scene she says of the departed lover or hus­band: ‘His dance is over.’ The opera is about the instability and impossibility of obsession and desire. None of the men can be who Lulu hopes for, Lulu can’t be the woman that the men hope for. The impossibility of a resolution of this impasse in each case dramatically ends in death.

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Whilst

So from the opera, from one of the many lines at the end of one scene, comes the idea of the Dance of Death.

If we had to make a painting of the opera, placing the scenes next to each other on a storyboard, we would reconstruct a frieze reminiscent of a medieval Dance of Death in which Death is personified, usually as a skeleton and often covered with a thin veil or some other clothing, in which the figure of Death accompanies a series of figures in a long drawing. The frieze is the natural form of the Dance of Death. Sometimes the frieze is broken up into pages as in Holbein’s Dance of Death, where each iteration of death and its next victim is shown on a separate page. But the classic examples, the ones that sit in our head, are of these long friezes in which death recurs like a beating drum between each figure: ‘You are not immune from my power. The pope, a cardinal, a priest, a king, an aristocrat, a guild man, a farmer, a peasant and a child, this is what we all come to’, says the work.

These, then, are the elements we had surround­ ing us in the studio. The two walls, blackthorn and marble (photos, ground plans), the Play­ Station controller and its animation hovering between acceptance and rejection, the comic grotesque of the Disney film, the Dance of Death from Lulu, an anticipation of Dada’s dancing.

‘Whilst’ is the grammatical form of un-anti­ci­ pation. Whilst hanging up the washing, whilst reading the newspaper, whilst pausing at the stop street, whilst peeling a peach – the visitor calls, the world changes.

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From Here to There More Sweetly Play the Dance is a processional project arising from these strands. Figures walking across the eight screens that constitute the format of the projection. One exploration results in eight small computer screens spread across two tables in the sitting room of the house next to the studio that we are using for editing the project. Another emerges enlarged onto eight viroc board screens in Amsterdam at the EYE Filmmuseum, or into an expansive 100 m across the blackthorn brushwood wall in Bad Rothenfelde. At this stage the Rome project separated out. Triumphs & Laments became a project for a drawn frieze on the walls of the Tiber – no pro­­jec­tions, only figures drawn from a particular history.

The procession is a form I have used many times before, trying to encompass in the work the muchness of the people in the world. And to record the fact that here in the twenty-first century human foot power is still the primary means of locomotion and we are still locked in the manual labour of individual bodies as a way of making the world.

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Specifically the image of a procession goes back to Goya and his paintings of processions.

It goes back more recently to photographs of refugees fleeing Rwanda, coming from north to south Sudan. All the movement that still exists across the continent of Africa. Further back to the images of the processions of people from the Balkans. The huge population of move­ments of people at the end of the Second World War. The image of a procession of people pulling or carrying their baggage is both a contemporary and immediate image and one deeply rooted in our psyches.

In some ways we first come across it in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In a prelude to talking about the responsibility of the Philosopher King, he describes people walking behind a screen carry­ing wooden and stone objects in their hands, their shadows thrown onto the wall opposite the prisoners shackled in the cave watching the shadows. Plato’s focus in his writings is of course on the viewers and the journey of the viewers from darkness into light.

The procession films focus rather on those carriers themselves. The anonymous performers in the Sisyphean task of showing people in the cave the necessity of viewing the light. The endless procession of people carrying on their

From Here to There

heads and shoulders baskets, bundles of clothes, spoils of war. All of history carried by them.

Who are these anonymous carriers? Taken for granted by Plato? Taken for granted by us as we see them walking through the streets of Johannesburg, through the streets of so many cities of the world? They’re the peasants, the proletariat, the unemployed, people at the margins of society. As Woyzeck says: ‘If ever we get to heaven, we’d still have to help make the thunder.’

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Recycling There is both a pleasure and an energy that comes from 40 people gathered in the down­town studio. ‘More team than project’, as my wife says. Actors, musicians, editors, cameramen.

There is an impulse for a work to be made – but with an openness as to what this will be. The studio is filled with the combined energy waiting in the psyches, in the limbs, in the intentions of all participants.

In the large studio in town, a platform 60 cm above the floor runs the 18-m length of the studio.

The wall is floodlit behind this walkway. A camera is pointed at people walking across and along it.

We are re-staging the procession of Plato’s figures in the cave.

The final procession will have to be 100 m long, but we can only film one small section, so each figure that walks across the length of the walk­ way has to do it several times to give us the variations and alterations that would naturally occur across the long distance of the walk.

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Who are the people doing the walk? People seen on the streets of Johannesburg. The recycling trolley pullers, people who every Tuesday

morning go through the piles of refuse from the suburbs of the city, and separate it out into cardboard, plastic, abandoned pieces of metal and load it onto makeshift trolleys, pull these trolleys through the traffic, up the hills from the suburbs into the centre of the city where they are delivered to the recycling depot. They are paid a small sum for each load, for the weight of the plastic, the paper, the cardboard. Enormous bundles far higher than a man, higher than the cars passing them in the street, for a pittance.

At the recycling depot, all is high-tech. There are people employed by the recycling depot, with all the correct procedures of unemploy­ment insur­ ance, of sick benefits, all the things demanded through the labour struggles in South Africa over the years. The two systems are essential together. This formal mechanized economy, and the informal army of desperate people who will rise at three in the morning to start their collec­ tion of yesterday’s cardboard boxes. This is one group of people in the procession.

There is also the procession of saints, such as one would see in Italian religious processions of people carrying images and effigies of saints and heroes in front of them as a brass band leads them in procession. So, we need to make a series of saints.

Making a Head What does it take to make a head? The heads are drawn on small pages of an encyclopedia, about 12 x 14 cm. Some based on heroic figures, figures from Rome: Cicero, Mucius Scaevola, Giordano Bruno. These are made with a thought ahead to the procession of figures to be done on the banks of the Tiber. Some of the trophies are based on Chinese heroic heads from the cultural revolution that appeared on posters, on enamel mugs, on every object. These too are painted with Indian ink onto the pages of the encyclopedia. There are other heads that are simply a brush mark. What is the minimum needed to make a head? An oval and a line for a neck is enough to make us recognize that what we are looking at is both a brush mark and a person. These images are then projected onto large sheets of paper, about the size of a person, and the brush marks traced, and cut out or torn out. These sheets of paper are mounted on stiffer cardboard, reinforced with pieces of wood at the back, so that these silhouetted, brushmarked faces and heads can be carried aloft by the people walking in the procession as so many saints.

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What is carried? Not only saints’ heads, but other spoils: typewriters, a bath, a pile of books, cages, bundles of firewood. As if one could draw all the hopes, fears and desires.

What else comes into the Dance of Death? The dancing figures. There are African churches in which part of the service and part of the ritual consists of a circling dance, as if the dizziness will make a trance and the trance will bring one away from one’s everyday life into a less mundane state. This dance that spins and con­ tinues is one of the elements of the Dance of Death of the crowds, performed by the group of actors and singers assembled in the studio.

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Degrees of Darkness Plato writes about the shadows of things cast up against the wall. But in the procession we are working with silhouettes of figures. If one takes all light off the actors and puts all the light on the back wall, they appear as shadows – completely without substance, a trace of something else. But if we put a side light at the end of the long walkway, traces of colour in their costumes emerge. The figures are more than shadows.

Amongst trolley­pullers gathering their wood and metal and paper for the recycling depots of the city, are people wearing plastic. Plastic against the rain, sometimes sheets of plastic the size of a tarpaulin, like a huge cloak, tied with a string around the waist. Very often with plastic garbage bags arranged in layers on top of them to keep out the rain at night and to give some measure of protection against the cold.

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We make our costumes partly out of plastic.

Large sheets that are painted with glue, with ink – so that when they are seen against the bright back wall, there is not a complete trans­ parency but a sense of an enveloping shell around the figures. The question of the presence or the

absence of the figures, how much they are translated into shadows, becomes this question of the degree of paint or glue, the numbers of layers of plastic necessary to keep a sense of a thickness of figure, but to allow them to float in and out of being silhouettes against the wall.

This is started in the filming. It is continued in the editing, where the contrast is pushed or lowered or raised – a series of technical and formal solutions that come to the heart of the substance of the project itself.

What are the dances? They are the revolving dances of the church groups. They are people carrying saints, as in a religious procession.

They are dances done with sticks and spades.

The spade dances from Johannesburg to induct young miners into the process of mining under­ ground. They are taught the correct way to use a spade, to move the bowels of the earth, to empty Plato’s Cave to find the gold inside it.

We have a dance, a fight with spades as sticks, and sticks, which refer back to South African traditions of children’s stick­fighting as a prelude to military activities in an older age.

And there are the dances that Dada Masilo has developed when working on her other Dances of Death. Her version of Swan Lake, her reinter­ pretation of Carmen, her dance about Ophelia – all pervaded by a mixture of Eros and Thanatos,

Degrees of Darkness

of sex and death. This is the terrain of the HIV/AIDS landscape in South Africa.

In the town studio on the walls there are the cardboard cut-outs: the heads of saints and their attributes (the flower, the bath, the tele­ phone). There are the remnants of the work­ shop: the abandoned recycling trolley, a pile of the plastic that wrapped the actors. In the hard drive of the computer in the garden studio we have their living embodiments: the teams of burlaks pulling the trolleys – on which are performed civic rituals of the politician, the translator, the stenographer. There are discrete groups waiting to be given their place in the larger procession: professional mourners, the tuba section of the brass band, the three paper skeletons, which are allowed out of the cave of the studio to be put to work under the card­ board gallows.

We are gathering the raw material from which the procession – its order, its rhythm, its shape – will be constructed on the editing table.

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What is in a Day’s Filming?

Avarice – gathering the money – throw money away – film in reverse (Luc / Tlale?) (filmed & abandoned) Stick & Spade dance (filmed, used) Extracts from Studio Notes for 25 September 2014 Dance with Flag (used)

To film:

On the trolley – Raft of the Medusa

holding flag pole & sail (& 2 office fans) (filmed, abandoned)

Blind leading the blind (filmed) Ebola patients & drips (filmed & used) Drips – bottle, globe, funnel, book, bird, brush mark, gibbet (filmed & used) Slave shackles (abandoned) Ship of Fools – film on a long trolley (12 people on board) Bar & drinks (abandoned) Tango dancers (filmed & abandoned) Palm tree & chandelier (cardboard) (not made)

Washing – disappearing clothes line (complicated machinery made - abandoned) Beating the Anvil (Goya) (not filmed) Procession of Saints – 23 cut-out heads (filmed, used)

Bringing the Night (Bham to pull a darkness behind him? Or darkness drawn from right to left?)

(Bham filmed, darkness pending)

Trolley pullers (burlaks) – group of 8 (filmed, used)

group of 3 (filmed, used)

Typist (adjust stockings)

multiply x3 for a typing pool (filmed, used x2)

Chris-Waldo, Chris – make a swivel chair for typist (Sue)

(made, used, extremely comfortable, now part of studio furniture)

Pulling (motion capture) for skeleton pull (Luc to perform) (captured, abandoned)

POSSIBLE TITLES? Paying for the Dance NO Emergency (Thé Dansant) NO Paul Celan ‘Death is a master from Germany.’

‘Play death more sweetly’ ?

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Playing the Dance We have the actors, we have a rack full of costumes, we have our sheets of plastic, we have our cardboard cut-outs, a trolley, a walk­ way, a camera. And we have a brass band. On YouTube I listened to a series of African brass bands playing. I watched fragments of the dancing skeletons, of Dada’s spade dance against the different pieces of music. I found one piece of music, and then sent members of the studio out to hunt for it, as if to hunt for Cinderella, having in their hand the glass slipper. The African Immanuel Essemblies Brass Band was found, and was invited to come to the workshop, both to re-perform the song that I had heard, and to see how they could be part of the procession. They came from Sebokeng, an hour’s journey from Johannes­ burg. It is both their image and their music that goes through the film. And an extension of their music.

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I knew at different points we would need moments of silence, moments where the music and film could be stretched out; to play desires of people on the screen against themes of sound, or where we would need silence. The song that they played was also taken apart.

Just the tubas playing. Just the accordion. Just the saxophone. Two singers improvised a song that could accompany the band. We recorded the song both with the band, and the two singers by themselves. Assembling in its digital form – in a music recording, in the images caught by the camera – a vocabulary for the piece, of sound, of images, from which to con­s truct the entire piece.

The final element of these pieces of the vocabulary were drawings of landscapes, of skies, of clouds that were then done in the studio (and are still to be done as I write this), to put behind and in front of the people on the walk. These landscapes are based on the mining landscapes around Johannesburg.

Empty mining landscapes, essentially flat, a wasteland of broken glass, burnt stubble of grass, empty billboards, the flat hills of mining tailings.

So the piece starts with ideas of the German Dance of Death, with ideas from Lulu and Buchner. But in the musicians, in the actors, in the landscapes, in the figures they are enacting, it is rooted in the city of Johannesburg.

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The Room of Failures There is a second invisible procession. The various dead ends of the project, the abandoned sections, the figures that could not work in the procession. Music not used. Ideas that seemed so clear when they were ideas, and that seemed so dull when they were enacted.

A second series of figures are hidden in an even deeper cave, from which not even Plato would allow them to walk across the platform to show the meaning of the world to the captives in the cave.

A series of quotidian domestic scenes were filmed. We spent two days making a washing line with washing that could disappear into a megaphone. We solved the technical question of the megaphone swallowing the clothes. We spent several hours filming it. But when we looked at it, all that emerged was the technical work of achieving the image. There was no residue, no ‘more than we expected’.

There is a gap between the excitement as an idea of an image starts to emerge, and its realization. Death dancing the tango. The pages of a newspaper blowing away from its reader. A small jazz ensemble pulled on its own trolley. All actions were competent but none of them could exceed their first image. All just showed the mechanics of the filming and the making. All were abandoned.

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Thinking Sideways While working on the More Sweetly Play the Dance procession films, I was engaged with a project relating to the cultural revolution in China, in particular to the dances and model operas commissioned by Madame Mao and performed during the period of the cultural revolution. These evoke the tradition of the Peking Opera and nineteenth-century classical dance, but are filled with images of red flags, with dancers on points with Chinese carbines fighting the Japanese, the small committee of the village communists winning out over the imperial aggressors. Fragments of this project have made their way into the procession, both the images of saints and in the final dance of Dada, on a trolley, en pointe, brandishing her Chinese carbine. At the last moment this image was taken from the Chinese project and pressed into service as the final image of the film.

The film itself, unwillingly, without any desire on its or my part, becomes part of a series of projects looking at the despair at the end of utopian projects – a probable failure, the probable impending failure of the utopian hope.

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At the time the project was being made, in the middle of 2014, the newspapers, the television, were filled with stories of the Ebola outbreak.

Images of people in paper suits, paper masks and goggles leading by the arm people in the final stages of distress and illness leading to death in west Africa. As a diary, this is what we saw in these days while making the film. These images of the drip sets feeding into people’s arms became part of the project. The drip sets become other talismans of hopes – a telephone, a bird, a world.

More Sweetly Play the Dance There is something always utopian about dance, the coordination of muscle, sinew, intention and delight that constructs the rhythmic purposeful movement of people in a dance. There is an irony of course in a dance both for and against death. Death as a dancer leading its companions to their end, and the medieval idea that if one danced furiously enough, if there was enough energy released in the making of the dance, one could keep death at bay.

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first page of the 16 pages leporello. only the 8 front pages will be printed. folded zig-zag, sewn between the 4th and 5th section.

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leporello back side not printed

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William Kentridge

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William Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa. He studied Politics and African Studies at the Uni­ versity of Witwatersrand in Johannes­ burg (1973-1976), Fine Art at Johan­nes­ burg Art Foundation (1976-1978) and mime and theater at L’École Inter­nationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris (1981-1982).

Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles – the dissolution of apartheid – William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects. Kentridge has always had an ambivalent relationship to the influence of European art and culture, focused by his own German, Jewish and Lithuanian roots. The influence of satirists such as Daumier, Goya and Hogarth is visible, and he also often used European classical themes as frameworks for contemporary African subjects.

Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation and performance, he trans­ mutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. In a signature technique, he photographs successive additions or erasures to his charcoal drawings on paper, recording scenes as they evolve. Between 1989 and 2011 he made an important cycle of films, entitled Drawings for Projection, that allegorize South Africa’s political upheavals through the life of the central

character Soho Eckstein. In this cycle of ten films, Kentridge addresses the doubling and contrary sides of the self, personified in the entrepreneur/capitalist Soho and his foil, the poet/lover Felix.

In addition to film and drawing, an important part of his career has been devoted to theatre. From 1975 to 1991 he was a member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, in Johannesburg and Soweto. In 1992, he began collaborat­ing with Handspring Puppet Company as a designer and director. Handspring and Kentridge together created multimedia pieces using puppets, live actors and animation, including Woyzeck, Faustus in Africa! and Ubu & the Truth Com­ mission to reflect on colonialism and the human struggle between the past, modernity and ethics.

Kentridge has also directed per­ formances, theatrical plays and operas that have been presented in festivals and theaters around the world. These include Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (2005) and The Nose by Shostakovich (2010).

In 2015 his production of Berg’s Lulu premiers at the Dutch National Opera (Holland Festival), a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the English National Opera in London.

William Kentridge has participated in a number of international biennales and in Documenta X (1997), XI (2002) and XIII (2012) as well as the Venice Biennale (2005, 1999 and 1993). A retro­spective of his work ended in 2012 after a three-year international tour that began at the San

Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2009). William Kentridge’s work has been exhibited widely throughout the world including at the Metropolitan Museum, New York (2014); the Pinaco­ teca do Estado, São Paolo (2013); the Tate Modern, London (2012); the Louvre, Paris (2010); the MoMA, New York (2010); the Albertina Museum, Vienna (2011); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2002); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2002); and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (1998).

He has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Kyoto Prize (2010), the Oskar Kokoschka Award, Vienna (2008), the Kaiserring Prize (2003), the Carnegie Prize, the Carnegie International (2000), Standard Bank Young Artist Award (1987), and the Red Ribbon Award for Short Fiction (1982). He has received honorary doctorates from many universities in Europe, America and South Africa. In 2012 Kentridge gave six lectures as part of the Charles Eliot Norton Professor­ ship in Poetry, during a residency at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. In 2015 he was nominated an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy in London.

William Kentridge is represented

by Marian Goodman, New York/London/ Paris; Goodman Gallery, Johannes­burg/ Cape Town and Galleria Lia Rumma, Naples/Milan.

Credits

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘William Kentridge.

If We Ever Get to Heaven’ 24 April – 30 August 2015 EYE IJpromenade 1 1031 KT Amsterdam +31 (0) 20 5891400 info@eyefilm.nl www.eyefilm.nl

The exhibition has been curated by Jaap Guldemond in collaboration with Marente Bloemheuvel

95

Exhibition Director: Sandra den Hamer Director of Exhibitions/Curator: Jaap Guldemond Associate Curator: Marente Bloemheuvel Project Managers: Claartje Opdam, Sanne Baar Graphic Design: Joseph Plateau Film Programmer: Anna Abrahams Publicity and Marketing: Inge Scheijde, Marnix van Wijk Technical Production: Indyvideo, Utrecht; Martin Schrevelius Audiovisual Equipment: Eidotech, Berlin Installation: Landstra & De Vries, Amsterdam

Publication Editors: Marente Bloemheuvel, Jaap Guldemond Translation: Billy Nolan (texts by Sandra den Hamer, Jaap Guldemond) Copy Editor: D’Laine Camp Graphic Design: Joseph Plateau Project Managers: Claartje Opdam, Sanne Baar Paper: Munken Polar 120 gr/m2 and 240 gr/m2 (cover), Muskat Grey 140 gr/m2 Font: Monotype Grotesque Printing and lithography: Die Keure, Bruges (Belgium) Publisher: EYE, Amsterdam/Barbera van Kooij, nai010 publishers, Rotterdam William Kentridge Studio Anne McIlleron and Yoav Dagan, Natalie Dembo, Gavan Eckhart, Janus Fouché, Snezana Marovic, Chris Waldo de Wet More Sweetly Play the Dance has been made in response to an invitation and with support from Lichtsicht – Projection Biennale, Bad Rothenfelde and EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam

Photography Credits The photographs on pp. 2-47 were taken

by Stella Olivier during the workshop for More Sweetly Play the Dance, Johannesburg, 2014 The images on pp. 49-63, 82-93 and the front cover are video stills from intermediate stages from More Sweetly Play the Dance, Johannesburg, 2014 The cover flaps and the leporello feature video stills from More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015

Acknowledgements William Kentridge; Anne McIlleron and staff at William Kentridge Studio; Sabine Theunissen The exhibition and this publication were made possible with the financial support of Ammodo and BankGiroLoterij

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions to reproduce all copyrighted material contained in this book. Should copyright have been unwittingly infringed in this book, inter­ ested parties are requested to contact nai010 publishers, Mauritsweg 23, 3012 JR Rotterdam, the Netherlands, info@naioıo.com nai010 publishers is an internationally orientated publisher specialized in developing, producing and distributing books on architecture, visual arts and related disciplines. www.naioıo.com

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Appendix

North, Central and South America ­ Artbook | D.A.P., New York, USA, dap@dapinc.com Rest of the world ­ Idea Books, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, idea@ideabooks.nl For general questions, please contact nai010 publishers directly at sales@nai010.com or visit our website www.nai010.com for further information.

Printed and bound in Belgium ISBN 978­94­6208­213­7

Diego Rivera May Day Procession in Moscow, 1956 Oil on canvas, 135.2 x 108.3 cm Private collection

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

For works of visual artists affiliated with a CISAC­organization the copy­ rights have been settled with Pictoright in Amsterdam. © 2015, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam

nai010 books are available inter­ nationally at selected bookstores and from the following distribution partners:

Master of Sant’Apollinare Procession of the Holy Virgins and Martyrs, 526 AD Basilica di Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna

© 2015 the artist, the authors, the photographers, EYE Filmmuseum, nai010 publishers

The Plight of Refugees, 2011 (video still) ATV Odessa

Credits

98 99

Soweto uprising (ZA), 16 June 1976 Photo: Peter Magubane

Mexican protest over missing students, Chilpancingo (MX), 2015 European Pressphoto Agency B.V.

Gaspard Félix Tournachon Panthéon Nadar, 1858 Lithography, 80 x 113 cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Protest March, 25 May 1939, Harold Tomlin, Daily Herald Archive

Federico Fellini Otto e Mezzo, 1963 (film still) EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam

James Ensor Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, 1888 Oil on canvas, 252.7 x 430.5 cm The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

100 Daniel Buren Seven Ballets in Manhattan Performance, first staged in New York, 1975

Architectural relief fragment from the procession of the Ara Pacis Augustae, 13­9 BC Marble, 114 x 147 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris © RMN (Musée du Louvre ) / Hervé Lewandowski

Rwandan refugees fleeing into Congo, 1996 Photo: Wim van Cappellen

101

Carnival Date, place and year unknown

Gustave Courbet Un enterrement à Ornans, 1849 Oil on canvas, 315 × 668 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Endre Tót Zer0 Demo, Viersen (BE), 1980 Photo: Endre Tót

Lucy Orta Performance, Johannesburg Biennale, 1997 Photo: Studio Orta

Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Blind Leading the Blind, 1568 Distemper on canvas, 86 × 154 cm Museo di Capodimonte, Naples

103

Mine strikes, Marikana (ZA), 1 October 2012 AP Images

Gentile Bellini Processione in piazza San Marco, 1496 Tempera and oil on canvas, 347 × 770 cm Galleria Dell’Accademia, Venice

Akira Kurosawa Seven Samurai, 1954 (film still) EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam

Benozzo Gozzoli Procession of the Magi, 1459­1461 Fresco, Palazzo Medici­Riccardi, Florence

Procession on the anniversary of Pope St Cornelius in Bokhoven (NL), 16 September 1941 Photo: Wiel van der Randen

104 105 The Standard of Ur, ‘Peace’ panel Mosaic found in ancient tomb, Ur (IQ), c. 2600­2400 BC

Iranian referendum to change from monarchy to Islamic Republic, 1 April 1979

Francis Alÿs Guards, London, 2004 Video documentation of an action (30 minutes) In collaboration with Rafael Ortega and Artangel Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

Religious Hindus wade through the Ganges river with water to sacrifice to the god Shiva in Allahabad (IN), August 2014 Photo: Jitendra Praksh © Reuters

106 107 Demonstration by suffragettes fighting for equal rights for men and women (GB) Date, place and photographer unknown

Easter procession in San Miguel de Allende (MX), date unknown Universal Images Group © GettyImages

Ambrogio Lorenzetti Allegoria del Buon Governo (detail), 1338­1339, Fresco, Palazzo Publico, Siena (IT)

Daimyo Procession, 1884 Tsuyama Historical Museum, Japan © Tsuyama City Museum

Communists protesting the arrest of Pollitt and Mann, Swansea (GB), 1934 Daily Herald Archive

Jules Breton Bénédiction des blés en Artois, 1857 Oil on canvas, 128 x 318 cm Musée des Beaux­Arts, Arras Photo: RMN­Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

Arco di Settimio Severo (detail), Rome (IT), c. 203 AD

Demonstration by unemployed, London (GB), 19 February 1993 (the figures represent the number of unemployed)

108 109 Lucas van Leyden Saint Paul Led Away to Damascus, 1509 Engraving, 28.3 x 40.7 cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Muslims marching through London (GB), 18 August 1938 Daily Herald Archive

SSimone Martini The Carrying of the Cross (Orsini Polyptych, detail), c. 1333 Tempera on wood, 28 x 16 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris © RMN (Musée du Louvre)

Demonstrators at a commemoration of Bloody Sunday, Londonderry (GB), 1997

François Bunel the Younger II The Confiscation of the Contents of a Painter’s Studio, c. 1590 Oil on canvas, 28 x 46.5 cm Mauritshuis, The Hague

110 111

Syrian refugees, 2011 Date, place and photographer unknown

John Singer Sargent Gassed, 1918 Oil on canvas, 231 × 611 cm Imperial War Museum, London

Dolce & Gabbana runway, Milan Fashion Week, Womenswear Autumn/Winter 2012/2013 Photo: Vittorio Zunino Celotto © Getty Images

112 Palestinian refugees, 1948 Date, place and photographer unknown

René Clair Entre’Acte, 1924 (film still) EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam

William Kennedy­Laurie Dickson, Emile Lauste, British Mutoscope and Biograph Syndicate Capuchin Monks, 1898 (film still) EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam

isbn 978-94-6208-213-7 www.nai010.com Printed and bound in Belgium

9 789462 082137

South African artist William Kentridge has achieved a worldwide reputation with his powerful animation films, charcoal drawings and large-scale installations, consisting of film, sound, music and sculptural objects.

In this publication, William Kentridge shares the genesis of More Sweetly Play the Dance, a new work he made in response to an invitation from Lichtsicht – Projection Biennale, Bad Rothenfelde and EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.

In a vivid text, accompanied by photographs taken during the workshop held at his studio during the production, Kentridge gives a unique insight into the background, preparations and recording of the work. Included is a 2-meter fold-out leporello featuring an impression of the captivating eight-screen film installation More Sweetly Play the Dance.