I am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine

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Published in 2008 by Goodman Gallery Copyright © 2008 Goodman Gallery and William Kentridge ISBN 978-0-620-42562-9 GOODMAN GALLERY JOHANNESBURG 163 Jan Smuts Ave, Parkwood, 2193 Johannesburg, South Africa T +27 (0)11 788 1113 info@goodman-gallery.com GOODMAN GALLERY CAPE 3rd Floor, Fairweather House 176 Sir Lowry Rd, Woodstock, 7925 Cape Town, South Africa T +27 (0)21 462 7573 info@goodmangallerycape.com www.goodman-gallery.com The publisher would like to thank William Kentridge, his studio manager Anne McIlleron, the writers, photographer and designer for their help in the production of this publication.

We would also like to thank Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town for hosting the exhibition William Kentridge – I am not me, the horse is not mine, December 2008.

Essays by William Kentridge, Philip Miller, Sue Pam-Grant Photography John Hodgkiss Design Ellen Papciak-Rose www.ellenpapciakrose.com Printed in South Africa by Ultra Litho ................................

COVER I am not me, the horse is not mine

(The Horse is Not Mine), video still from installation, 2008 ................................

ENDPAPER The Nose, study for set painting (detail), acrylic on canvas, approximately 350 x 500 cm, 2008 ................................

PREVIOUS I am not me, the horse is not mine, projection from lecture, 2008 ................................

OPPOSITE I am not me, the horse is not mine (The Horse is Not Mine), video still from installation, 2008

THE NOSE: LEARNING FROM THE ABSURD . ...........................7 – William Kentridge

I AM NOT ME, THE HORSE IS NOT MINE ...............................11 Installation of 8 film fragments – William Kentridge

HIS MAJESTY COMRADE NOSE ....................................................................12 PRAYERS OF APOLOGY ..............................................................................18 A LIFETIME OF ENTHUSIASM . .....................................................................22 COUNTRY DANCES I (SHADOW) ..................................................................28 COUNTRY DANCES II (PAPER) ....................................................................28 THAT RIDICULOUS BLANK SPACE AGAIN (A ONE-MINUTE LOVE STORY) ............34 COMMISSARIAT FOR ENLIGHTENMENT . ........................................................40 THE HORSE IS NOT MINE ...........................................................................52

music – Philip Miller

NGILAHLEKELWE IKHALA LAMI ...................................................................56

I AM NOT ME, THE HORSE IS NOT MINE . ..............................61 Lecture LECTURE (NOTES) .....................................................................................62 – William Kentridge, Philip Miller, Sue Pam-Grant LECTURE (EXTRACTS) ...............................................................................63 – William Kentridge

CREDITS . ...........................................................................................76

– William Kentridge

This is the substance of the short story The Nose written by Nikolai Gogol in 1837. Chekhov described this

A man wakes one morning and finds his nose gone. He

as the greatest short story ever written – and even

attempts to track it down through the streets of his city,

after Chekhov I don't think anyone can argue with that

going to the police, placing newspaper advertisements for

assessment. One of the sources of Gogol's story was a

its return, seeking medical advice. When he does meet

section of the novel Tristram Shandy, written by Laurence

his nose (in a cathedral) he realises to his dismay that his

Sterne in 1759, in which a man loses his nose. Sterne

nose is of a higher rank than he is. His own nose will not

in turn has his antecedent in Don Quixote by Miguel

speak to him. When his nose is arrested (trying to leave

Cervantes (published in 1601). A strand of sober absurdism

the city in disguise), it still will not rejoin his face. But one

runs through the work of all three authors, the impossible

morning he wakes and the nose is back in place.

and fantastic used as a pivotal narrative device. It is a strand that moves from the periphery to centre stage in twentieth-century Modernism.

Gogol's short story is turned into an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1930, the trajectory of the absurd exploding into twentieth-century Russian Modernism.

(The opera was a popular success but was suppressed

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PREVIOUS I am not me, the horse is not mine, projection from lecture, 2008 ................................

OPPOSITE William Kentridge’s studio, early 2008 ................................

Overleaf William Kentridge’s studio, early 2008

shortly after its opening.)

I am not me, the horse is not mine takes the short story, its earlier history and its possible future histories as the basis for looking at the formal inventiveness of different strains of Russian Modernism and at the calamitous end of the Russian avant-garde.

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The work for the eight projections was done as preparation for the production of Shostakovich's opera.

The initial idea was of a nose on the loose, or a nose with locomotion (in most cases a paper nose superimposed onto a filmed body), but then I also studied old film material from the Soviet Union of the 1920s and '30s. A workshop with student actors in Johannesburg furnished many of the silhouettes used in the projections. On top of projections of these human figures, paper cutouts were added and interposed in an attempt to find a link between the Constructivist language of El Lissitsky and the earthy language of Gorky and the Russian filmmakers. These languages were very different and even antithetical to each other at the time, but in hindsight they share a sense of openness, of possibility or forming something new, of agency. As if the upheavals of the 1917 revolution could provide energy for new images, new words, a new language.

At the time it seemed the paths could run parallel, but now we know that even in 1918 Lenin was looking for "reliable anti-Futurists", and that the red wedge that would defeat the white circle would soon be swept away.

I am not me, the horse is not mine is an elegy (perhaps too loud for an elegy) both for the formal artistic language that was crushed in the 1930s and for the possibility of human transformation that so many hoped for and believed in during the revolution.

In a transcript of some 1937 meetings of the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikolai Bukharin, close lieutenant of Lenin, is heard fighting for his political and physical life. The title of the projections, I am not me, the horse is not mine, comes from this transcript and is a Russian peasant expression used to deny guilt. It is not what the owner of the nose would say of his nose but it is what his nose says of him.

There is a dark comedy in the failure of Bukharin's language and in the laughter provoked by his passionate pleas. Only the most grotesque absurdism comes close to this theatre. Only the absurd – the rupturing of expected causes and results, of expected order in the world – seems able to depict this reality.

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Installation of 8 film fragments – William Kentridge

HIS MAJESTY COMRADE NOSE PRAYERS OF APOLOGY A LIFETIME OF ENTHUSIASM COUNTRY DANCES I (SHADOW) COUNTRY DANCES II (PAPER) THAT RIDICULOUS BLANK SPACE AGAIN (A ONE-MINUTE LOVE STORY) COMMISSARIAT FOR ENLIGHTENMENT THE HORSE IS NOT MINE

music – Philip Miller

NGILAHLEKELWE IKHALA LAMI

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OPPOSITE I am not me, the horse is not mine, video stills from installation, 2008

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describing the megalomania of the human infant. It is this mixture of childishness and self-importance that the nose assumes for himself.

I needed to have the nose, separated from Kovalyov, trying to make his way up the social ladder. It is a Sisyphean task. No sooner does he get to the top of the ladder than he disintegrates and falls down – only to pick himself up and try again. All of this reminds me of a scene in a 1920 American

INSTALLATION OF 8 FILM FRAGMENTS

Freud's phrase "his majesty the baby" was his way of

experimental film The Death of a Hollywood Extra in which the extra tries to ascend the corporate studio ranks in Hollywood, endlessly climbing a flight of concrete steps. When I started the sequence I searched for suitable steps in Johannesburg on which to stage the scene. But before I found the right steps I lost patience and (as often is the case) staged the scene in my studio using the studio stepladder.

As with many of the fragments in I am not me, the horse is not mine, the filming was done twice: once to get the basic action (someone climbing the stairs in a variety of different ways and with different degrees of energy and determination); and then a second time, shooting the projection of the first filming frame by frame and adding to the projection a paper nose that forms the character. A projector is suspended above a sheet of paper. The man climbing the steps is projected and a frame frozen. The paper nose is placed on top of the ladder and a camera next to the projector photographs this image.

The first film is advanced by one frame, the paper nose is moved a few millimetres to the right place on the projection, and the projection plus nose is photographed again. It is a collage of paper and projection.

In climbing and collapsing endlessly I was thinking not only of the difficulty of social climbing but also, as in the game Snakes and Ladders, that rising to the top (going up a ladder) is no guarantee of staying there. The nose enacts his own attempts and failures but also stands in for all of those who, having risen to the top of the Party in Russia (and not only there), suddenly found themselves hurled down from the top – sometimes to rise again, but in many cases, shattered and shot and their corpses abandoned.

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PREVIOUS / ABOVE / OPPOSITE I am not me, the horse is not mine (His Majesty Comrade Nose), video stills from installation, 2008

The nose enacts his own attempts and failures but also stands in for all of those who, having risen to the top of the Party in Russia (and not only there), suddenly found themselves hurled down from the top.

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Party's leading theoreticians and right-hand man to Lenin. He became part of the Central Committee in 1918. His rise and falter and fall and humiliation and death are emblematic of the self-destruction of the Bolshevik Party and the ideals of the 1917 revolution.

In 1928 he split with Stalin on economic policy, and when the purges began following the assassination of Kirov in

INSTALLATION OF 8 FILM FRAGMENTS

Nikolai Bukharin became a member of the Bolshevik Party in 1906, just after the failed 1905 revolution. He was one of the

1929, his position came under attack. But he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party and Central Committee right through the 1930s when many around him were denounced and purged. When his turn came in the late 1930s, he was powerless to resist. Reason and language were both useless in the face of a decision once made. The tragedy of his situation resides in the impossibility of reconciling his need to believe in the Party and cause to which he had given all his life with the new world of illogic, of line, of strategy, which he had embraced for the sake of his Party. Herein lies the tragedy of his life, but also its comedy, the comedy of a world at odds with itself. A comedy of inversion, where things mean their opposite, where logical argument is a sure sign of duplicity and lying is explained away as strategy. A gasp of surprise at the inversions. In the transcripts of meetings of the Central Committee, not only are the words of the speakers recorded, but also their reactions, in a kind of stage direction: "noise in the room", "consternation", "prolonged laughter". As if a script for a mordant comedy is writing itself. As if only dismayed laughter is appropriate to understanding, or continually failing to understand, what is going on.

The text used in this fragment is edited from three stages of Bukharin's downfall. The first part is from a meeting of the Central Committee in 1932, when he first came under suspicion and attack. But the bulk comes from a 1937 meeting of the Committee and from some fragments of a letter he wrote to Stalin from prison in the days before he was shot, in which he begs for mercy and tries finally (in vain) to rescue himself by rescuing language from the labyrinth into which it has fallen. ("Finally I need to know. Did you really believe what was said?")

Was he himself, was the horse actually his?

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In the transcripts of meetings of the Central Committee, not only are the words of the speakers recorded, but also their reactions, in a kind of stage direction: "noise in the room", "consternation", "extensive laughter".

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ABOVE I am not me, the horse is not mine (Prayers of Apology), video stills from installation, 2008

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enthusiasm. The marches, the May Day parades, the Five-Year Plans fulfilled in four or three years. These were the symbols and proofs of the success of the Soviet experience.

But what I am interested in is that part of the enthusiasm that could not be extinguished even as, from the 1920s on, the cost, the casuistry and terror of that enthusiasm became clearer. Thus Shostakovich could shift throughout his life between an irreverent, absurd view and pleasure in the

INSTALLATION OF 8 FILM FRAGMENTS

To live in Stalin's era was to be condemned to a lifetime of

world, and at times play the trumpet for the edifice as loudly as anyone, with a conviction that was more than simply selfpreserving or strategic. The need for belief and the power of that belief are not just foolishness or self-service. They are also about hope.

"Comrade Mauser, you have the floor," Mayakovsky wrote in the early years of the revolution (sharing with Frantz Fanon a deluded belief in the purifying effect of violence).

His suicide by shooting seven years later was the clearest demonstration that once it had the floor, the Mauser would keep its place.

If one holds onto the discoveries, risks and inventions of the Russian avant-garde in the years before it was crushed, one also has to find a place not simply to acknowledge, but to house the faith animating the work of its members – their belief in a transformed society. This holding onto their beliefs (though we are aware now of their contradictions, their sophistries) is the task of the figures walking on the ramp in A Lifetime of Enthusiasm. Well, not their task, but the sense behind them. A procession determinedly going towards an uncertain destination.

The procession was made in different stages: first by a group of acting students taking part in a workshop for the production of the Shostakovich opera, then by additions to images of them with scraps of paper and text placed over a projection of the first filming. Finally, some sections were animated separately and edited into the film.

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The marches, the May Day parades, the Five-Year Plans fulfilled in four or three years. These were the symbols and proofs of the success of the Soviet experience.

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PREVIOUS / ABOVE I am not me, the horse is not mine (A Lifetime of Enthusiasm), video stills from installation, 2008

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the dance.

I had been working with students and actors in a workshop for the production of the Shostakovich opera The Nose. We had filmed the actors walking up a ramp against a brightly lit backcloth, so in fact we were filming their silhouettes.

I asked them one by one to improvise a dance for one of the transitional sections of the opera – improvisations of African imaginings of Russian dances. But instead of placing the light

INSTALLATION OF 8 FILM FRAGMENTS

A dance, a shadow of a dance. A shadow of the shadow of

for the backdrop between the performer and the screen, I lit the dancer and had a double image, the dancer and his shadow.

A shadow is superficially like a silhouette, a dark twodimensional trace of a being, its movements directly connected to the movements of the dancer. But there is a big shift. A shadow is a silhouette with attitude. As the light source is moved in relation to the subject, the shadow changes. It is still of course directly connected to its source, but elongations and compressions occur. The light was placed at an oblique angle to the dancer so that the shadows of limbs would extend three or four times the size of the dancer. The usual animation language of exaggeration, of stretching and compression, was given by the light source. The dancer danced his own animation.

In Country Dances I (Shadow) you see the shadow, but also from time to time, at the edge of the frame, the dancer, looking ridiculously small and weak in comparison to his shadow. This was not thought out in advance. It was a chance discovery amongst a range of improvisations and changes of strategy. But as the version of the exercise started, it jumped out for the surprises it gave (and the wonderful dance done) and the lines of associations the dance and its shadow suggested.

The second dance, Country Dances II (Paper), removes the image from the original dancer one stage further. The shadow is now replaced with torn or cut fragments of paper and text. The movement of the paper (adjusted frame by frame under an animation camera) was loosely based on the timing and movements of the shadow. The swirling of the coat was approximated through the use of larger sheets of paper – pages from a Russian encyclopaedia.

It is a broken telephone: each version of the dance is further and further removed from the original, just as the first dance is removed from the imagined Russian original by time, distance and the creative misunderstandings these bring.

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For Country Dances I, a light was placed at an oblique angle to the dancer and was used to produce a shadow that distorts like an animated drawing.

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ABOVE I am not me, the horse is not mine (Country Dances I (Shadow)), video stills from installation, 2008

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Country Dances II is one step removed from Country Dances I, a shadow of a shadow. Paper cut-outs replace the shadow of the dancer.

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ABOVE I am not me, the horse is not mine (Country Dances II (Paper)), video stills from installation, 2008

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unpublished in his lifetime (he died of starvation in a Leningrad prison in 1941). His violent, fragmentary stories are full of malice, misanthropy and incoherence – without the inventive optimism of Mayakovsky (who had shot himself ten years before Kharms was writing). The dystopian world that Kharms portrays is the dark underside of the optimism of Mayakovsky, the Constructivists and Shostakovich. The oneminute love story that makes up this fragment is not based on

INSTALLATION OF 8 FILM FRAGMENTS

Daniil Kharms was a Russian writer. Most of his work was

a specific story by Kharms, but uses his idea of love turning to violence – or gratuitous violence – as the norm, as a principle of the history of two figures.

The figures were constructed out of fragments of paper based on actors in a 1925 Bauhaus theatre production. The pieces of paper were not joined together (as most animated paper puppets would be), but left disconnected, so that the figures can disintegrate and reconnect in accordance with their own laws and logic. On the one hand it is a simple series of scenes of attraction and violence, on the other the initial attraction is incidental. The violence is all that remains.

STORY OF A BRAWL Aleksei Alekseyevich crushed Andrei Karlovich beneath him, and, having socked him in the mug, let go of him.

Andrei Karlovich, pale with fury, flung himself onto Alexei Alexeyevich and punched him in the teeth.

Alexei Alexeyevich, not expecting such a quick assault, collapsed on the floor, and Andrei Karlovich sat on top of him, pulled his dentures out of his mouth and so thoroughly worked over Aleksei Alekseyevich with them, that Aleksei Alekseyevich got up from the floor with an entirely maimed face and a torn nostril. Holding his face in his hands, Aleksei Alekseyevich ran away.

And Andrei Karlovich wiped his dentures, put them in his mouth, and satisfied that they were in place, looked around and, not seeing Aleksei Alekseyevich, went searching for him.

– Translation by Lauren Dueck

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The one-minute love story that makes up this fragment is not based on a specific story by Kharms, but uses his idea of love turning to violence – or gratuitous violence – as the norm, as a principle of the history of two figures.

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ABOVE / OVERLEAF I am not me, the horse is not mine (That Ridiculous Blank Space Again (A One-Minute Love Story)), video stills from installation, 2008

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Stalin spoke at Party meetings, buckets of salt water would be placed next to the chairs of members so they could dip their hands, inflamed from clapping, into the water. In this fragment the nose is he who applauds, and he who is (or wishes to be) applauded.

He is also Shostakovich playing the piano, and the people's commissar for music (the head of the composers'

INSTALLATION OF 8 FILM FRAGMENTS

In a four-LP set of a speech by Stalin the first twenty minutes of the recording consists only of applause. It is said that when

union) who denounced Shostakovich. (MUDDLE NOT MUSIC was the headline of Pravda's review of his opera The Nose).

He is the heroic Soviet athlete leaping hurdles, pole-vaulting or diving.

He is happy to occupy any position, undertake any task, make any recantation if glory is in sight. (Only after working on The Nose for many months did I realise the many attributes he shares with Ubu, the subject of other films and drawings of mine.)

The raw footage in this fragment comes from many sources: Russian film archives; fragments of French and American films made in the late 1920s; even two or three seconds from Dziga Vertov's 1928 film Man with a Movie Camera. (The film was made the same year Shostakovich wrote The Nose.)

The fragment takes material from the '20s and '30s but looks at it from a later perspective. Formally, there are things in the films from the period (particularly in Vertov's masterpiece) that have never been bettered or even repeated.

The task or the intrigue is not to separate the brilliance of filmmaking from the ideology, but to understand how the film was dependent on the strength of the beliefs. To lose the possibility of the direct belief and hope is to lose the possibility of some of the brilliance. So, mixed in with the critique of the disaster waiting in the whole system of actions and belief is a sense of loss. Of inevitable jadedness, of distance.

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He [the nose] is happy to occupy any position, undertake any task, make any recantation if glory is in sight.

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PREVIOUS / ABOVE / OVERLEAF I am not me, the horse is not mine (Commissariat for Enlightenment), video stills from installation, 2008

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It is said that when Stalin spoke at Party meetings, buckets of salt water would be placed next to the chairs of members so they could dip their hands, inflamed from prolonged clapping, into the water.

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PREVIOUS / ABOVE I am not me, the horse is not mine (Commissariat for Enlightenment), video stills from installation, 2008

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sources. The statue of the Bronze Horseman in St Petersburg is a symbol of the city, and in one of his attempts to rise above his origins the nose tries to make himself into an equestrian hero. A second prompt for the horse was the presence of horses (and their heroic riders) in Soviet socialist-realist images of Stalin and other Soviet heroes. In these the horse is an extension of the rider, a way of making him taller and larger than life, as if the energy of the horse is not only under

INSTALLATION OF 8 FILM FRAGMENTS

The nose acquires a horse. The nose's horse comes from three

the control of the rider, but is his (the rider's) own power.

The third impetus for the horse was the ongoing project of examining how little we need to see. How specific do scraps of paper have to be for us to recognise what we see? In the end not very specific at all. A head, a curve for a neck, some straight lines for legs and a flourish for the shape of a tail are all we need not only to convince ourselves we are seeing a horse, but for us to imbue the horse both with the attributes of the live animal and the associations of their images.

So while I was trying to make minimal or residual horses, I was also trying to make anti-heroic horses. Horses that would have the least right to be on monuments. I discovered this was not easy. Even the most ill-shaped, hollow-backed beasts with distorted neck and heads still claimed and held their space.

The horse behind these, behind all representations of horses, is Don Quixote's Rocinante, a thin, weak horse used as an ironic comment on the idea of heroic horses of chivalry.

But even Cervantes's descriptions are not enough to stop us seeing the horse as Don Quixote does, as a heroic, noble beast (heroic for accepting and participating in Quixote's delusional actions). Now that I think of it there is a fifth source (and perhaps the forgotten one is the real one). In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the heroic, suffering workers of the Soviet Union are represented by Boxer, the cart-horse willing to work till he drops ("I will work harder"), only to be sold to a knackers yard when his usefulness is over.

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While I was trying to make minimal or residual horses, I was also trying to make anti-heroic horses. Horses that would have the least right to be on monuments.

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ABOVE I am not me, the horse is not mine (The Horse is Not Mine), video stills from installation, 2008

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In 2008, I rejoined the project (see page 66). By the time William spoke to me about composing music for I am not me, the horse is not mine, the lecture/performance piece had already taken shape. He asked me to compose something for the lecture, but which could also be used to accompany the series of eight film fragments of the same title, which are usually shown in conjunction with the performance. So, what I really had to do was compose one piece of music for eight film fragments, to be screened simultaneously. In retrospect, it was like splitting myself into eight silent movie pianists who all played at the same time.

William had some idea of what he wanted. He wanted a brass band march for a procession. He wanted musical quotations from Shostakovich's The Nose. He had been using an extract of the galop from The Nose as a guide track when editing with Catherine Meyburgh, and that seemed to work.

But there was also something else that needed to be captured in his imagery: William with a "nose head" falling down ladders, Stalin on crutches, men and women dragging bundles behind them and strange little Constructivist paper cut-outs, sidling up to each other, jiggling their bodies in little gavottes.

When I had first attended the two-week workshop with Sue and William, I had brought a recording of a Zionist church choir from Pongola. I loved the quirky rhythms of the songs and the extraordinary harmonies of the singers. William loved the music too. I now had to find that choir. After many phone calls, I contacted the man who had recorded them, Richard Siluma (the late Lucky Dube's uncle), a kind of P.T. Barnum of traditional choirs, travelling around the country recording choirs for potential recording deals. He told me that the particular Pongola choir I was looking for no longer existed as a unit.

I needed to find another choir that could sing in the same style as the Pongola choir. Richard said this was easy.

A day later, I was recording with Thulani Manaka and his Apostolic Faith Choir. When the twenty singers arrived in the recording studio, I thought the best way of explaining to them what I was after was to show them fragments of William's films. They had never seen anything like it. I then told them the story of Gogol's The Nose and asked Thulani Manaka, their choir leader, whether they would work with me and improvise a song in isiZulu about a man who lost his nose.

MUSIC

– Philip Miller

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I told them that there should be no talk of Jesus, as far as possible, but lots about body parts. This they did.

The song goes like this: Ikhala Lami Ngiboniseleni ikhala Lami (I lost my nose) (Anyone who can find it must give it back to me) Ngilahlekelwe isitho Somzimba Ngiboniseleni isitho Sami (I lost part of my body) (Show me where part of my body is) As the leader of the choir, Thulani is like the coxswain in a canoe. He must cajole and exhort his singers. The song always has to praise another singer by name, who is recognised as a great singer of hymns. It is all there in this song.

The singers move in concentric circles in both directions, spinning around and around manically. I hear this strange rhythmic mechanical sound, almost like an African shaker, but I don't see anything resembling a shaker being used. I discover that this sound is called "tweeting", and it is made by three of the singers whistling through their teeth, to create the tweeting sound that ends up winding through the music of these films.

Then I go back to composing the marching band, recording trumpeters, a euphonium player, a Maskande guitarist playing a petrol can guitar, xylophones. Thulani's crazy shouts and rants and the choir all come together – layers upon layers of sounds and rhythms colliding, lapsing, folding into each other. Finally I think that I have something.

After several rough try-outs and listening sessions with William, I go to his house early on a Friday evening to play him the final music. I drive there with my friend Sharon and play it to her on the car stereo. It is the week of xenophobic attacks in Johannesburg. It is the eighties revisited, but worse. Violence without meaning. Sharon says to me it is like a crazed song to the city of Johannesburg – a city again in flames. Maybe I have after all composed a song for the city.

We listen in William's lounge, turning the music full blast. William dances around in concentric circles, like one of 58

Thulani Manaka's singers.

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PREVIOUS I am not me, the horse is not mine (A Lifetime of Enthusiasm), video stills from installation, 2008 ................................

OPPOSITE I am not me, the horse is not mine, lecture, 2008 ................................

ABOVE William Kentridge, William Kentridge, William Kentridge, I am not me, the horse is not mine, lecture, 2008

The filmed events – William Kentridge walking round the room, sitting, sleeping – found their places in the course of the lecture – the combination of final image and final text being a fortuitous conjunction.

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LECTURE (NOTES) PERFORMER'S NOTES – William Kentridge STAGE DIRECTOR'S NOTES – Sue Pam-Grant MUSIC COMPOSER'S NOTES – Philip Miller

LECTURE (EXTRACTS) – William Kentridge – Gogol translations by Lauren Dueck

William to left of centre stage. Glasses off.

For the last while I have been working on a project related to the short story The Nose, written by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol in 1837, which was translated into an opera by the Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, in 1928. The story and the opera recount the history of one Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov who wakes one morning to find his nose has disappeared. Kovalyov is a bureaucrat; his rank of Collegiate Assessor is about one-third of the way up the hierarchy of Russian officialdom.

Back to ladder.

Kovalyov follows the nose as it walks down the street. He follows it into Kazan Cathedral, off Nevsky Prospekt.

“How do I approach him?” thought Kovalyov. “It’s clear from everything – from his regimentals to his hat, that he is a State Councillor. The devil knows how it’s to be done!”

“Dear sir ...” Kovalyov spoke with self-respect, “I don’t know how to understand your words ... It seems to me that everything here is entirely obvious ... or you want ... you see, you are my very own nose!

The nose looked at the major, and knit his brows.

“You are mistaken, dear sir. I am myself. Besides, there can be no close relationship between us. Judging by the buttons of your vice-uniform, you must serve in another department."

And here we have the heart of the story, the question of what is of Kovalyov, and what is not? What control does he have over that section of himself, over his nose, and in what way is he a person divided against himself? On the one hand, he is trying to convince the nose who he is, and on the other hand, another part of himself is absolutely dismissing him.

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(NOTES)

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WK Many years ago I spent a year studying acting at a theatre school in Paris.

I quickly discovered I should not be an actor. But in the years since then I have often had to appear in front of audiences, not acting, but giving lectures, which is a relatively safe halfway house between talking and acting.

I also have been filmed in my studio for different documentaries. In these circumstances, the line between working and the performance of working is often blurred by the presence of the camera (and its attendant handmaidens, the crew). And in the last year or so I have been filming myself in the studio in a series of fragments in homage to the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. In these films I perform various actions: walking, falling, catching paper. But not acting. A grammar of

movement had to be practiced and learnt for these actions (particularly for those which run backwards), but I reassured myself with the knowledge that I was only doing specific activities, and not acting.

SP-G After having seen William in his Méliès films, I became interested in the idea of witnessing the artist alive in his work, in seeing if William's celluloid image could converge with the real William, as a live event.

In October 2006 I was in the Melrose Arch underground parking lot, planning to swim at the gym. I called William to propose the idea of a live performance. I was surprised when he picked up. My plan to leave a message evaporated in the moment, and I was suddenly asking William whether he

would be interested in performing live in his work. There was a silence on the other end of the line and then a reply, something along the lines of "Sorry Sue, but acting is not something I do." But at 4pm, that very same day, I was sitting on the travelling chair in his studio. A ten-day workshop with the idea in hand was to proceed. His words were "let's see what happens."

WK But somewhere I was tempted by the thought of taking some of the fragments I had filmed and performing them live. I was also interested in taking the form of the lecture (which for me is usually lecture plus projections) and making something that was more than a succession of projections of my films and my comments on them. I had also been talking to the composer

(EXTRACTS)

Philip Miller about making a smallscale theatre piece, for one or two actors and projection. Maybe one actor and one singer, or one singer and one object manipulator.

SP-G In preparation for the task, I bought a beautiful notebook, with the hope that this object would lead me closer to clarity and a more formulated concept around the idea of William in dialogue and interacting with his work.

WK The first workshop was a mess. There were too many strands. Philip thought we were going to make a one- or twoperson show about Johannesburg.

Suddenly I was talking about a lecture which either I or someone else would perform, maybe with a singer. Sue was interested in me performing alone. I spent several hours filming myself walking back and forth across the studio (as I had been doing with the Méliès film fragments). A paper screen was hung in the middle of the studio so we could see the interaction of a live figure, a projection and a shadow.

Entrances and exits, close timing and farce were the modes of performance.

It was not clear how either Johannesburg stories or the history of Italian colonialism in Ethiopia (another theme I was working on) would come into these scenes of entrances, exits and coffee cups balanced on a head.

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PREVIOUS I am not me, the horse is not mine, lecture, 2008 ................................

OPPOSITE I am not me, the horse is not mine, lecture, 2008

William on ladder.

Kovalyov wakes one morning and the nose is back on his face. The story ends here, but the writer is not quite finished: No, that I do not understand at all, I decidedly do not understand! But the strangest, the most unintelligible part is how authors can choose such subjects. I confess, that is entirely incomprehensible, it’s just...no, no, I completely do not understand. First, there is decidedly no use for the fatherland; second...but second there is also no use.

And yet, when you reflect on it, really, in all this, there is something. Whatever you say, such things do happen in the world – rarely, but they do happen.

Glasses off. Return to ladder. Drink water.

Gogol's story of a man divided from his nose goes both forwards and backwards. It goes forward to Shostakovich who wrote his opera based on the story in 1928, ninety years after Gogol. In Shostakovich, the real and absurd division of a person resonated with the fragmentation of Dada, and with the rupture of the 1917 revolution. The serious lightness of Gogol gets caught up in the storm of twentieth-century Modernism. "MUDDLE, NOT MUSIC" was the judgement of Pravda. Performances of the opera were stopped.

Shostakovich was lucky to escape with his life – never mind his nose.

So the story goes back from Shostakovich to Gogol and from Gogol to Sterne. But it is not that simple. For Sterne is not the author. As with Gogol, he splits himself between himself as the author of the story and as a reader of it. He is not himself, or at any rate is other or more than himself.

And Sterne invents another author called Hafen Slawkenbergius, who is the author of a section inside Tristram Shandy. Slawkenbergius is described as the greatest expert on noses in the world, and he has written a ten-volume treatise on noses, which Sterne assures us is one of the great repositories of knowledge, not only of noses, but of all human understanding. In one chapter Slawkenbergius recounts the story that I told you, of the man who travels from Strasbourg to Frankfurt (chapter 10 of volume 9 of this treatise within the novel).

But in order to prove that it is an authentic document and not just his own invention, Sterne quotes the book at length, in the Latin in which Slawkenbergius wrote it.

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(NOTES)

66

PM When I joined William and Sue in the studio for a two-week workshop, I asked William to hire a piano. In my mind, I saw myself as a cross between Chico and Harpo, the Marx brothers, Mickey-Mousing at the piano, improvising as William walked backwards and forwards in front of the projections. Not at all the image of the solitary composer of serious contemporary music.

I came armed with a roll of tin foil, some metal chains and bluetack. I thought I might use these materials to "prepare" the piano, as I had done successfully in the past for the soundtrack to the film Memo. The tin foil kept falling off the strings of the piano. The chains just turned the sounds of the notes into a metallic cacophony. And all I could feel was

that I was caught up in a nightmare in which I was a silent-movie pianist, but I did not know how to play my instrument, and there was only an intermittent flickering image on a screen.

Even more shocking for me was when William, Sue and I manipulated several puppet sheep heads into a danse macabre and I found that I did not seem to be able to synchronise the sheep's head in time to the music.

Another realisation comes to me. I cannot be a puppeteer.

Notes from day one: WK stands in front of a projection – his white shirt illuminated.

"How about starting with an ink blotch – a pen leaking in a pocket".

WK drops a splotch of ink onto a piece of white paper.

SP-G

Camera is on standby. Philip plays on the "foil piano" – a melancholic cacophony filters through – beautiful.

WK adds ink – camera on – shoot – brush – more ink – camera on – shoot – brush – brush – black – splodge. WK stands again in front of the nowprojected splodge.

We all struggled to find clarity in the workshop. It was not clear from the outset what the intentions were and everyone's personal expectations seemed to be met with various disappointments.

Fragments of splodge appear on the chest area of WK's shirt [interesting].

Now it's time to make "sheep skulls sing" – sing to Verdi, sing to the Lesotho Ladies Choir – sing to the Alex Gospel singers ... lunch [I felt relieved].

(EXTRACTS)

My notebook guided me towards the personal as I scribbled down details from the everyday studio experience. These often-domesticated texts, casual moments and interjections seemed to me to be the draw card. This included an ongoing collection of "alarm dialogues" that William was having with the security technicians around the faulty sensors in both his studio and his bedroom.

Perhaps these fragmented strands will find their way into the "Johannesburg stories" one day.

Departing from the Méliès films, I started experimenting with William walking across the studio in a series of improvisations, where I would add simple instructions to increase the tension around a possible narrative of "waiting".

Dolus inest, anime mi, ait hospes – nasus est falsus. – Verus est, respondit uxor. – Ex abiete factus est, ait ille, terebinthinum olet – Carbunculus inest, ait uxor.

Mortuus est nasus, respondit hospes.

Vivus est, ait illa, – et si ipsa vivam tangam.

'Tis an imposture, my dear, said the master of the inn – 'tis a false nose. – 'Tis a true nose, said his wife. – 'Tis made of fir-tree, said he, – I smell the turpentine. – There's a pimple on it, said she.

'Tis a dead nose, replied the inn-keeper.

'Tis a live nose, and if I am alive myself, said the inn-keeper's wife, I will touch it.

Notes: "Enter – now wait – you cannot move – but you have forgotten something – now try walking out without walking out ..."

We played with the notion of entering and exiting, with walking and waiting. These improvisations were filmed and then projected back onto a large suspended paper screen.

It was inside these endless and often hilarious "waiting" improvisations that I noticed the potential for interchange between live performance and the celluloid image. This was further emphasised when William started to improvise with the filmed projections, physically interacting with the image from both in front of and behind the screen, cross-weaving content with a visual interchange between the "captured" and the "moment". We recognised that this could be the seed for the performance ...

What is our edge?

What is our edge? Head-banging against our own limitations.

Feel the cliff where our intelligence ends. Bouncing back off the inside walls of our head. Studio as head. Parcours d'atelier. Read the section three times.

Pickled hands. Playing cards against yourself. Do not move until three new ideas have come ... ... These notes make no sense whatsoever. I think what I meant, with these notes, I think what I mean, what I am trying to find, is where we meet the outside world. One of the edges is the limit of understanding.

The forlorn space where we feel our brain ending – surrounded by the woods and ravines of what our brain won't compute.

Lightning This is easy, a lightning between the outside world and the shell of one's head. No translator needed. Shift of protocol, whispering in one's ear. The blank space of ideas ...

Drink water.

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OPPOSITE I am not me, the horse is not mine, lecture, 2008

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(NOTES)

WK

SP-G

When we showed some of these filmed and performed pieces to Philip he was dismayed – even outraged. I suddenly saw what I had been doing through his eyes, and ran a mile. This was acting and more particularly bad acting. We had hired a piano, and with much effort got it into the studio for the workshop for Philip to improvise on.

The piano stood unopened the whole time, a silent rebuke for the folly of what we were doing.

The ten-day workshop ended with us hiring a small film crew, and on a sweltering hot Johannesburg morning, we all set off from the home of the jacarandas to the centre of the city to film William – waiting. Waiting at a taxi rank, waiting in the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and finally waiting in a wave of toyi-toying strikers at the Library Gardens. The footage, even though sometimes technically flawed, presented us with a possibility that something was there. "So where do we go from here?", I asked, in our post-mortem of the now two-week workshop. William replied "let it rest, when the time is right it will present itself to us."

And so we waited ...

PM

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The ideas of a piece of music theatre about the city of Johannesburg seem to have fallen by the wayside for now.

I leave after the second day. I cannot find a point of entry into the workshop process.

All in all we waited for just about two years for the project to re-emerge. To be honest, there were times in this period that I would call and say "Hey, what's happening, are you still interested?" And I was always met with his patient words, "Its time will come – don't push it."

WK It took months to come back to the project. When I did it was with certain limits. The piece would be in the form of a lecture. My projection could perhaps be ridiculous. But I would only give the lecture. Sue was very calm and said "OK. We start with your restrictions. And see what emerges."

I was still interested in what could be achieved between a live person and their projection. (I think I had in mind the scene from Duck Soup in

(EXTRACTS)

which Groucho confronts his reflection in a mirror – is it his reflection or a double? Perhaps many of the scenes of fragmentation and doubling of the self that I have used in different projects come from this same scene.)

I mentioned this project to Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. We were talking about what new piece I would show at the Sydney Biennale that she was curating. She decided there and then that this is what I would do. Now I do take responsibility for the piece.

I would not have described or even mentioned it if I had not wanted to do it, but it took a deadline, a venue, an audience and a context for it to become real.

SP-G I then received a call from William to say that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev from Sydney was interested in the "lecture" and would like it to be at the Sydney Biennale in June 2008. I was delighted that the project was going once again to resume, but there was also the underlying fear and panic at having to make the concept/lecture/ performance work.

And what was it all about? Was it going to be a "lecture" or was it going to be a performance? Or was it going to be a lecture/performance? And what was going to be the content?

At this point William had decided to call it a "lecture", hanging up the safety net for the aerial act which was about to follow. I understood his reservation and self-protection, and supported a process that would in time reveal itself in its own chosen form.

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OPPOSITE I am not me, the horse is not mine, lecture, 2008

Filming 4am panic The 4am panic, the dark hour when every project seems both impossible and possible. Lying awake trying to redesign the largest of projects, four times over, between 4.17 and 4.43 in the morning. So I wake at 4 in the morning, trying to put the pieces together, thinking, should I be filming this panic also, as showing part of the process of how the lecture is made? Do I go out of the bedroom, out across the garden, unlock the studio, disarm the alarm, get a camera, calm the dogs, come back, and film this panic, this inability to make sense of all the fragmentary ideas that are lying around. There must be a limit to the crazy things one will do. Try to sleep. The artist is always at work, even when he sleeps. The artist is at work only when he sleeps.

Is Trotsky the nose of the Communist Party of the USSR – of the CCCP – from old stamps, who did not exactly absent himself from the Party, but is absented from it. Like the nose, his disguise is penetrated.

Unlike the nose, he is not simply arrested, but assassinated in Mexico in 1941.

Of course, it's not that at all, you fool, it's not Persephone in the labyrinth with a string and a lion. It's Daedalus who designed it, the Minotaur is inside it, Theseus is the person with the string, and the string is given to him by Ariadne. You are not Persephone at all. Fool, what did you go to school for? I'm a poltroon, an idiot, a fool. I hate myself, I hate myself.

Shostakovich and the Party, the dentist, the clock has stopped, leaves to a tree And I think, OK, if you think about Shostakovich and the Party, the Party split in half, Shostakovich split in half – needing to believe in the Party, but also needing to understand his distance from the Party. Is it about comedy or tragedy? What is laughter in the face of the severest woe, and this wrench between Modernism and politics, and the red wedge will defeat the white square? And this marriage of bad faith between politics and Modernism – OK, I've got the dentist, I mustn't forget the dentist, can't change the appointment because all the technicians will be on standby like mechanics.

Lenin, with his dictum of "Find me reliable anti-Futurists." (AntiFuturists with good teeth.) What is the nature of hope, in the face of political disappointment? I mean Stalin: by the 1930s Stalin has become so huge that each time he makes a speech the people have to applaud so hard and loud that there are buckets of salt water next to them, to rub their hands in, to recover from the applause.

Not a nose in sour vodka, but pickled hands.

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(NOTES)

WK The Ethiopian project was finished (an anamorphic film called What Will Come (has already come)) and work on The Nose was well underway. It was not that I had decided that this (my preliminary work towards The Nose) should be the subject of the lecture/ performance, but rather that when Sue and I met up again to see what, if anything, could be rescued from the original idea, I used it as the material to show her what a basic lecture could be. In the first telling of the story and the literary history behind it, it became clear that there was enough material around the story – and the absurdity of the story – for this to form the basis of the piece we would make.

I had assumed The Nose would be one element of the piece, but as it progressed other elements fell away.

SP-G My role here was to find a way of staging what should seem like an authentic lecture unravelling as the artist grapples with having to stage a lecture that should seem like a lecture but that unravels as he digs deeper into the fragments of "his other".

WK I filmed myself walking across the studio and then in a different position in the studio. Working with Catherine Meyburgh, the patient editor of many completed and uncompleted projects, I wanted to see what it would look like having two almost identical presences (back to the Duck Soup scene). I showed this fragment to Sue and we spent some time seeing how it worked with me performing with this projection.

SP-G

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On day one of rehearsal, William sat me down and showed me the new footage: clips of film of himself in the whiteshirt-black-trousers uniform, footage of Man 1, Man 2 and now Man 3, sitting, listening, waiting and sometimes

sleeping. The footage was brilliant, funny and poignant. As William spontaneously started to play with these life-sized projections, it was very clear to me that this was the right time for the birth of this work.

WK At this stage, and for a long time, I thought we should be working on a lecture without words (still a possibility for another piece). I discovered how difficult and stressful if was to try to keep in sync with a projection moving behind your back. The sensation is not that you are out of time, but rather that the timing of the projection malevolently changes at will. As the rehearsals of the piece progressed we used less and less close timing and I performed less and less with the projections – the non-communication with the other selves became as important as, or more important than, the moments of synchronicity.

SP-G I think we realised, or should I say the process and excavation revealed, that intricate choices around the relationship between the celluloid men and William, were voluminous. Narrative questions arose: "Who is leading whom, who has the upper hand and who has what status?" The big question was how much exchange there was to be with his allied fragments of self. And were the screen characters in fact allies? Had we more time, that exploration would have followed, but our time constraints had us working with less interaction between up front and onscreen.

Identifying these intricate details had substantial consequences in the physical grammar and staging.

William had used his studio ladder as a prop/furnishing in his film clips. The ladder became integral to the physical vocabulary of the performance. It facilitated the "Groucho mirror", and allowed us to explore the physical interchange between William and his screen images.

WK The film footage we were using, in addition to the sections of me walking across the studio, or sitting in a chair, or falling asleep, were pieces I had been developing for The Nose: both for the Shostakovich opera and for a miniature version of the opera I hoped to make for the Belgian contemporary music ensemble, Ictus. When we were refused rights to re-orchestrate the Shostakovich music, I worked with the French composer François Sarhan on a piece related to, but not the same as, The Nose – a series of short vocal or instrumental pieces called Telegrams from the Nose. This exists as a halfhour concert piece. One of its sections is the text from the meeting in which Bukharin is fighting for his life. This text used in the concert (in Russian) became part of the text of the lecture. It has a third life as one of the eight projections that make up the installation of I am not me, the horse is not mine.

I now had a safety net of a text (or most of it), a series of images from The Nose and the footage of me moving in the studio. It was possible to start rehearsing.

Even though this was a lecture and the script was of my own devising – I could change it as I liked – the process of preparing it was a proper rehearsal process. Sue had said we needed two weeks. I had thought two run-throughs were all that were needed but I realised just how rusty I was as a performer. When I acted thirty years ago, I could learn lines easily, the whole performance would be in my head like a blueprint, I could see where I was in the whole process at any moment. Now, not only would the words not stick, but I couldn't remember the sequence of actions the projections were performing behind me. So I allowed myself lecture notes (my script), cues on the back of photocopied sheets and changed the angle of performance so I could see the screen at different times.

(EXTRACTS)

SP-G Over the next two weeks we worked intensively on the text/script/lecture that William was developing each evening to bring new challenges to the morning's rehearsal.

Notes from rehearsal – page 15 Cervantes: Don Quixote [halfway down 2nd page]: On the line, "I can find no way to consider it true, since it goes so far beyond the limits of reason."

On screen: "Man 2 takes off the ladder." William [up front] notices that Man 2 on screen is pulling off ladder.

WK to push ladder back to stage R. Screen Man 1 exits.

WK to pick up notes and return to centre stage.

WK takes cue from Screen Man 2 who has returned.

I think that perhaps the clock has stopped, because it's now only 4.18, and it seems this panic has been going on for two hours, not fifteen minutes. And Anne is saying, "You must go to sleep. If the words come not as easily as leaves to a tree, better they do not come at all. Your job is to make drawings, not to do the words, leave those to other people." And I think, if only I had not agreed to this speech, then everything would be fine.

1 P ractice my vowels before I speak. Sorry I can't, can't, can't come to the phone! Please leave a message.

2 Classified personals. MJM, looking for DSJW with a good prognosis of afternoons of ... 9a. It's alright. It will make sense in its own good time, like next year.

3 Don't be pathetic. Work this out, don't be prosthetic. 4.17 and 20 seconds 4.17 and 22 seconds.

4 How many sheets of blank paper are left in the ream?

5 Molly to the vet tomorrow.

6 Vet. Molly. Cupboard shelves. Solomon. Noses and toeses but Moses supposes erroneously.

7 Coconuts are horses' hooves.

8 Take the "o" out of noose. Noose snoose snooze snore sneeze.

9 The artist is at work only when he sleeps.

At 4.30am Anne wakes and turns on the light and says, "It's enough.

For goodness sake, let it rest. We've all got work in the morning."

WK starts to discard his notes.

WK to move stage R between ladder and the image of the object.

Screen Man 2 exits.

WK moves up to screen – his back to audience – looks left/looks right.

WK follows – looks at his notes – keeps looking for Screen Man 2. WK is discarding notes as he walks. Screen Man 2 enters with notes. Screen Man 2 is discarding his notes. WK is picking up the discarded pages. WK prepares for "What is our Edge".

A note for WK – when you pick up the notes, be encouraged by what you find.

Allow the new momentum to give you a new energy and synergy of ideas.

Only on the line "pickled hands" do you find that you are losing the plot.

In the Rocinante text: the shifting moment comes from a suspended place – find the moment when you are suddenly without horse – feel that you are about to fall – that is the shift – then pick up the note.

So this is about the party that eats itself. So you have the purges starting in the 1930s, where not only opponents of the regime are being executed, but the very supporters themselves, Central Committee members themselves, are being eradicated, erased, subjected to show trials and executed.

Bukharin: Whatever they are testifying against me is not true.

(Laughter, noise in the room.) Why are you laughing?

There is nothing funny in all this. But I cannot admit, either today or tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, anything which I am not guilty of. (Noise in the room.)

Mikoyan: And when Rykov, speaking about your note, says that where there is smoke, there is fire – is he telling the truth?

Bukharin: Generally speaking, it seems there can be no smoke without fire. (Laughter.)

Mikoyan: Well, that's precisely what we are talking about.

Bukharin: But that brings up another question. To what extent can you call my note 'smoke'? Allow me to conduct a 'vicious struggle' not only against myself but also against all of my former allies.

71

William would then continue, filming and editing new material in the afternoon and, god knows how, consolidating the day's work in preparation for the next morning's rehearsal.

My challenge was to keep the delivery enlivened, energised, to help William rediscover and find fresh and new life in fragments that we rehearsed over and over again. To keep the simplicity and delight in the telling of the narrative, and to find authenticity in the playing of a lecture that spirals in on itself to reveal the other. As we broke down the text into smaller beats, we found clarity within the moments, which enabled William to play more fluidly within the structure of the piece.

WK With a mixture of calm, enthusiasm and angry determination, Sue kept me going back up the ladder, redoing each section time and time again.

Doing what a director should always do, making the performer discover the text as if it is a series of new thoughts. (It is astonishing how badly one can say one's own words, and how much rehearsal you need to give the appearance of being yourself.) The entire project would not have got off the ground without Sue's persistence.

Her phone calls and refusal to make a space in which I could have said the project was being put aside were essential; a terror and a pleasure.

SP-G

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After a break of about a week, we returned to resume the rehearsal process and William, in a moment of frustration, asked me at what point he should move the ladder. I had also forgotten. He then asked me to look at my notes in order to find the place.

The truth be told, I had not written down any staging notes as I had been so drawn into what I was watching, I had simply forgotten to write.

(EXTRACTS)

Notes from first run-through – Monday 19 May 2008: Find the charm and enjoyment in the telling of the story.

In the conversation, the starting point must be from the screen then take the text out to the audience.

Move away from screen – focus after – the landing of the nose. Do not notice that the Screen Man has left the screen. Find the transitional shift into the ladder.

The intention behind climbing the ladder is to try to see if you can see what the Screen Man is writing in his notes – keep rooted to your intention.

"WHAT IS OUR EDGE" – WHERE IS LADDER NOW??

[We need a rehearsal to map the journey of the ladder.] Ladder is on the right side of WK. PERSEPHONE IN THE LABYRINTH. Allow the image of the falling line to intercept the text. "The faculty of recognition" – the horse image is too long.

"4am in the morning" – should we be seeing the image of the nose diving into the pool? Use standup comic genre to tell the story – paint in every detail – no broad brush strokes – slow the story down – don't rush over the domestic detail in the text – it's very funny.

The ladder should be centre to the image, resonating with the ladder in the pool. WK should be engulfed in the image – keep centre – stay inside the image – find the walk that circulates back and forth – gather and share. Allow the chaos to build – keep honest – keep detailing the finer points – it's ok if you feel lost in the text – use the fear of losing your lines – stay in the moment – don't act the panic – just be panicked.

Find transition into Bukharin. Progressive urgency with Bukharin text. We want to see your eyes – make eye contact with your audience when you can – keep connected/engaged. Always try to find a lightness of being ...

Bukharin: That means that those who give testimony know the nature of the general atmosphere. (Laughter, noise in the room.)

Postyshov: What kind of atmosphere are you talking about?

Bukharin: The whole tragedy of my situation lies in this, that this Piatakov and others like him so poisoned the atmosphere, such an atmosphere arose that no one believes human feelings – not emotions, no the impulses of the heart, not tears. (Laughter.) Many manifestations of human feeling, which had earlier represented a form of proof – and there was nothing shameful in this – have today lost their validity and force.

Bukharin: Comrades, I implore you not to interrupt me, because it is difficult for me, it is simply physically hard for me to speak. I will answer any question posed to me, but please do not interrupt me just now. I won't shoot myself, because then people will say I killed myself as to harm the Party.

But if I die, as it were, from an illness, then what will you lose by it? (Laughter.) Please permit me to finish and explain this whole business to the best of my ability.

Kaganovich: You are not very good at explaining it – that's the whole point.

Bukharin: Whether I explain it well or poorly, I am speaking sincerely, my thoughts are sincere.

Kaganovich: Not every act of sincerity is correct.

Bukharin: In any case, I am speaking sincerely.

Molotov: And we too are criticising you sincerely. (Laughter.

Uproar in the room.)

Voroshilov: You scoundrel! Keep your trap shut! How vile! How dare you speak like that!

Bukharin: But you must understand – it's very hard for me to die.

Stalin: And it's easy for us to go on living?! (Noise in the room, prolonged laughter.)

73

(NOTES)

74

WK In the end the form was clear, or rather, a structure emerged. Part One: I tell the story of The Nose (extracts from the Gogol short story). Part Two: I digress to talk about a division of the self – notes on hotel living. Part Three: The Nose in Shostakovich. Then back to Tristram Shandy and the divided self in Don Quixote (with extract – English and Latin – from these texts). Part Four: At a loss for words, finding notes, finding a train of thought. The limits of intelligence. Also in this section, how to make a horse (Don Quixote again), and taking a line for a walk.

Part Five: Complete loss of what to say.

Trotsky, Stalin, a divided party, the end of Russian Modernism. Part Six: The Party exploded. Bukharin's speech plus interjections at the plenum of the Party in February 1937. Part Seven:

A lifetime of enthusiasm – procession projected with music by Philip Miller.

[Note for WK – to slow down in the telling of the nose's visit to the Quedlingberg nunnery.]

SP-G

WK to move stage right.

Notes from sections in ... THE NOSE: BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS: Sterne: Tristram Shandy.

WK [centre stage, but right] to start this section with enthusiastic energy.

On the line "But the story goes backwards too" – Screen Man 2 enters [chair man]. On line "... the absurd is alive and well" WK notices Screen Man 2 for the first time. WK attempts to continue his story – the interaction/ exchange of looks from Screen Man to WK interrupts the telling.

Screen Man 2 is trying to find a comfortable position on the chair [he knows that he might have to be there for a long time]. WK to continue after giving Screen Man 2 the look ...

Screen Man 2 can't take it any longer and starts to edge out on his chair, levering himself out with the hope that no one will notice.

Once Screen Man 2 is out – PAUSE PROJECTOR. WK has not noticed that Screen Man 2 has left and continues with Sterne's Hafen Slawkenbergius ...

On the word "Slawkenbergius" Screen Man 1 enters pushing "the ladder".

WK notices Screen Man 1's arrival – he loses his train of thought – this is the cue for WK to move to his on-stage ladder – he pulls the ladder closer to the screen – climbs to top. WK climbs to top of ladder – trying to catch a glimpse from Screen Man 1's notes ...

WK, from top of ladder, starts the Latin part of the text.

Screen Man 1, now listening to the Latin, takes down notes in his black book. Enter Screen Man 2 – he sits on ladder – and, watching WK, draws in his black notebook.

WK continues with the Latin text.

Screen Man 2 can't keep up – he gets lost with the Latin – he tries to find the Latin in his black note book.

Screen Man 1 stops drawing and listens patiently on the steps of the ladder.

WK starts the next beat – Cervantes: Don Quixote. [Note for WK – include the Screen Men in the telling of this story – refer back to screen as often as you can.]

WK After each day of rehearsal Catherine would re-edit sections in keeping with new timings and additions. The archival footage used in section five was assembled and shaped (she made a very careful and ordered chaos).

My daughter Alice entered as stage manager and video operator. After ten days of rehearsal (and not the two run-throughs I had anticipated), I performed the piece for an audience in the studio. Sue was right, we could have done with more rehearsal.

SP-G Bringing in an audience was a turning point in the process. This was the transformation point from "lecture" to "performance". Viewing the piece through the eyes of an audience gave me a new perspective on the work. It was tremendously satisfying to see William ignite with his audience and hear their extremely positive responses and their experience of the piece.

In contemplating this process with William in his lecture/performance I am not me, the horse is not mine, I can't help but draw the analogy of the Kentridge driveway that leads up from

the road to his house. As difficult as it is to drive up, it is sometimes more tricky to drive down, especially when you have only a small triangle to turn around on, but on exiting the "cat gates", I always felt richer for having made it both down and up.

WK At the end of our long journey, Philip rejoined us. The music wasn't the music we had first talked about for the small-scale Johannesburg performance project – what remains of that is a house lullaby for burglar alarm and microwave. This still waits its use. I had thought that there would be music interludes between the sections of the lecture, but these disappeared, as did a three-part, one-man band to be played by the projected selves (still to be done at some point).

The filmed events – me walking round the room, sitting, sleeping – found their places in the course of the lecture – the combination of final image and final text being a fortuitous conjunction.

It was lucky to find the combination, but it then was re-filmed and re-edited with care to clarify the relationship (the timing) of word and image.

SP-G Notes for end: William on top ledge of ladder, reading the last lines from the Bukharin text.

Bukharin: But you must understand – it's very hard for me to die.

Stalin: And it is easy for us to go on living?! (prolonged laughter, noise in the room).

Screen Man picks up his shoes and exits. Straight in with Philip's march – full volume.

William to sit down on ladder – his back to us.

William to watch the screen. The procession enters from screen left.

Fragments of procession march through William's uniform white shirt.

As screen procession ends on screen – fade to black. William to come down from ladder, to centre stage, to take his bow.

SP-G The ephemeral boundary that lies between the captured and the living moment, the image and the spoken word, is a conversation that is just beginning – the silent dialogue is still to come.

WK We needed a raucous march to move away from the end of the text. Philip wrote a galop (a form Shostakovich uses in the opera) and worked with a Johannesburg choir and their leader to go on top of, through and behind the band playing. I have never asked if he thinks the piece finally made is utterly different from or a continuation of the early fragments that drove him out of the studio.

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PREVIOUS LEFT I am not me, the horse is not mine, lecture, 2008 ................................

PREVIOUS RIGHT Telegrams from the Nose, projection (detail), 2008 ................................

OPPOSITE I am not me, the horse is not mine, lecture, 2008

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ABOVE / Opposite The Nose, workshop, 2008 ................................

OVERLEAF I am not me, the horse is not mine, lecture, 2008 ................................

PAGE 80 I am not me, the horse is not mine, projection from lecture, 2008 ................................

ENDPAPER The Nose, study for set painting (detail), acrylic on canvas, approximately 350 x 500 cm, 2008 ................................

BACK COVER I am not me, the horse is not mine (The Horse is Not Mine), video still from installation, 2008

INSTALLATION OF 8 FILM FRAGMENTS, 2008

LECTURE/PERFORMANCE WITH PROJECTION, 2008

DVcam and HDV transferred to DVD (6 minute loop)

DVcam and HDV transferred to DVD, live performance (45 minutes)

Directing, animation and photography William Kentridge Editing Catherine Meyburgh Composer Philip Miller Animation assistants Gerhard Marx, Naomi van Niekerk and Catherine Walker

Directing, animation, photography and performance William Kentridge Editing Catherine Meyburgh Composer Philip Miller Stage direction Sue Pam-Grant Animation assistants Gerhard Marx, Naomi van Niekerk and Catherine Walker

Galop Music composition by Philip Miller Ngilahlekelwe Ikhala Lami Musical arrangement by Philip Miller with music and lyrics by Thulani Manana and Richard Siluma Choir Thulani Manana and Abanikazi Bomkhalanga The Galop Band Adam Howard, trumpet; Thulani Manaka, vocal leader; Bethuel Mbonani, percussion; Billy Middleton, tuba; Dan Selsick, trombone; Ntkozo Zunga, Castrol tin-can guitar Dancing figure Thato Motlhaolwa The Nose workshop participants Johannesburg, January 2008

Panaota Athanasiou, Zola Hahsatsi, Rachel Jacobs, Alex-Ann Keppie, Mbovu Malinga, Wez-Lee Masilo Makgamatha, Thato Mathole, Onthatile Matshidiso, Hlomohang Motheto, Thato Motlhaolwa, Miranda Ndou, Lesego Ngwato, Mamo Nondlwana, Roberto Manuel Pombo, Eve Rakow, Motlalenwa Sehloho, Rabeka Silinda, Nqaba Tsela, Claudine Ullman, Nick Welch

Galop Music composition by Philip Miller Ngilahlekelwe Ikhala Lami Musical arrangement by Philip Miller with music and lyrics by Thulani Manana and Richard Siluma Choir Thulani Manana and Abanikazi Bomkhalanga The Galop Band Adam Howard, trumpet; Thulani Manaka, vocal leader; Bethuel Mbonani, percussion; Billy Middleton, tuba; Dan Selsick, trombone; Ntkozo Zunga, Castrol tin-can guitar Lecture video operator Alice Kentridge Dancing figure Thato Motlhaolwa The Nose workshop participants Johannesburg, January 2008

Panaota Athanasiou, Zola Hahsatsi, Rachel Jacobs, Alex-Ann Keppie, Mbovu Malinga, Wez-Lee Masilo Makgamatha, Thato Mathole, Onthatile Matshidiso, Hlomohang Motheto, Thato Motlhaolwa, Miranda Ndou, Lesego Ngwato, Mamo Nondlwana, Roberto Manuel Pombo, Eve Rakow, Motlalenwa Sehloho, Rabeka Silinda, Nqaba Tsela, Claudine Ullman, Nick Welch

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William Kentridge is a South African artist who makes drawings, short animated films, sculpture and prints. He also designs and directs for theatre and opera. Since his participation in Dokumenta X in Kassel in 1997, solo shows of Kentridge's work have been seen in museums around the world. He is the recipient of the Carnegie Medal (1999/2000), the Goslar Kaisserring (2003) and the Oskar Kokoschka Award (2008). In April 2005 he directed Mozart’s The Magic Flute for the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels. The Guggenheim Foundation commissioned Black Box/Chambre Noire, a miniature theatre piece with mechanised puppets, projection and original music by Philip Miller, for the Deutsche Bank Guggenheim, Berlin, in October 2005. Current projects include work towards a production of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, to premier at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in March 2010.

Philip Miller is a composer working in live performance, theatre, film and video. He has collaborated with William Kentridge since 1994, composing music to many of his animated films, including: Felix in Exile (1994), Weighing... and Wanting (1998), Stereoscope (1999), Medicine Chest (2001), Journey to the Moon (2003) and Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005). In 2007 he conceived and composed Rewind – a cantata for voice, tape and testimony which has been performed in New York and Johannesburg. It will be on tour in Europe in 2009. Miller's sound installation Special Boy was selected for the exhibition, Spier Contemporary 2007. His CDs include William Kentridge's 9 Drawings for Projection, Black Box/Chambre Noire, Shona Malanga and The Thula Project.

Sue Pam-Grant is an inter-disciplinary artist, theatre director and playwright. Her most recent solo exhibition, Open at the Seams, opened at Gallery MOMO in February 2008 and she recently directed Sylvaine Strike's Coupé at the Market Theatre. In October 2008 she collaborated with composer Xoli Norman and curator Indra Wussow and her foundation kunst:raum sylt quelle to present the interdisciplinary installation Guard on Shift in Johannesburg.

She has been invited to take up a two-month residency at the kunst:raum sylt quelle in 2009. She is currently working on a new body of mixed-media sculptures, Dress Maps/ Body Contour. She is represented by Gallery MOMO.

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WILLIAM KENTRIDGE – I AM NOT ME, THE HORSE IS NOT MINE A man wakes one morning and finds his nose gone. He attempts to track it down through the streets of his city, going to the police, placing newspaper advertisements for its return, seeking medical advice. When he does meet his nose (in a cathedral) he realises to his dismay that his nose is of a higher rank than he is. His own nose will not speak to him.

When his nose is arrested (trying to leave the city in disguise), it still will not rejoin his face.

But one morning he wakes and the nose is back in place.