Part 1 : The Moment Has Gone
Part 2 : Waiting For The Sibyl

The 42-minute chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl and the 22-minute film with live score The Moment Has Gone comprise a singular program of South African artist William Kentridge’s work—an evening in the theater of visual and aural alchemy unlike anything else.

Waiting for the Sibyl, created in collaboration with choral director and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd, one of South Africa’s leading progressive pianists and composers, is a piece for nine performers that unfolds in a series of 6 short scenes, interrupted and revealed by the dropping and raising of the front curtain. The work incorporates signature elements of Kentridge’s visionary practice—projection, live performance, recorded music, dance / movement, and shadows cast by the performers against a hand-painted backdrop—to tell the story of the Cumaean prophetess Sibyl. She would write out a questioner’s fate on an oak leaf and place it at the mouth of her cave on a pile of others’ fates. But when you went to retrieve it, a breeze would blow up and swirl the leaves about, leaving you uncertain if you were learning another’s fate or your own. The fact that your fate would be known, but you couldn’t know it, is the deep theme of our relationship of dread, of expectation, of foreboding towards the future.

Unspoken throughout but hovering over the opera is the notion that our contemporary Sibyl is the algorithm that will predict our future, our health, whether we’ll get a bank loan, whether we’ll live to 80, what our genetics will be. This certainty of an implacable mechanism that determines our outcome is juxtaposed against the desire for a more human connection to our destiny, an instinct to believe in the possibility of something other than the machine to guide us in how we see our future. The work is a profound, jarring, playful, and visually stunning meditation on what it means to be alive in our current moment in history, grappling afresh with humanity’s primordial task of making sense of the inherently tragic state of always knowing, yet never knowing, where our end will lead us; the cursed and blessed consciousness that makes us human. 

The Moment Has Gone begins the program and is a new 22-minute film with live score by Kyle Shepherd combining piano and an all-male South African chorus lead by Nhlanhla Mahlangu. It incorporates City Deep, the latest in Kentridge’s series of Soho Eckstein films, and sequences of Kentridge creating the work. In City Deep, the artist’s unique charcoal animation technique of successive erasure and redrawing conjures a non-linear story featuring his drawn alter ego Soho Eckstein, set between a municipal art museum (based on the Johannesburg Art Gallery) and an abandoned mining area at the edges of the city where unofficial artisanal gold mining takes place. The action jumps: the museum collapses, Soho comes face to face with his fate, whilst a solitary miner persistently works against his destiny. Interspersed throughout are images of the film’s creation, of the artist in his studio—always itself an action (a futile one) against destiny.