Shared from the 3/5/2023 San Francisco Chronicle eEdition

ENTERTAINMENT COMMENTARY

Kentridge prepares multifront artistic visit to Berkeley

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Cal Performances

Multimedia artist William Kentridge’s works include filmmaking, theater and opera direction, puppetry, performance and more.

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Salgu Wissmath/The Chronicle 2022

South African multidisciplinary artist William Kentridge calls his work “boundary-free.”

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Stella Olivier/Cal Performances

A performer in “Sibyl,” William Kentridge’s multimedia chamber opera that will be the centerpiece of his works during his residency.

To call William Kentridge a creative polymath is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.

The 67-year-old South African artist has embraced an enormous array of genres and approaches over the course of his career. Drawing and printmaking have always been central to his work, but his output encompasses a wealth of other projects as well — filmmaking, theater and opera direction, puppetry, performance, and more.

This month, Berkeley audiences will have a rare chance to immerse themselves in Kentridge’s multifaceted world, as he begins an extensive residency sponsored by Cal Performances, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

The centerpiece of the visit will be the U.S. premiere of “Sibyl,” a collaborative two-part presentation on mythological themes that combines live music, dance and film. Kentridge is also scheduled to perform Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate,” a 1932 tour de force of Dadaist sound poetry.

BAMPFA has assembled a collection of films related to his career, including several of his operatic productions and a documentary. Kentridge spoke with The Chronicle in November, during a short visit to the UC Berkeley campus.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Your career has been such a multifarious one, with drawing and film and opera and stage performance and so on. Do you think of yourself as an artist who does one thing, and then also another, and then another? Or is it all a single, boundary-free creative flux?

A: It’s kind of boundary-free. Obviously, when it gets presented, it’s very different in an opera house than in a museum. But a lot of my operatic work, for example, is connected to things that happen in the studio. When I directed (Alban Berg’s) “Lulu,” I was working with certain drawings, but it was part of a continuum that had started earlier and which got very detailed during the opera, and I continued working with that technique after the opera.

Q: You’ve directed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and elsewhere. How does that kind of work intersect with other projects?

A: There are two different ways of thinking about directing an opera. You can think, “OK, here’s an opera house that has an agenda of performances it wants to show in its repertoire.” They’ve hired an orchestra and singers, and you’re the hired assistant to direct it. That’s the job, and you do it, and then after the opening or the dress rehearsal, you’re surplus.

Q: And the alternative?

A: Here is an extraordinary institution that is giving me a piece of paper or canvas that is 17 meters wide, 10 meters high, 12 meters deep. And they’re throwing in a 70-piece orchestra to play while my drawing is happening. And they’re giving me three hours of time for this to happen. And as a bonus, there are five of the best singers in the world and fantastic music and a great libretto. And they’re saying, “Now go and make us a big, four-dimensional drawing that we can watch.”

Q: The centerpiece of this visit is going to be the U.S. premiere of your new piece “Sibyl,” which, as I understand it, is in two parts.

A: The opera, “Waiting for the Sibyl,” was created as a companion to a piece by (sculptor) Alexander Calder. But we couldn’t travel with it, so we made another piece to use as a prelude. “The Moment Has Gone” is a separate film, about 20 minutes long, that uses the same musicians. It’s like an overture.

Q: You’ve said that your life tends to go in cycles, with periods of travel and performance alternating with work at home in the studio.

A: It fluctuates. During the pandemic it was an anomaly because I had all those months in the studio. It was fantastic.

Q: So you’re the guy who loved the pandemic shutdown, is what you’re telling me?

A: I mean, I went through COVID three times. But everyone in the studio got it very early on, and so for eight months, before it was clear you could get it again, no one wore a mask. No one was anxious. The studio just operated wonderfully. Then we all got hit with the omicron variant.

Q: Now when you refer to the studio, you’re talking about two different establishments, correct?

A: My studio at home is a much more domestic space for drawing. But for the past six years, I’ve been involved with an art center in Johannesburg called the Less Good Idea, where curators are chosen every year to invite different performers, actors, and construct five interesting evenings for the citizens of Johannesburg. It’s about the energy that comes when people who haven’t worked together come together and see what happens. Giving four percussionists a bunch of typewriters, for instance, to use as a kind of street dance.

Q: What does the name mean?

A: It’s from a Tswana proverb: “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.” So the less good idea is not the stupid idea. You have to have a first idea, against which this could be less good. It’s being open to things you don’t expect.

Q: Tell me about your daily life. Are you just making art in your head 24/7? Do you ever sit down on the couch and say, “I’m done making art for the day, I’ll do a crossword puzzle?”

A: Absolutely. I’m really frustrated that there’s not much soccer on American television. But no, I don’t draw when I travel. I probably should, but I don’t. I’m not someone who says, “Wherever I am, that’s my studio.” I read and make notes in my hotel room, but my real work begins when I get home.

Q: You studied acting for a while, but you claim you were a failure. And yet your presence in lectures and performances is highly theatrical.

A: Well, I’m performing myself. It’s very different when you have a script of someone else’s words that you have to inhabit as if they were real. And the drawing is performance also. At a certain point, I understood that one of the conditions of being a contemporary artist now is that you’re expected to talk. The exhibition is not enough, the work isn’t enough. Matisse never had to do interviews.

Reach Joshua Kosman: jkosman@sfchronicle.com . Twitter: @JoshuaKosman

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