William Kentridge (Johannesburg, 1955) likes to play with nineteenth-century artifacts. On the set of Wozzeck, Alban Berg's opera whose staging premieres tomorrow at the Liceu, the South African artist famous for his drawings and animations has included an old movie projector from which a reel of film appears that nobody is going to see. And that contains his drawings... But it is only part of the props, it complements this set of old woods that recreate the world of poverty in which soldier Wozzeck lives. A poetic dimension that says a lot about Kentridge's artistic practice.
“In the history of photography and cinema there is either the idea of capturing reality or of transforming it. And the theater is the place where you can capture this sample of transformations”, says the recently arrived artist in Barcelona, a city he has not visited since 1991 and to which he has now flown twice in a short time to attend opera rehearsals . “In the 17th century -he continues- they did it with movement on stage; in the 19th century, with magicians and shadow puppets, or that change of hat that transformed the actor... And in the same way, this Wozzeck does not seek to describe, but to appeal to the psyche that the character exudes”, he assures.
And there, what Kentridge calls the pleasure of self-deception, plays a role. “The pleasure of knowing how something is done and still wanting to believe in the magic it hints at,” says the artist. In this story of sexist violence in which the man kills his wife, commits suicide and leaves an abandoned child -all in a military context-, the character of the son is played by a puppet, according to the South African creator for this Commissioned by the Salzburg Festival. “The public can see how it is handled but, if it is done well, when it moves it moves us, we cannot rule out that it comes to life, we know it is an object but at that moment it becomes real”.
The primitive illusionism that Méliès or the Lumière brothers took from the circus to turn it into cinema accompanies this artist in his perception of reality that is invisible because it is everyday. And to corroborate this, the Liceu has staged Double vision at the Saló dels Miralls (until June 29), an exhibition in which Kentridge invites us to discover that “the brain is a muscle that creates illusions”.
Being so recent the exhibition that the CCCB dedicated to him in the pandemic -when the creator could not travel to Barcelona- the Liceu has thought of showing something complementary, "because Wozzeck is already a work of art in itself", points out the artistic director of the theater, Víctor García de Gomar. Thus, the artist has used works that he has been developing in the last decade and arranges them in pairs of identical photogravures that, seen through a stereoscope, acquire a third dimension.
"The brain is a muscle that is creating this illusion. We see it in three dimensions, which is the way that corresponds to our way of seeing and understanding the world. The habit of seeing it that way is something invisible, but we make it evident in this exercise ", explains the artist while confirming the magic of his proposal by approaching one of the various stereoscopes that it has not been easy to find for this exhibition. "Here it is your brain that creates the illusion. It is the deception of perception itself," he adds, dropping his gaze, who a couple of days ago was appointed Honoris Causa by Columbia University, in New York, at the same time than Patti Smith, Yo-Yo Ma or Hillary Clinton.
In this proposal to examine how we actively construct images and meaning, Kentridge uses everything from photogravure from his series Underweysung der Messung (2207), a set of prints that refer directly to Albrecht Dürer's drawing machines, to works with Ivorypress, Elena Ochoa Foster's publishing house, pursuing the dream of creating a pop-up book. There are even photo-etched parts of himself looking through the stereoscope. Or another in color made from the model of Wozzeck's stage.
For the artistic director of the Liceu, Kentridge carries with him the idea of transformation. "With his animations he erases the world to turn it into something better, strips reality bare with irony and subversion, and uses drawing for an incisive critique of the abuse of power, of the trauma he observes from Johannesburg. But always from a idea of poetic language", he adds.
For an artist who has always wanted to add audio to his animations, opera is “like drawing in four dimensions”. "What opera offers me are screens to project and the physical space of the actors. You can consider that I am a director who is employed by an opera house but I prefer to see myself as an artist who is offered a 70x40 meter canvas. More still, they offer me the best singers to put before my drawings, and then an orchestra of eighty musicians, a musical director and a choir, plus the lighting designer... For me it is like an opportunity to make a large-scale cartoon scale".
However, he only does one every 4 or 5 years. She has had five in 25 years, as she has been combining the hustle and bustle of teamwork with the loneliness of the studio. The Magic Flute was her first big title, but in each one the technique changes. "Often on new projects I have a vision of what the language should be," she notes. In Wozzeck it is charcoal, in Shostakovich's Nose it was collage... And now, she reveals, she is working on a new project for a Shostakovich Symphony in a new language. "It's not like anything I've ever done. There's no charcoal drawing animation... I use cardboard."
Although he finds the means to make opera mainly in Europe, Ketridge has managed to make three of them in South Africa. He does them all in his Johannesburg studio, both the drawings and the scene rehearsals. For this Wozzeck there were workshops with local artists in order to see the impression he gave on stage. And they had "such an interesting time" that they later made a production with what came out of these workshops.
"Each theater project takes months of drawing work, and it's something I do, I don't need anyone to do it for me. The essential activity is to draw or draw and film to make it into animation, or get an animation for a staged work. The hardest part is avoiding old ideas," he confesses. "My hope has always been that there will be new things that I didn't anticipate."
When he feels like making too many changes before an opera, I prefer to do another piece. With The Magic Flute, for example, there were the questions of the Enlightenment and colonialism. Kentridge says he could have rewritten the opera so that it was about colonialism in Africa and the Queen of the Night was a black woman from the continent... "but I was interested in the substratum of the Enlightenment. And that became another project called Black Box, about the genocide in Africa in 1900 by the Germans".
Regarding Wozzeck, he defines it as an opera that speaks of the violence that arises from despair. "I don't know how it will be in Barcelona but in South Africa the violence of men against their girlfriends and wives is a big problem and this opera makes it very visible. It is a very contemporary issue. Violence arises from depression. From people who are depressed and for whom physical confrontation is a momentary release. Someone said to me... 'for once, couldn't it be Marie who kills Wozzeck?'"
Written in 1830 but not staged as a play until 1915, Berg's opera then transposes with dramaturgy, although in both cases there is an awareness of war. That is why the opera recreates it as a premonition of the First World War, with the explosions in the sky, the lights that shine, heads rolling through the mud... the playwright, Georg Büchner, already described all this in 1830, when almost a century to happen.
"Obviously, in terms of what's going on in the Ukraine right now, with destroyed villages and abandoned children, those are the images that come to mind," Kentridge concludes. "The kid wiping snot on the back of his the truck or the people drowning on the beaches of Turkey... It is the type of images that served Büchner to anticipate the great war, just as we are full of them and we knew what the Ukraine would be like”
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