In April this year I was finally, to my relief, seated with knees jammed into the backrest in front of me at the BAM opera house in New York as the curtain rose on William Kentridge’s The Magic Flute.
In its tour of Europe the opera had changed slightly, absorbing some of the lessons of Kentridge’s later production Black Box/Chambre Noire. Though minor, the changes had shifted the ground of the work in barely perceptible, but significant, ways.
And so relief: I had been at work on a book on the opera for some months, but had seen the production on DVD only. What struck me, seated in the opera house, was that in the film the characters had seemed to be overwhelmed by a huge cosmic darkness.
On stage the effect was altogether different. When I discussed this with Kentridge, in typical fashion he gave me a technical explanation: the camera, set at some distance from the stage, had shown me more of the mise en scène than my own eye would have.
Watching the opera live, even seated way up in the mezzanine with a bird’s-eye view, I tended to shift my focus from one event on stage to another, taking in the action in a kind of collage.
On the second night I was close enough to the stage to see the sweat on the singers’ faces and the designs that Kentridge had handpainted on to some of the costumes. Now the characters dominated the stage and, though the projections swirled around them, they were of a piece with the scenery, engendering shimmering lines as they gestured, giving birth through their singing to imagery on the proscenium and backdrops.
Kentridge’s explanation of why the filmed and live versions were so different notwithstanding, I retained the impression, confirmed by his many notes on the opera and by some of the scholarly writing on Mozart’s creation, that the production had a dark underbelly. For all its comedy, the opera was cosmic, its themes going beyond the simple interplay of good and evil.
Over the months of its tour, Kentridge — at work by then on the opera’s sombre cousin Black Box, commissioned by Deutsche Guggenheim — found ways to make this darkness more explicit. The most notable change from the original production in Brussels was the insertion of an archival film of a rhino hunt in German East Africa, circa 1911.
The darkly comic film, showing two hunters shaking hands over a rhino’s corpse, had brought, said Kentridge, howls of protest from some in the opera cast. I imagine that it seemed too serious for the opera, too political, but Kentridge insisted on it, wanting to draw a line from the enlightenment rationality in Mozart’s opera to Black Box‘s searing treatment of the massacre of the Herero by the Germans in 1904 in German South West Africa.
In the many trips to Kentridge’s studio while I was at work on the book, I often considered the effect of this film on the opera. In conversations about it, Kentridge took some pleasure in remarking on the responses to this new element of the production. He had given much thought to the many ways he could have interpreted the opera and to the shape it might have taken had he been preparing it for a South African audience.
That he had the assurance to make changes to a major production well into its world tour is emblematic of Kentridge’s approach to his work. Animated filmmaking has taught him that the work is always in progress, even when it is finally let go. Returning to a finished project does not suggest that it is flawed, but rather that it absorbs the lessons of other projects, that it constantly interrogates its own assumptions.
When I took the finished book to Kentridge’s studio last week, I met for the first time many of those who had been involved in the original production in Brussels. They were here for the opening of the opera and to work with Kentridge on the next major production.
Though scheduled to open only in 2010, the project is well under way and will, no doubt, produce many prints, drawings and projections, some of which will become works in their own right, quite apart from the role they will play in the finished production.
Bronwyn Law-Viljoen is the managing editor of David Krut Publishing
Learning the Flute
Some months after I had undertaken to do this production of The Magic Flute, I was invited to exhibit in a museum in a small town. The museum was in an old half-timbered house and one of the rooms — a monks’ refectory — was filled with wood panelling and murals; not to be touched by the artist.
I decided to do a projection in this room using a blackboard as a screen — apart from anything else, to work out if one could use a black surface rather than the usual white as a projection screen. I needed to start thinking about The Magic Flute and decided to use the blackboard as a kind of sketch book for the production, to see if a visual language would emerge. — William Kentridge