‘What are you?” I asked William Kentridge again towards the end of our late-afternoon interview. I had ignored his initial response because it avoided the question altogether. Perhaps it is a tired question he’s heard too often, or perhaps he was tired after a full day of rehearsals for Dancing with Dada, the work he’s premiering at the upcoming Kentridge festival at the Market Theatre.
He came up with at least a reason for an answer: “It took a long time for me to write ‘artist’ under profession. I wrote ‘technician’ at first. But when I was about 30, I wrote ‘artist’.”
Why then particularly, which would have been in the mid-1980s?
“That’s when it was explained to me that I was unemployable,” says Kentridge. “And I decided, sink or swim, I was going to be an artist.”
So if you’re an artist, what is your practice?
“Drawing” was his certain reply. “Sometimes in two dimensions. Sometimes in three dimensions with time, or four dimensions in projections on a stage.”
There is something deep-rooted to his attachment to drawing: “Even when there are long periods when I haven’t drawn, I still think of myself as a draftsman.”
Kentridge is most associated with drawing, no matter the discipline he works in. His soft charcoal lines, rubbed and smudged around the edges, are as much a signature as his name. Sometimes he might introduce a little red. But mostly it’s black through thick and thin. “I’m very bad with colour,” he says. “When I worked with colour, I was always thinking: ‘Is it nice, is it nice?’ Making etchings in black and white released me from the nightmare of oil paint. Working in charcoal allowed me to be free to think about ideas.”
Filing in the talent gaps
Now, where there’s colour, it’s mostly found colour. As much as Kentridge is synonymous with charcoal drawing, he is also well known for his collaborations. A happy collaborator who knows his own limitations, he is emphatic as much as pragmatic: “If it can’t be made out of masking tape or cardboard, I need a collaborator. In so far as I have a talent, it’s choosing collaborators.”
But he doesn’t work with just anybody. Early on Kentridge realised he needed a structure to mediate between his own uncertainty and other people’s certainty, for it is a delicate dance between certainty and uncertainty that brings a collaborative work into being. “People who are too certain make difficult collaborators,” he says, giving an example: “The costume designer I work with never arrives with a beautiful drawing. There is neither a sense of her saying what the costumes should be nor asking me what they should be.”
As such everything gets the benefit of the doubt in the process of making, and ideas that arrive on a whim are given a chance, looked at and worked over. There are long-standing collaborative partnerships in Kentridge’s practice. The outstanding musical collaboration is with composer Philip Miller, who first wrote a score for Kentridge more than 17 years ago for the animated film, Felix in Exile (1994). Kentridge and Miller are working with dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo on Dancing with Dada. One of the critical elements of this piece about the nature of time’s own rhythms is a set of mechanical drums. “We’re trying to get drums to play by themselves,” says Kentridge, with one of his silent smiles. “We’re teaching them to play Philip’s music.”
In demonstrating the drums, the off-centre rhythmic play of Tom Waits comes to mind.
“He’s certainly been a musical hero of mine,” says Kentridge. “Both Philip and I share an aesthetic interest in his music.”
And the nature of this aesthetic interest? A dancehall band gone to seed, old traditional forms and their transformations, voices that are interesting rather than merely beautiful — and the way Waits takes a simple emotional connection to a ballad, hooks on to it and expands it from there.
Making new from the old
Kentridge refers to Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards, Waits’s three-album set released in 2006. It is the compilation of songs on the Bastards album that reinforces the affinity. Here, in a more experimental mood, Waits not only turns Brecht and Kerouac into melodies but also includes songs from a version of Woyzeck, Georg Büchner’s 19th-century unfinished play about working-class life in Germany.
Woyzeck on the Highveld (1992), Kentridge’s own translation of Büchner’s classic into the landscape of migrant labour in 1950s South Africa, inaugurated another rich collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company. Although some of the work in the Market Theatre programme has not been seen in Johannesburg before, Dancing with Dada is the only work that has never been performed previously and, as such, is the focus of Kentridge’s attention.
He has several reasons for producing Dancing with Dada. The first is next year’s installation for Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany. “To make the installation, there has to be a lot of live performance beforehand. Dada is a way of continuing the work on the Documenta piece.” In collaborating with Dada Masilo, Kentridge hopes to play with flexibility and inflexibility, with liveness, with differences in age.
“I’m not hoping to be a dancer like Dada,” he says. “I’m hoping for a meeting of two different languages, driven by our different ages. It has to do with being synchronistic and being out of time.”
At the beginning of next year, Dancing with Dada will take the form of a concert piece, which Kentridge hopes will further refine the installation for Kassel. “The Documenta piece is the detritus version of the concert piece.”
Another reason for Dada is the forthcoming Norton Lectures that Kentridge will be delivering at Harvard University. Exploring how a line of thought might emerge from and be made out of anarchy, the rationale behind the lectures stems from a long-standing interest in ways of working that introduce what can’t be rationalised or predicted.
Dealing with disintergration
“There are a set of minimal, banal actions that Dada and I have been doing on the stage,” says Kentridge. “There are certain big themes that we want to undo, unsay.” This process of unmaking raises questions about entropy and, for the Norton Lectures more specifically, whatever is antithetical of entropy.
“Art is about anti-entropy,” says Kentridge.
Why so?
“If you take a vase and hit it with a hammer, it shatters. If you throw the shards up in the air, they won’t land in the form of the same vase. What artists do emblematically is take the shards and from them construct a new vase or something else. They create coherence from fragments. One element of time is the disintegration from order to disorder. What we do as people is to try to keep coherence in the face of disintegration.”
Dancing with Dada might be a few weeks away but Kentridge isn’t certain whether it will work as a piece of art. But he seems unperturbed. “It has to be performed to know this,” he says.
“The point of being an artist is that you don’t trust yourself. The work requires an external confirmation by other people looking at it. And this work needs the pressure of the audience waiting.”