Chaos and collaboration

William Kentridge talks about time and man’s relation to it in his latest series of collaborative works

Being allowed  into William Kentridge’s studio at Arts on Main for a sneak preview of his latest collaborations feels somewhat like stumbling across a mad scientist’s chaotic laboratory. There are drums being “trained” to play themselves, as well as larger- than-life  wood and metal sculptures  sporting various  functional musical instruments, loud-hailers and levers.

In many ways, these structures are Kentridge’s proudest protagonists, and serve as a good starting point to describe the two-week programme of live events that Kentridge and a lengthy list of fellow artists are going to be putting on at the Market Theatre in September.

Broadly titled Refuse The Hour, a variety of diverse artistic events come together to join a larger dialogue about man and his relation to time. The machines that form part of the individual performance entitled Dancing With Dada (16-18 September) are in many ways the catalysts behind the overarching theme, and Kentridge himself  is the first to admit that they have a life and logic of their own.

Just as Galileo connected the beat of his pulse to the measurement of time, inspiring the dawn of pendulum clocks, Kentridge connects the beating of our hearts to man being a walking, breathing clock. In doing so, the animate machines on stage begin to take on distinctly human characteristics, from the concertina-like lungs to the moving “heads” of the loud-hailers and the spinning wheel acting as a flailing arm driving a violin  bow backwards and  forwards.

In working with dancer Dada Masilo and composer Philip Miller to produce the new and large-scale collaboration that is Dancing With Dada, Kentridge will be giving Joburg audiences a  prelude to a project that will take final shape at Documenta 13 in Kassel in 2012.

Dancing With Dada – which Kentridge says will be a bit like “taking a mixture of elements and different impulses, throwing them in a hat, shaking them violently and then throwing them all on stage” –  acts as a kind of a  microcosm for  all six individual performances and events that make up the final programme.

Audiences can expect collaboration at its finest, a cacophony of ideas, voices, sounds and ideas, all fighting for their place on the stage and,  as Kentridge predicts, all displaying a fair degree of entropy and disintegration into chaos despite  their best attempts at rescuing the situation.

Besides Dancing With Dada, there are various other noteworthy performances in the programme, such as the one night only cine- concert screening of 12 of Georges Méliès films (18 September) – followed by Kentridge’s own Journey To The Moon, a film that pays homage to  Méliès, who so inspired his work – as well as the first time that Kentridge will deliver his lecture I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine (7 September) to Joburg audiences.

The lengthy and impressive list of names and collaborators is reason enough to indulge in a few of the performances on offer, but there’s also the rare opportunity to see one of the South Africa’s most renowned artists in his element. Even Kentridge himself acknowledges this rare gathering of art and energy.

“If Dancing With Dada works, it will be shown next year in cities around the world,” he says. “But I suspect that it will be at its fullest and most chaotic in September, because we’re using a lot of musicians based here in Joburg, and if we took the performance overseas, we would have to trim it down quite a lot.”

Refuse The Hour is a two-week programme of live events on at the Market Theatre from September 6 – 18. Visit www.markettheatre.co.za for more information and for a full programmes. Tickets are available at the Market Theatre, the Goodman Gallery and Computicket.

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Wednesday 24 August 2011.