Creative chaos

William Kentridge takes to the stage and explores the concept of the division of the self 

9/10

SHOW: I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine by William Kentridge

VENUE: The Market Theatre, 56 Margaret Mcingana Street, Newtown, Johannesburg

There’s complete silence as an already captivated Joburg audience watches William Kentridge pacing the stage just before he commences his world famous lecture I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine. Not only is it the opening night of the two-week series of live performances  Refuse The Hour at the Market Theatre, but it’s also the very first time that Kentridge has performed this lecture  in Joburg (it was first  presented in SA at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town in 2008).

The clock strikes eight, the lights dim, Kentridge stops reading his notes, looks up sharply from behind  his glasses at the audience and launches into a passionate retelling of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol’s short story, The Nose.

Gogol’s story about a man who wakes up one morning to discover that his nose  has detached itself from his face and walked off to achieve a higher rank in society is itself based on Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1928 opera The Nose, and using both of these source texts Kentridge extends the themes of the division of the self and the terror of hierarchy to create a theatrical monologue that is both thought-provoking and full of humour, as well as moving and somewhat tinged by nostalgia.      

      

At one point in the monologue Kentridge alludes to the piece’s Dadaist undertones, saying that as the artist his job is not to make sense, only to make the drawings. He also casually throws away pieces of his “script”, later picking them up and reading lines and paragraphs at random, creating an air of chaos and adding to that sense of the nonsensical that the Dada movement was renowned for.   

 

I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine is in many ways Kentridge’s exploration of just how much of the outside (supposedly rational) world we need lodged with all of us, and he does so using comical background videos of himself (some of which even boast two digital  video Kentridges pacing behind the “real” Kentridge, further driving the concept of the divided self forward) and beautifully llustrated and edited projections that fuse  artworks, paper silhouettes and old Soviet film snippets to add layers of meanings and possible interpretations to this already intricate monologue.

This article was first published in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Friday 9 September 2011.

Refuse The Hour is a two-week programme of various live events at the Market Theatre until September 18. Visit www.markettheatre.co.za for more information. Tickets available at the theatre, from the Goodman Gallery and Computicket.