William Kentridge by Maria-Christina Villasenor

He set out using a full arsenal of media-drawing, etching, painting, acting, filmmaking-to respond to the political issues pressing around him. Early in his career, Kentridge performed with the highly politicized Junction Avenue Theater Company in apartheid-era Johannesburg, at the same time running a printing press and producing posters for the struggling trade unions of the late 1970s. His genre-crossing talents led him to create a production for Shostakovich’s The Nose at the Met in 2010 that was as much a window onto the politics and aesthetics of 1930s Russia as it is a delirious use of the absurd to tell a deeply humanist tale of lives suppressed by totalitarian regimes.Įverything in Kentridge’s background points to his ability to transform complicated material into an artwork of operatic proportions. The South African-born Kentridge has an artist’s eye for rendering ideas in powerful visual form, a performer’s innate understanding of the irresistible presence of the live actor, and a sophisticated music lover’s knowledge of the intricacies of operatic and orchestral forms. By Roselee Goldbergįew contemporary artists come to the opera stage as fully equipped to realize its complex dramas, rich passions, and sheer monumentality as William Kentridge. The term “multidisciplinary” could have been coined for this artist, whose work incorporates drawing, painting, film, animation, sound recording, live performance, and a shrewd, politically engaged intelligence.

William Kentridge by Maria-Christina Villasenor