Paper Music

‘Most children draw... I just forgot to stop!’ William Kentridge has an inimitable drawing style – seemingly nonchalant, but with a touching core. Politics, history and poetry come together in the work of the South African artist.

His trademark: animated movies based on charcoal and pen drawings, artworks which also form the basis of the production Paper Music (2014).

A panther, drawn in charcoal, prowls around the backdrop while two singers (Ann Masina and Joanna Dudley) and a pianist (Vincenzo Pasquariello) perform on the stage: with Paper Music, Kentridge has once again made a paean to the combination of music and image. Paper Music is a joint project between Kentridge and South African composer Philip Miller, whose collaboration begun 25 years ago. During this festival, their shared art can also be seen and heard on a larger scale in The Head & The Load (2018).

Paper Music brings together vaudeville, opera and film – the production is subtitled ‘ciné-concert’. With his aesthetic and theatrical instincts, Kentridge has created an absurd, poetic one-hour performance based on new and old footage. Kentridge cares deeply about the history and development of his home country, and the piece deals with politically controversial issues such as South Africa’s apartheid past, colonialism and the AIDS crisis.

Fragments from previous films by Kentridge are included in Paper Music. Miller has accompanied them in his trademark idiom, characterized by repetitive elements and a certain tenderness in the harmonies used. For some films, Miller rewrote existing material that he composed previously; he also created new music. The singers demonstrate the full breadth of their skill, imitating sirens, musical instruments and animal sounds.

One of the older pieces that form part of Paper Music is The Refusal of Time (2012). Kentridge: ‘The Refusal of Time was the first time I had worked with Ann Masina and with Joanna Dudley, and found the extraordinary combination between their voices, the music of Philip Miller, and the images that we were making in this essay on time and our relationship to destiny.’

The production also includes an entirely new suite of songs, also titled Paper Music, which brings together fragments of lectures that Kentridge has given. Texts and phrases from these lectures become the libretto of the songs, which paint a portrait of the political situation in Johannesburg in 2014. The music engages in a dialogue with footage of falling papers and pages being turned.

Film and music influence and reinforce each other. In Paper Music, Kentridge challenges the audience to listen to the image and look at the sound.