WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

“Increasingly, admirably, Kentridge is using his international profile as a platform for collaborations with a host of South African colleagues.”

— The New York Times

William Kentridge (born Johannesburg, South Africa, 1955) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theater and opera productions. His method combines drawing, writing, film, performance, music, theatre, and collaborative practices to create works of art that are grounded in politics, science, literature and history, all the while maintaining a space for contradiction and uncertainty. Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from several universities including Yale and the University of London and of numerous awards and honors in recognition of his work.

THE OFFICE produces Kentridge’s performance work around the world. These large-scale, multidisciplinary, uncategorizable theatrical productions incorporate most or sometimes all the elements of his artistic practice, which in combination conjure dizzying spectacles deep with layered meaning that are unlike anything else in the art world. They are conceived and developed with a fluid but regular company of like minded creative collaborators—composers, choreographer/dancers, musicians, designers, video artists, actors, and others who collectively help to realize Kentridge’s singularly imagined works for the stage. Producing one of these is not for the feint of spirit or the risk-averse: the challenges are often diabolically complex; the rewards, though, are unparalleled.

kentridge.studio

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE’S COLLABORATORS

A rotating but steady company of creative fellow travelers conspire with Kentridge to bring his work to the stage; here is an incomplete list:

William is represented by
Goodman Gallery
Lia Rumma Gallery
Hauser & Wirth

THE GREAT YES, THE GREAT NO

conceived & directed by WILLIAM KENTRIDGE
with PHALA O. PHALA and NHLANHLA MAHLANGU

From one world to another
Marseille, 1941: a liner sails for Martinique. Fleeing Vichy France, on board are surrealist André Breton, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, Communist novelist Victor Serge and exiled German author Anna Seghers. The Great Yes, The Great No adds its layer of fiction to history, augmenting this very real passenger list with several other famous figures: Martiniquan writers Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Jeanne and Paulette Nardal, in whose salon in Paris the theorized concept of ‘négritude’ was born, in dialogue between Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor (a Senegalese writer) and Léon-Gontran Damas (a Guyanais poet). Also on board are philosopher Frantz Fanon, Joséphine Bonaparte (another Martiniquais), Joséphine Baker, Trotsky and even Stalin.

All are united by the symbolic power of the crossing, experienced in turn as uprooting, exile or reinvention - from Africa to the Caribbean, from the Caribbean to Europe, from war-torn Europe to a new elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that Kentridge conceived of the Captain as an incarnation of Charon - the ferryman of the Underworld on the River Styx: this wartime transatlantic voyage takes characters and spectators into another world, governed by a deconstruction of signs and words. In addition to the writings and words of these famous thinkers and artists, which find their way into the text of the play in fragments, the Captain constructs his lines from snippets taken from Bertolt Brecht, Anna Akhmatova, Wislawa Szymborska, Marina Tsvetaeva and others.

A lavish show
Created with associate director Phala Ookeditse Phala, choral conductor and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and dramaturg Mwenya Kabwe, The Great Yes, The Great No is part play, part oratorio, part chamber opera. William Kentridge’s breathtaking visual inventiveness, particularly linked to the spirit of surrealism, is in dialogue with Nhlanhla Mahlangu’s musical composition, in a dramaturgy combining a ‘Greek choir’, actors and dancers, projections, masks and shadow play. The fertile ground of the Black Paris of the 1940's, the poetics of Martinique, Surrealism and the Négritude movement form the background to the libretto. The Great Yes, The Great No is led by these anti-rational ways of approaching language and image. Finding strange beauty in the unexpected, the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional, surrealism has been described as Negritude's creative weapon, and The Great Yes, The Great No captures the poetic and the revolutionary as it gestures towards a more free future possibility.

The Great Yes, The Great No trailer

2025 Ruhrfestspiele, Recklinghausen (GE)
2025 Bergen International Festival, Bergen (NO)
2025 CalPeformances, Berkeley, CA (USA)
2025 The Wallis, Los Angeles, CA (USA)
2025 Adrienne Arsht Center, Miami, FL (USA)
2024 ImpulsTanz, Vienna (AT)
2024 Luma Foundation, Arles (FR) [PREMIERE]
2023 In development

OH, TO BELIEVE IN ANOTHER WORLD

A film for Shostakovich 10th Symphony

William Kentridge has created some of the most original and bold stagings in the opera world--his productions of Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose and Alban Berg's Wozzeck among them--and film and video work is central to his practice. Now, in a project to be commissioned by the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, he returns to Shostakovich with a 50-minute film designed as a dynamic visual counterpoint to the great composer’s Symphony No. 10, created to be shown with live musical accompaniment by an orchestra.

Symphony No. 10 was premiered by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra on December 17, 1953, the same year as Stalin’s death. It was Shostakovich's first symphonic work since his second denunciation in 1948, and is often cited as an inflection point in his rehabilitation as a creative artist. Kentridge’s film will incorporate elements of techniques he developed and deployed in his production of Wozzeck, his expansive multidisciplinary theatrical work The Head & the Load, and the immersive Pepper’s Ghost illusion used in his experimental adaptation of the avant garde theater piece Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. The resulting film will illuminate, interrogate, and honor the symphony; the combination will add up to an inspiringly confounding evening of music and cinema.

Oh, To Believe in Another World trailer

2025 Bergen International Festival, Bergen (NO)
2024 New York Philharmonic, New York (USA)
2023 Wiener Konzerthaus, Vienna (AT)
2023 Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Hong Kong (HK)
2022 Pompeii Theatrum Mundi, Pompeii (IT)
2022 Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, Lucerne (CH)

SIBYL

The 42-minute chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl and the 22-minute film with live score The Moment Has Gone comprise a singular program of South African artist William Kentridge’s work—an evening in the theater of visual and aural alchemy unlike anything else.

(PART 1) The Moment Has Gone, which begins the program, is a new 22-minute film with live score by Kyle Shepherd combining piano and an all-male South African chorus lead by Nhlanhla Mahlangu. The film incorporates City Deep, the latest in Kentridge’s series of Soho Eckstein films, and sequences of Kentridge creating the work. In City Deep, the artist’s unique charcoal animation technique of successive erasure and redrawing conjures a non-linear story featuring his drawn alter ego Soho Eckstein, set between a municipal art museum (based on the Johannesburg Art Gallery) and an abandoned mining area at the edges of the city where unofficial artisanal gold mining takes place. The action jumps: the museum collapses; Soho comes face to face with his fate; a solitary miner persistently works against his destiny. Interspersed throughout are images of Kentridge in his studio making the work—the act of creation, always itself an action (a futile one) against destiny.

(PART 2) Waiting for the Sibyl, created in collaboration with choral director and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd, one of South Africa’s leading progressive pianists and composers, is a piece for nine performers that unfolds in a series of 6 short scenes, interrupted and revealed by the dropping and raising of the front curtain. The work incorporates signature elements of Kentridge’s visionary practice—projection, live performance, recorded music, dance / movement, and shadows cast by the performers against a hand-painted backdrop—to tell the story of the Cumaean prophetess Sibyl. She would write out a questioner’s fate on an oak leaf and place it at the mouth of her cave on a pile of others’ fates. But when you went to retrieve it, a breeze would blow up and swirl the leaves about, leaving you uncertain if you were learning another’s fate or your own. The fact that your fate would be known, but you couldn’t know it, is the deep theme of our relationship of dread, of expectation, of foreboding towards the future.

Sibyl trailer

2023 Sydney Opera House, Sydney (AU)
2023 Wiener Festwochen, Vienna (AT)
2023 Teatros del Canal de Madrid, Madrid (ES)
2023 CalPerformances, Berkeley, CA (US)
2023 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris (FR)
2022 Barbican Centre, London (UK)*
2022 Ruhrfestspiele, Recklinghausen (GE)
2021 Ingmar Bergman Festival, Dramaten, Stockholm (SE)
2021 Summer Nostos Festival, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Athens (GR)
2021 Red Bridge Project, Grand Théâtre, Luxembourg (LU)
2019 Teatro del’Opera, Rome (IT)

*William Kentridge is a 2023 Olivier Award Winner for Outstanding Achievement in Opera for his conception and direction of Sibyl at the Barbican theatre. Sibyl was additionally nominated for Best New Opera.

HOUSEBOY

Over the course of a 120-minute durational performance, founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea and co-curator of its 7th Season, William Kentridge presents a staged interpretation of the Cameroonian novel Houseboy. Through the work of an ensemble cast comprising the various characters throughout the 1956 novel by Ferdinand Oyono, Houseboy explores themes of colonialism, trauma, and narrative history in a production that merges music, language, translation and drawing. Houseboy is the sum of its parts, with each aspect of the performance remaining singular and vital to the overall narrative. A large backdrop rendered in charcoal by Kentridge, all hills and palm trees, sets the scene, and each character remains present on stage throughout the play. Music, myriad live percussive sounds from just off stage, both punctuates and sets the pace for the narrative.

At the heart of Houseboy, though, is language and the written word. Here, language is resistance and soft rebellion, and the presence of the diary – the primary vessel for the story – is a means of creating a record. In a moment early on in the play, when the protagonist reads the diary of his master, he discovers accounts of events that happened to him, but which he has no memory of. It is the start of his preoccupation with bearing witness to history. Considering his position as houseboy to colonial authority, he occupies a role that is perfectly positioned for unfettered observation. Later, once he has been keeping his own diary for some time, he declares: “I don’t think I’ll ever forget what I’ve seen”. It is a vital moment in the play. He has begun to write, to remember, to archive and to actively witness so that he can no longer forget. Ultimately, it is an essential statement about agency, language and post-colonial memory, those enduring themes and points of interrogation that are central to the novel and which are brought so vividly to life through the staged production of Houseboy.

Houseboy Trailer

Houseboy is presented in partnership with The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg.

2023 Brown University, Providence (US)
2022 Red Cat, The Broad, Los Angeles (US)

In loving memory of
Mncedisi ‘Mr. President’ Shabangu.

THE HEAD & THE LOAD

Music composed and conceived by PHILIP MILLER | Music direction, co-composing & conducting by THUTHUKA SIBISI | Choreography by GREGORY MAQOMA

William Kentridge’s exploration of Africa’s role in the First World War combines music, dance, film projections, mechanized sculptures and shadow play to illuminate the untold story of the millions of African porters and carriers who served—and in many cases died for— British, French and German battlefield forces. Freighted with the weight of this little-examined history and quickened by Kentridge’s visionary theatrical alchemy, The Head & the Load is an exceptionally ambitious work of performance. The Head & the Load sees Kentridge work with his longtime collaborator Philip Miller, one of South Africa’s leading composers along with Thuthuka Sibisi co- composer/music director and choreographer and principle dancer Gregory Maqoma to create what the artist describes as “an interrupted musical procession”. This rich and multi-layered performance features an international cast of singers, dancers, and performers, a majority directly from South Africa. Miller’s powerful and evocative compositions offer a perfect complement to Kentridge’s imaginative work.
The Head & the Load website / The Head & the Load trailer

2023 Joburg Theatre, Johannesburg (SA)
2022 Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, Miami (USA)
2019 Holland Festival, Amsterdam (NL)
2018 MASS MoCA (work in progress) (USA) | Tate Modern, London (UK) | Ruhrtriennale, Duisburg (GE) | Park Avenue Armory, NYC (USA)

URSONATE

Kentridge interrogates the theme of Dada in this performance piece based on the seminal 1932 sound poem Ursonate - a poetic and musical work by renowned dada artist Kurt Schwitters. Unlike a classical sonata, Ursonate did not require musical instruments for its performance, just the human voice. Kentridge's version of Ursonate differs from that of other performers in that he demonstrates his ability as an actor and director, orienting the work not only to the listener but also to the viewer. Whereas the resonance of other renditions of Ursonate can be captured by ear, Kentridge's rendition has to be seen. The artist reads the words from a score, but in a dynamic and engaging way, gesticulating emphatically to draw the viewer's attention to his embodied presence on the stage. A paper screen above the stage displays a constant flow of animated images of the artist's drawings, which are orchestrated to fit the flow of his performance. In the cadenza, the piece concludes with the arrival of the soprano Ariadne Greif and two other musicians from the Knights, one playing a French horn. Taking up the poem with rival vivacity, Ms. Greif engages Mr. Kentridge in an electrifying duet. More polished than any vintage Dada performance, and richer in freely accessible humor, Kentridge’s Ursonate nonetheless pays homage to its predecessors by demonstrating how helpful the language of absurdism can still be in addressing a world that makes no sense. This multimedia performance piece mixes spoken word, animated video, and improvised music featuring William Kentridge, soprano Ariadne Greif and tap dancer Peter Kuit. It is set on a stage of reclaimed wood and a pasted paper screen.

2023 CalPerformances, Berkeley CA (USA)
2021 Red Bridge Project, Grand Théâtre, Luxembourg (LU)
2019 Holland Festival, Amsterdam (NL) | Kunstmuseum, Basel (CH) | Züricher Theaterspektakel, Zurich (CH)
2018 Ultima, Oslo (NO)
2017 Harlem Parish, Performa, NYC (USA)

A GUIDED TOUR OF THE EXHIBITION: FOR SOPRANO WITH HANDBAG

Guided tours in museums intend to give visitors a closer understanding of the art work. On the other hand, every text explaining a work of art automatically places it in the past, immobilizes it, silences it. In this performance developed by William Kentridge and soprano Joanna Dudley, they work against the museification of art works. The performance “A Guided Tour of the Exhibition: For Soprano with Handbag” allows the pictures to defend themselves and to resist interpretations. It is both an accompanying programme to the exhibition and its refutation. The opposite of a classic guided tour, this is a moment of pure poetic pleasure that puts artworks against interpretation as part of a theatrical mise-en-scène.

Interview with Joanna Dudley

CONCEPTION William Kentridge, Joanna Dudley
VOCAL CONSTRUCTION | CHOREOGRAPHY | PERFORMANCE Joanna Dudley
VIDEO DESIGNER/EDITOR FOR OVERALL FILM USED IN PERFORMANCE Žana Marović
VIDEO DESIGNER/EDITOR FOR INDIVIDUAL FILMS Catherine Meyburgh
CINEMATOGRAPHER FOR FILM STARRING WILLIAM KENTRIDGE & JOANNA DUDLEY Duško Marović
COSTUME Greta Goiris

2023 CalPerformances, Berkeley CA (USA)
2021 Red Bridge Project, MUDAM Museum, Luxembourg (LU)
2017 Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (FR), Print Room London (UK), Louisiana Museum Copenhagen (DE)
2016 Berliner Festspiele / Foreign Affairs, Berlin (GE), White Chapel Gallery London (UK)

PAPER MUSIC

Paper Music one of the projects in the long-time, ongoing collaboration between Johannesburg-born visual artist William Kentridge and his South African compatriot Philip Miller. Their artistic partnership dates back to Kentridge’s 1993 film Felix in Exile, part of his celebrated Soho Eckstein series for which Miller wrote the score. Paper Music is a witty, poignant, a gently subversive song-and-film cycle; it unites films, mostly animations based on William Kentridge’s charcoal and ink drawings, with live musical performances by vocalists Ann Masina and Joanna Dudley, pianist Vincenzo Pasquariello, and composer Philip Miller. A fascinating exploration of the relationships between sound and image. Produced in association with Quaternaire

2021 Red Bridge Project, Grand Théâtre, Luxembourg (LU)
2019 Theater Basel | Holland Festival, Amsterdam (NL) | Teatro Jorge Eliécer Gaitán & Teatro Santander, Botogá (CO)
2017 Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (FR)
2016 The Print Room, London (UK)
2014 Flame, Florence (IT) | Carnegie Hall, NYC (USA) | Durub Al Tawaya, Abu Dhabi (UAE) | CLUJ International Theatre Festival, Cluj (RO)

TRIUMPHS & LAMENTS

William Kentridge’s project for TEVERETERNO, Triumphs and Laments: A Project for the City of Rome (2016), is a large-scale, 550 meter-long frieze, erased from the biological patina on the travertine embankment walls that line Rome’s urban waterfront. Exploring dominant tensions in the history of the Eternal City from past to present, more than eighty figures, up to 10 meters high, represent Rome’s greatest victories and defeats from mythological time to present, forming a silhouetted procession on Piazza Tevere, between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini. The work opened on April 21, 2016 with the premiere of a theatrical event created in collaboration with composer Philip Miller, soloists Joanna Dudley, Lavinia Mancusi, Ann Masina, Bham Ntabeni, Patrizia Rotonda featuring live shadow play and two processional marching bands performing against the backdrop of the frieze.

2016 Piazza Tevere, between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini, Rome (IT)

p[Photo: John Hodgkiss] — p
[Photo: John Hodgkiss]

REFUSE THE HOUR

Refuse the Hour is the chamber opera companion to William Kentridge’s five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time. Entirely original in its conception and presentation, Refuse the Hour interweaves an astonishing range of visual and sound languages, setting dance, live music, projections, drama, and dynamic scenic design against one another on stage. As Kentridge himself delivers a fragmented lecture, these elements swirl around him: dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo enters into a taught physical interaction with the artist and set; singers and musicians perform composer Philip Miller’s riveting score; an array of strange musical machines clatter intermittently into life; and Catherine Meyburgh’s video design animates the proceedings. In the midst of this Dadaistic dream landscape, Kentridge acts as a contemporary storyteller, recounting a tale that begins with the myth of Perseus and ends with Einstein’s visionary findings. The result is a journey to the fringes of science, theatre and art, a synthesis both playful and profound that could only have sprung from the mind of this singular artist. The Refusal of Time was originally commissioned for dOCUMENTA 2012. Created with the physicist Peter Galison, the installation is a meditation on different historical conceptions of time and the complex legacies of colonialism and industry. Refuse the Hour, first performed in June 2012 at the Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam as part of the Holland Festival, is a spectacular multimedia work that takes The Refusal of Time to another level.

2017 A.C.T. San Francisco (USA) | Center for the Art of Performance, UCLA, Los Angeles (USA)
2015 Brooklyn Academy of Music, NYC (USA) | Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, CT (USA)

The Head & the Load, Ursonate, Sibyl, The Great Yes, The Great No, Oh, To Believe in Another World, Paper Music, and Refuse the Hour are toured in partnership with Quaternaire

[Banner video made by William Kentridge & Zana Marovic]

Triumphs & Laments | William Kentridge in front of the freeze. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Great Yes, the Great No | Dancer Thulani Chauke and pianist Thandi Nthuli. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

Triumphs & Laments | Installation of the freeze. [Photo: Marcello Leotta]

The Head & the Load | N'Faly Kouyate, Luc de Wit & William Kentridge during rehearsals at MASS MoCA. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Great Yes, the Great No | Luc de Wit as a coffee pot. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Nhlanhla Mahlangu, William Kentridge, Luc de Wit, Hamilton Dhlamini & Catherine Meyburgh during rehearsals at MASS MoCA. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

Triumphs & Laments | THE OFFICE team stage managing during the opening night performance. [Photo: Marcello Leotta]

Triumphs and Laments | Installation of the freeze. [Photo: Marcello Leotta]

The Head & the Load | Joanna Dudley & William Kentridge on stage. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Great Yes, the Great No | Breton & Breton (Luc de Wit & William Harding). [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Costume Supervisor Judith Stokart making costumes. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

(Making of) The Head & the Load. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Thuthuka Sibisi. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | William Kentridge & Gregory Maqoma on stage. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Emmanuelle Erhart fabricating costumes. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Great Yes, the Great No | Workshop in Johannesburg, 2023. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Thulani Chauke warming up for rehearsals. [Photo by Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | THE OFFICE's Laurie Cearley & Nadine Goellner in Johannesburg during the first workshop. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | William Kentridge & Sabine Theunissen on stage. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | William Kentridge trying on a head piece. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Colin Jacobson, Waldo Alexander & Thuthuka Sibisi during rehearsals. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Creating the floor carpet at MASS MoCA (2018). [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Judith Stokart. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Great Yes, the Great No | Hamilton Dhlamini. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Joanna Dudley. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

Sibyl | Thulani Chauke & William Kentridge rehearsing on stage at Teatro dell'Opera in Rome. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Great Yes, the Great No | Pianist Thandi Nthuli and cellist Marika Hughes. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Composer Philip Miller during rehearsals in Johannesburg. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Great Yes, the Great No | The chorus during a workshop in Johannesburg. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Emmanuelle Erhart & Hamilton Dhlamini in Johannesburg. [Photo by Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Studio technicians Jacques van Staden & Chris Waldo de Wet. [Photo by Stella Olivier]

Sibyl | Creative team meeting at Teatro dell'Opera in Rome. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

Sibyl | William Kentridge. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

Sibyl | Cinematographer Dusko Marovic at Teatro dell'Opera. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Great Yes, the Great No | Costume Designer Greta Goiris. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

Sibyl | The team at work in Rome. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

Sibyl | Sabine Theunissen on set. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Thuthuka Sibisi & Joanna Dudley on stage. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

The Head & the Load | Thuthuka Sibisi, Gregory Maqoma, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Mncedisi Shabangu, Tlale Makhene & Hamilton Dhlamini in the New York subway

Sibyl | Dancer Thulani Chauke. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

SIBYL | William Kentridge on stage at Teatro dell'Opera. [Photo: Stella Olivier]

Sibyl | Vocalist Sbusiso Shozi. [Photo: Stella Olivier]