Notes Towards a Model Opera, 2015
Three channel HD film installation
Choreography and dancer: Dada Masilo; music composition and arrangement: Philip Miller; additional music composition: Johannes Serekeho, music performed by First St John Brass Band; video editing and construction: Žana Marovič, Janus Fouché; sound mix: Gavan Eckhart; costume design: Greta Goiris
William Kentridge Studio
by William Kentridge
Taken in the Exhibition
In China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao Zedong took place between 1966 and 1976. Its aim was to accelerate development and to abandon bourgeois values while imposing Maoist thought.
The brutal government-led campaign, involving the enforced relocation of people and the violent suppression of free thought, echoed strategies pursued in South Africa during apartheid. Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’, which contained directives and inspirational thoughts, disregarded the harsh reality confronting those living ordinary lives.
‘Yangbanxi’ (Model Operas), eight of which were created by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and performed as ballets as well as being adapted as films, were the only officially sanctioned state music permitted during the Cultural Revolution.
With strong nationalist themes and highly charged musical scores, ballets like ‘The Red Detachment of Women’ transformed peasants and soldiers into heroes of the revolution.
Kentridge’s work refers tangentially to the current expansion of Chinese state interests, a form of economic colonialism, across Africa. In the film, the graceful ballerina dressed as a soldier and dancing with a rifle, transposed by Kentridge to South Africa, is an incongruous image.
Similarly, the Chinese campaign to eradicate the four ‘pests’ (mosquito, rat, fly and sparrow) during the Great Leap Forward (1958–62), is rendered tragically absurd in the film – millions of birds were killed in an orchestrated campaign, leaving the grain fields at the mercy of locusts and resulting in the Great Chinese Famine (1959–61), and the eventual reimportation of sparrows from the Soviet Union.
[Royal Academy]
William Kentridge
(September — December 2022)
The largest exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK to date, ‘William Kentridge’ leads the visitor on an experiential voyage through the last 40 years of his extraordinary career.
William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg in 1955. After graduating in Political Science and African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in 1976, he spent two years studying at the Johannesburg Art Foundation before going to Paris in 1981 to study mime and theatre at the L’Ecole internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq.
Returning to Johannesburg, he continued to work in theatre but also began to concentrate on his art, which included suites of etchings and linocuts, large-scale charcoal drawings and short films.
By the late 1980s his work was gaining recognition outside South Africa, a process accelerated by the end of apartheid and the reopening of the country, which had long been internationally regarded as a pariah state. Since the 1990s, his art and work for stage has been seen in museums, galleries, theatres and opera houses across the world.
While always regarding drawing as his primary practice, Kentridge continues to make prints, sculptures, tapestries and films, and to work on theatrical projects and lectures. His work in theatre has expanded to include both directing operas and creating new operatic pieces in collaboration with composers and performers.
[Royal Academy]
Notes Towards a Model Opera, 2015
Three channel HD film installation
Choreography and dancer: Dada Masilo; music composition and arrangement: Philip Miller; additional music composition: Johannes Serekeho, music performed by First St John Brass Band; video editing and construction: Žana Marovič, Janus Fouché; sound mix: Gavan Eckhart; costume design: Greta Goiris
William Kentridge Studio
by William Kentridge
Taken in the Exhibition
In China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao Zedong took place between 1966 and 1976. Its aim was to accelerate development and to abandon bourgeois values while imposing Maoist thought.
The brutal government-led campaign, involving the enforced relocation of people and the violent suppression of free thought, echoed strategies pursued in South Africa during apartheid. Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’, which contained directives and inspirational thoughts, disregarded the harsh reality confronting those living ordinary lives.
‘Yangbanxi’ (Model Operas), eight of which were created by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and performed as ballets as well as being adapted as films, were the only officially sanctioned state music permitted during the Cultural Revolution.
With strong nationalist themes and highly charged musical scores, ballets like ‘The Red Detachment of Women’ transformed peasants and soldiers into heroes of the revolution.
Kentridge’s work refers tangentially to the current expansion of Chinese state interests, a form of economic colonialism, across Africa. In the film, the graceful ballerina dressed as a soldier and dancing with a rifle, transposed by Kentridge to South Africa, is an incongruous image.
Similarly, the Chinese campaign to eradicate the four ‘pests’ (mosquito, rat, fly and sparrow) during the Great Leap Forward (1958–62), is rendered tragically absurd in the film – millions of birds were killed in an orchestrated campaign, leaving the grain fields at the mercy of locusts and resulting in the Great Chinese Famine (1959–61), and the eventual reimportation of sparrows from the Soviet Union.
[Royal Academy]
William Kentridge
(September — December 2022)
The largest exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK to date, ‘William Kentridge’ leads the visitor on an experiential voyage through the last 40 years of his extraordinary career.
William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg in 1955. After graduating in Political Science and African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in 1976, he spent two years studying at the Johannesburg Art Foundation before going to Paris in 1981 to study mime and theatre at the L’Ecole internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq.
Returning to Johannesburg, he continued to work in theatre but also began to concentrate on his art, which included suites of etchings and linocuts, large-scale charcoal drawings and short films.
By the late 1980s his work was gaining recognition outside South Africa, a process accelerated by the end of apartheid and the reopening of the country, which had long been internationally regarded as a pariah state. Since the 1990s, his art and work for stage has been seen in museums, galleries, theatres and opera houses across the world.
While always regarding drawing as his primary practice, Kentridge continues to make prints, sculptures, tapestries and films, and to work on theatrical projects and lectures. His work in theatre has expanded to include both directing operas and creating new operatic pieces in collaboration with composers and performers.
[Royal Academy]