Somewhere between a musical, video and installation, this medium-format show (35 minutes) for smaller rooms is the fruit of a collaboration between South African artist William Kentridge and French composer François Sarhan. It is a mixture of Russian futurism, poems by Daniil Harms and records of Stalinist trials. The graphical material comes from preparatory studies for the production of Nez, by Shostakovitch, which Kentridge is preparing for the Metropolitan Opera (2010).
Description. The backdrop is a large canvas painted by Kentridge to resemble a collage of newspapers boasting the progress of science. This canvas serves as a screen for the projection of the video Telegrams from the Nose, a video consisting of a stylish combination of anamorphosed human shadows, small black animated silhouettes in cut-out paper, geometrical shapes evoking Russian constructivism, letters in movement, and text. At the bottom of the screen, there is a little stage for the composer (who starts the performance with a pantomime, acting with his shadow on the video) and the violinist at the end of the show. Below the stage are the narrator and four musicians. The acoustic guitar and synthesiser are slightly amplified. The violin and cello are actually Stroh instruments, an ordinary violin and cello whose sound is amplified and projected by a sort of gramophone horn. This shrill, artificial sound finds a response in the voice of the narrator, amplified by a handmade megaphone on the left of the screen. The musical score runs throughout the film: the performance lasts for about 35 minutes.
François Sarhan, William Kentridge, a Stroh-Viole
Terror and frenzy. Commentary by François Sarhan. The show is based around the central character of Fyodor Bukharin, a close ally of Stalin who was tried and executed by firing squad on his orders in 1938. The texts are the records of Bukharin's trial, to which are added a few short pieces of a desperate absurdity by Daniil Harms, another Russian author who died under Stalin.
Soviet Russia at the end of the 1920s saw an explosion of futurism and constructivism (Mayakovsky), but also the start of the trials that would end in the purges. It was a mix of the hopes of artists and intellectuals who wanted to take part in the Revolution but who were soon brought to heel by the regime: "Find some anti-Futurists we can trust," was Stalin's order in 1926. Disappearances, sarcasm, threats and oppression were masked by the grotesque, speed, vitality: the terror took hold, but in a wave of unbridled artistic frenzy and imagination. (F.S)
About the music. In phase with Kentridge's images, the music of "Telegrams" scrolls through a series of hurried, scratched out, dislocated "Shostakovian vignettes". It is a work of memory and allusion, without any direct quotations. As always with Sarhan, it is the text (the spoken voice) that carries him away: here the composer pursues his quest for a modern melodrama. An a-lyrical narration, like a voice sample imported direct from everyday life (or an archive or old film), is used as the guiding thread, attaching a rich harvest of instrumental events to itself like glue.
William Kentridge, Parcours d’atelier, 2007.
Collage, encre de chine et crayon sur papier. 264 x 393 mm
Courtesy Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris/New York.
© William Kentridge
william kentridge, françois sarhan
telegrams from the nose
