"Founded by David Binder, a former artistic director at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Powerhouse: International kicked off last month with a choreographed skateboarding performance and continues until mid-December. Kentridge's Waiting for the Sibyl features an original score composed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd making use of South African harmonies, plus an ensemble of ten singers and dancers performing amid a lively melange of the artist's distinctive animated ink drawings, collages, text projections and sculptures."
"The opera takes its inspiration from the oracles of ancient Greek and Roman legend-specifically, the Cumaean Sibyl, who resided in a cave near Naples and, when people came to her with questions about their future, would write the answers on oak leaves. The sibyl arranged the leaves outside the cave, but when a wind came, their inevitable shuffling meant that those who sought her answers could never be sure which leaf was meant for them."
Waiting for the Sibyl premieres in Brooklyn as part of the inaugural Powerhouse: International festival at Powerhouse Arts, a converted former power plant in Gowanus. The festival celebrates theatre, music, dance and other performances and was founded by David Binder. The opera features an original score by Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd that uses South African harmonies, plus ten singers and dancers performing amid animated ink drawings, collages, text projections and sculptures. The production won a 2023 Olivier Award. The work draws on the Cumaean Sibyl myth of oak-leaf oracles; paper leaves, including from Dante's Divine Comedy, symbolically drift through the stage action. The piece was commissioned by Rome Opera as a companion to Alexander Calder's 1968 Work in Progress.
#william-kentridge #waiting-for-the-sibyl #cumaean-sibyl #powerhouse-international #south-african-harmonies
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