One of South Africa’s most prolific artists, William Kentridge has expressed his distinctive creative identity through an astonishing variety of media. Some of his most striking work has been achieved through the medium of opera. This month, his latest foray into the grandest of all the arts – Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose – premieres at New York’s world-renowned Metropolitan Opera. In the midst of the tremendous anticipation surrounding this event, he granted CLASSICFEEL’s Lore Watterson and Lara Koseff an exclusive interview to discuss his long-running and tremendously successful association with the operatic stage and particularly, his newest production.

CLASSICFEEL: Let’s go back to the beginning of your involvement with opera. Your first opera ever was your version of Monteverdi’s The Return Of Ulysses, which opened in 1998. How did the opera originate, where was it actually first performed and what about its life since its 1998 premier?

William Kentridge: It was first performed in Brussels as part of the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts with Handspring Puppet Company. I had a discussion with them about doing an opera. And that became Return of Ulysses. It was a co-production with Vienna Festwochen and La Monnaie, the opera house in Brussels. So that was the connection from the theatre world to the opera world. I think it’s been to about 20 or 30 cities now. And next year it will be at Theatertreffen, a big German theatre festival.

The next one was Zeno at 4am, the opera I did with Kevin Volans. It was a contemporary opera, a chamber opera with the Sontonga Quartet, as they were called then. And that was also puppets and shadow puppets and singers. That one was done first for the documenta arts festival or art exhibition and then went to about ten or twelve places altogether. It was also a chamber piece like Return of Ulysses.

CF: Then came your 2005 production of The Magic Flute. You produced it for Belgium’s La Monnaie opera company and then brought it to South Africa in 2007 through a partnership with Rand Merchant Bank (RMB). In this production your animated drawings showed dancing sunbeams, rhinos doing back flips and architectural diagrams unfolding and dissolving in midair. The projected images were integrated into the performance rather than just providing a backdrop. You changed the way people think about opera with that project.

WK: Well, I don’t know about that, but in 1992 when I started working with Handspring, it was very unusual to have video projection as part of a theatre production. Projections had been done since the 1920s, I’m not saying this is the first time anyone had put actors on stage plus projections. But to use it as part of the narrative material, integrated right into the heart of it – which started with Woyzeck, and which continued with The Magic Flute and now with The Nose – that’s still somewhat unusual. Usually your director is not the person that makes the video; you have another director who makes it and they employ someone to make some images to put on video. But for me, in the productions that I work on, that element of it is very central and at the same time one starts to think of the music or the acting or anything else, or design – that is very much part of the project.

Read more in the March 2010 issue of CLASSICFEEL magazine