As part of William Kentridge's residency at UC-Berkeley, Cal Performances presented the American premiere of his stage work SIBYL over a three-day run in Zellerbach Hall. The attendant Gala on the first night meant that, unusually for Cal Performances, the show did not have a ridiculously late start time, so that was the performance I went to (I did not, of course, attend the Gala).
SIBYL is based on a legend of the Sibyl of ancient Cumae (near present-day Naples): she would write your future on an oak leaf & lay it on a pile with other such futures. As you went up to retrieve yours, a wind would rise & shuffle the leaves, so that you could never be sure if the future you were holding was your own or someone else's. This is certainly a resonant parable, suggesting both the inevitability & the uncertainty of our destiny.
The first half is anchored on a short film, The Moment Has Gone, which explores in Kentridge's familiar style of feathery charcoal drawings, constantly erased & redrawn. the story of a Kentridge-like figure going to an art museum & simultaneously the life of a marginal mining operation. Scenes flow naturally with oneiric logic into one another. There is also a live score by Kyle Shepherd & an all-male chorus of African men headed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu. After an overly long intermission, which I would have preferred not to have (intermissions break the flow, especially for an audience a large number of whom are clearly just waiting for the after-party, & I didn't see that any set-up was needed for the second half), we have a short chamber opera, Waiting for the Sibyl, a collection of scenes that do not each end so much as continue in some other universal space after the curtain drops on them. There is no resolution other than reinforced ambiguity.
There are gnomic, possibly gnostic, brief sentences or saying that are broadcast on the back walls (partially obstructed from my right front orchestra seat by the placement on stage of the chorus, & of a large megaphone-like device, but they are also spoken aloud & repeated, so I was given most of them). In one of the scenes a man tries to sit down, only to have the chair pulled away from him mid-descent; after several attempts, he manages to sit down, only to have the chair collapse. It is a scene redolent of both the silent comedians & Beckett (who, of course, admired those comics; Keaton & Chaplin are really some of the underacknowledged springs of the twentieth-century avant-garde). In another scene, an African woman sitting on a chair (chairs keep recurring) is slowly revolved around; on her shoulders she carries a long stick, one side of which has a sign saying Dreams & the other a sign saying True, & both the signs also rotate slowly. Is True a noun, opposing itself to Dreams, or an adjective, modifying Dreams? What are True Dreams? Prophetic ones? Later, one of the repeated sententiae is None of Our Dreams Came True – is that what was suggested here? Or possibly all possibilities are, you know, always possible.
A reference to the circles of Hell recalls a thought that some of the portraits in the film looked like Dante, or someone Dante-esque. The singing, choral & solo, is constant, & an enchantment, but the words are not in English & not translated; one section involves clicking so I am assuming there is an African language involved there. Sound & meaning do not always coincide, at least for some of us. The megaphone gets used to repeat some of the slogans we've seen projected, ending with the pronouncement, over & over, Starve the Algorithm repeats into the darkened auditorium. A woman in the back shouts Yes!, which seems a bit . . . sure, it's what people who attend performances in Berkeley are currently thinking, but these are also the people who whip out the inevitable mobile phone as soon as they can, & put them away as late as possible, so what does it mean for us to think this?
I would love to have seen this show over & over; I think each viewing would reveal new connections & deeper richness, but of course that would be missing the point of a stage work, which gives us moment-by-moment & then passes away into memory before the curtain falls: uncertainty & ambiguity rule us, & part of what makes beauty beautiful is that we know it is fleeting. SIBYL is another astonishing work from Kentridge.
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