William Kentridge’s Sibyl is a performance for three dancers and choral ensemble of six, divided in two parts, part one being a twenty-two-minute film with live score entitled The Moment Has Gone and part two the forty-two-minute chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl. Both performances comprise a singular programme of South African artist William Kentridge’s work – an evening in the theatre of visual and aural alchemy unlike anything else.

Waiting for the Sibyl, co-commissioned by the Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, Teatro dell’Opera di Roma and Dramaten – Stockholm and created in collaboration with choral director and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and composer Kyle Shepherd, unfolds in a series of six short scenes, interrupted and revealed by the dropping and raising of the front curtain. The work incorporates signature elements of Kentridge’s visionary practice – projection, live performance, recorded music, and shadows cast by live performers on a hand-painted backdrop – to tell the story of the Cumaean prophetess Sibyl. She would write out a questioner’s fate on an oak leaf and place it at the mouth of her cave on a pile of others’ fates.

Unspoken in the opera, was the fact that the contemporary Sibyl is the algo rithm that will predict our future, our health, whether we’ll live to eighty. But there is a way in which we are still fighting to hold on to the possibility of a human Sibyl: the desire we have for something other than the machine, to guide us in how we see our future.

The work is a profound, jarring, playful, and visually stunning meditation on what it means to be alive in our current moment in History, grappling afresh with humanity’s primordial task of making sense of the inherently tragic state of always knowing, yet never knowing, where our end will lead us; the cursed and blessed consciousness that makes us human.

Concept & Director: William Kentridge
Composition, Music Direction & Piano: Kyle Shepherd
Associate Director, Choral Composer, Voice & Dance: Nhlanhla Mahlangu
Voice, dance: Xolisile Bongwana
Voice: Ayanda Nhlangothi, Zandile Hlatshwayo, Siphiwe Nkabinde, Sbusiso Shozi
Dance Thulani Chauke, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Thandazile « Sonia » Radebe Projections Žana Marovic’
Costumes: Greta Goiris
Set design: Sabine Theunissen
Lighting design: Urs Schönebaum
Cinematography: Duško Marovic’

Co-commissioned by: Teatro dell’Opera di Roma; Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg; Dramaten – Stockholm

Produced by: THE OFFICE performing arts + film
Rachel Chanoff, Laurie Cearley, Olli Chanoff, Lynn Koek, Catherine DeGennaro, Gabrielle Davenport, Noah Bashevkin, Erica Zielinski, Diane Eber, Chloe Golding, Kyla Gardner & Bruna D’Avila

In partnership with: Quaternaire - Paris