The Widening Gyroscope: William Kentridge’s All-Seeing Opera
Still from Waiting for the Sibyl (2025 performance).
In William Kentridge’s chamber opera, Waiting for the Sibyl (2019), which had its American debut at Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus on Wednesday, the titular Sibyl never speaks—or, rather, never sings. She is ventriloquized from the start, stamping and swinging wildly as she mouths along to a gravelly-throated tenor who stands at attention to her side. After the opening salvo, she is largely relegated to the stage’s margins: she perches silently atop ladders, she slinks on the outer reaches, watching but never joining the rich harmonies that composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu pulls from his formidable cast.
It’s a sly and perhaps natural choice for Kentridge, who has made a career out of creating palimpsest-like films and collages, to efface the voice of the Sibyl, great seers and speakers of antiquity, and make her into marginalia. In the Aeneid, the Cumaean Sibyl is described as a “mad mouth” ranting and raving with prophecy; her cliffside shrine is pitted with caves from which hundreds of voices rush—“the Sibyl’s replies.” She guides Aeneas to Hades, and centuries later is mentioned in the final canto of Dante’s Paradiso, where her prophecies, written on flitting leaves, are whipped up and lost in a whirlwind of intermingled fate. That whirling gyre of the Sibyl’s printed matter persists throughout Waiting for the Sibyl, but her presence remains, as the title might suggest, something like Beckett’s Godot: forever becoming, forever just out of reach.
Still from Waiting for the Sibyl (2025 performance).
What, then, takes center stage at Waiting for the Sibyl? Like much of Kentridge’s oeuvre, it is driven by a palpable pleasure in the textural qualities of organic material. He’s best known for his charcoal animations concerning the violent imperialist history of his native South Africa, which he composes through continual erasure, coating every frame in a kind of dusky, coalsmoke effluvium. Films like Johannesburg (1989) and Mine (1991) use this charcoal erasure to depict the dirty work of capitalist exploitation and colonialism, evoking a creaky visual world that appears to have been literally dragged up out of the earth.
Waiting for the Sibyl is suffused with a similarly organic quality: the sets are perfectly antiquated, stuffed with typewriters and torn-out book pages and other outmoded gizmos. The music, too, has a rich and earthy quality, full of breathy sighs that recall those prophetic leaves in the wind. There’s also a delightful assonance between the palatalized clicks of the performers’ Zulu, the tapping of a pick upon coalface, or the clacking of typewriter keys. This percussive continuum forms the basis of one of the opera’s most striking setpieces, a grand post office ensemble, where a secretary’s typewriter melds with a contrapuntal piano and a skittering chorus of voices that whir to life to animate the voices on the pages spread across the stage. Here is the core conceit of Kentridge: a concatenation of disparate material, picked up from the floor or from history, and linked together in an ever-evolving, briefly harmonious chain.
Still from Waiting for the Sibyl (2025 performance).
It’s worth noting that this opera was originally commissioned by the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma in 2019 as a companion piece to Alexander Calder’s Work in Progress (1968), a kinetic ballet that featured performers interacting with Calder’s balletic mobile structures, but Kentridge couldn’t get permission from the Calder estate to reproduce or transport the works for this run. The prelude piece is instead a short film, The Moment Has Gone, accompanied by a live quartet performance. It’s a fine enough opener, but one can’t help but feel that something is lost in the Calders’ absence. The breathy wind and gyroscopic gizmos all feel like a complement to the sculptor’s mysterious twirling talismans. There are costume designs directly indebted to those famous weathervane ovals that in this context feel like non-sequiturs. The prelude film and the opera itself feel unrelated to one another, and without that space-age machinic balancing act to open, Sibyl can feel a bit heavy-footed, even amid its joyous slapstick and stagecraft.
But this is still a thrilling experience, and in many respects, the weightiness feels apt. As the opera comes to a close and the action onstage erupts into a maelstrom of whipsawed page scraps blown into the air by the performers’ coats, the background begins to flash with striking, elegiac phrases, prompting the Sibyl to return to her plinth on center stage. “My Father’s Books,” blinks one boldfaced title. “All the Names Burnt With The Rest,” reads another, quickly followed by “You Will Be Alone on The Plain,” and “You Will Never See That City.” Kentridge, whose parents were anti-apartheid lawyers in South Africa, is no stranger to the physical detritus of a settler colonialist state, and in the six years since Sibyl first premiered, its final vision of a blasted plain littered with unheard voices has become even more striking. Every day, in Palestine, in cities across the US, the colonialist machine whirs to life, ripping people from their homes and tossing them to the wind. In Waiting for the Sibyl, the one who sees is silenced, brought back only when everything has already been torn up and tossed away. “TO WHAT END?” reads the final title. The question lingers off the stage, too.
Waiting for the Sibyl runs at Powerhouse Arts from October 8 through 11, 2025.
