Waiting for the Sibyl/ The Moment Has Gone

William Kentridge, whose work The Head & the Load dazzled audiences at the Ruhrtriennale 2018, returns with his unique combination of projection, music, and shadows cast by live performers. His new production is comprised of the 43-minute chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl and the 22-minute film with live piano score The Moment Has Gone.

Waiting for the Sibyl is inspired by the myth of the Cumaean prophetess Sibyl, who writes out a questioner’s fate on an oak leaf, only to mix those leaves with the fates of others. In Kentridge’s reimagining of the myth, our contemporary Sibyl is the algorithm that predicts our life’s course health, bank loan genetics. On stage and on giant screens, objects and situations dissolve and reform, all elements point towards one question: What is to come? The dreadful certainty of a mechanism that determines our outcome is juxtaposed against the desire for a human influence to our destiny.

The Moment Has Gone combines a charcoal animation film featuring Kentridge’s alter ego Solo Eckstein with sequences of the artist creating the work. It includes phrases and ideas that reappear in the chamber opera, and an appearance by Sibyl herself.