April 11, 2007
Artist’s Video Adds Magic to ‘Flute’
A scene from William Kentridge’s production of “The Magic Flute,” opening today at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
By ANNE MIDGETTE
For full article published April 9, 2007 go to http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/arts/music/09flut.html
Picasso’s flashlight draws a centaur in the air, Matisse’s brush hovers over the paper before committing itself to the first stroke, Jackson Pollock pours arcs of thick paint: all famous examples of the artist’s hand caught on film in the act of creation, in a particular kind of theater.
And exactly this theatricality is the hallmark of William Kentridge, the South African artist who at nearly 52 is an unlikely star of the international art scene. Mr. Kentridge’s medium is charcoal: he draws an image, photographs it, erases and redraws it many times to create evocative video animations that at once tell stories and convey the narrative of the act of drawing.
From here to live theater is a small step, one Mr. Kentridge has now attempted on his largest scale yet. After a series of puppet operas (including a moving adaptation of Monteverdi’s “Ritorno d’Ulisse,” seen in New York in 2004) he undertook in 2005 a full production of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” for La Monnaie, the Royal Opera House in Belgium. That production opens tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The result is an exuberant dialogue between drawing and music, a three-dimensional work of art with video projected across and around the human figures onstage. Sometimes the animations echo the characters’ thoughts; mathematical diagrams stand in for the teachings of Sarastro and his priests. Sometimes they reflect the music, with white lines reaching upward during a chorus, like fireworks. Sometimes they form antic glosses, suddenly coalescing into birds, a lion, a dancing rhinoceros.
Avant-garde? Not a bit. What makes Mr. Kentridge unlikely in the art world is his down-to-earth accessibility. His best-known video works, like “History of the Main Complaint” (involving two recurring characters, Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum, navigating post-apartheid South Africa), are at once quirkily idiosyncratic and easy to grasp.
Mr. Kentridge’s “Magic Flute” is based on the metaphor of the early camera, using the palette of a film negative, white on black, to reflect the opera’s shifting presentation of good and evil.