The 42-minute chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl and the 22-minute film with live score The Moment has Gone comprise a singular program of South African artist William Kentridge’s work—an evening in the theater of visual and aural alchemy unlike anything else. OLIVIER AWARD WINNER 2023 Outstanding Achievement in Opera and nominated Best New Opera Production.

(PART 1) The Moment Has Gone, which begins the program, is a new 22-minute film with live score by Kyle Shepherd combining piano and an all-male South African chorus lead by Nhlanhla Mahlangu. The film incorporates City Deep, the latest in Kentridge’s series of Soho Eckstein films, and sequences of Kentridge creating the work. In City Deep, the artist’s unique charcoal animation technique of successive erasure and redrawing conjures a non-linear story featuring his drawn alter ego Soho Eckstein, set between a municipal art museum (based on the Johannesburg Art Gallery) and an abandoned mining area at the edges of the city where unofficial artisanal gold mining takes place. The action jumps: the museum collapses; Soho comes face to face with his fate; a solitary miner persistently works against his destiny. Interspersed throughout are images of Kentridge in his studio making the work—the act of creation, always itself an action (a futile one) against destiny. (PART 2) Waiting for the Sibyl, created in collaboration with choral director and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd, one of South Africa’s leading progressive pianists and composers, is a piece for nine performers that unfolds in a series of 6 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, dance / movement, and shadows cast by the performers against 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. But when you went to retrieve it, a breeze would blow up and swirl the leaves about, leaving you uncertain if you were learning another’s fate or your own. The fact that your fate would be known, but you couldn’t know it, is the deep theme of our relationship of dread, of expectation, of foreboding towards the future."