Sibyl (Sydney Opera House) ★★★★

Conceived by William Kentridge. Composed by Kyle Shepherd & Nhlanhla Mahlangu. Sydney Opera House. Nov 2-4, 2023.

South African, multidisciplinary artist ​​William Kentridge has an eye-opening Australian premiere to close out the Sydney Opera Houses’s 50th birthday celebrations. Sibyl demonstrates Kentridges “Gesamtkunstwerk”, his blend of forms to deliver a message. Encompassing hand-drawn animation, dance, song, shadow-play, physical comedy, sculpture and more, it is revelatory and truly expansive.

The performance begins with a short film, The Moment Has Gone, showing Kentridge’s animation style. His use of charcoal to gradually create a single image while telling a story, is fascinating. When combined with his humour as a storyteller, you start to see the mind of the artist at work. Woven into this animation are short phrases, some portentous, some silly or banal. The film is accompanied by a live score by Kyle Shepherd on piano featuring an all-male South African chorus led by Nhlanhla Mahlangu providing an organic and live aspect to the prerecorded work.

Following that is a chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl, sung in four Bantu languages. It explores the idea of the ancient Greek oracles and prophetesses of mythology across a number of songs, each staged individually. The tale of the Cumaean Sibyl, giving prophecies of the future on oak leaves, only for them to be scattered without order by the winds, making them impossible to decipher, is interpreted over six songs. 

Combined with projections, hand-painted backdrop, and music composed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd, the phrases from the film become prophecies with the pages coming alive, through song, dance and animation. Somehow they start as magical elements, and become more mundane as the show progresses. A commentary on how contemporary life has made the miraculous merely commonplace.

In the end it is not the message that resonates but the medium itself (I tip my hat to Marshall McLuhan). The cross-disciplinary use of art styles itself frees the artists from linear interpretations, like an oracle crosses time. The future is irrelevant when our focus is in the here and now, watching the stage, immersed in spectacle and song.