Dancing with Dada / 2011

For Documenta 13 in 2012, a contemporary art showcase presented every five years in Kassel, Germany, William Kentridge will present The Refusal of Time. The project grows out of a series of ongoing conversations with the Harvard-based science historian, Peter Galison, and wrestles with our changing ideas about time, the history of the standardisation of time and resistance to a linear construction of time and space. It questions our constructed experience of time, and invites alternative interpretations of time. Dancing with Dada was created as part of work towards this larger project – in this way the piece is both complete in itself, and a space for experimentation and testing of ideas. The dance concert premiered at The Market Theatre in Johannesburg in 2011 as part of the Refuse the Hour programme. It integrated dance, live music, strange machines and projection. Philip Miller created original music and sound for the piece, and award-winning dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo both choreographed and performed within it. Sabine Theunissen, Greta Goiris, Catherine Meyburgh and Luc de Wit, who worked with Kentrige on both The Magic Flute and The Nose, also contributed to this production. Goiris created costumes – a rapid assembly of parts, for this piece, rather than detailed control of every detail. Theunissen worked with Kentridge on design of the stage, backdrops and machines. De Wit explored the possibilities for movement on stage; and Meyburgh, together with Snezana Marovic, edited the video. Joanna Dudley sung Miller’s rendering of Berlioz’s song La Spectre de la Rose (from the song cycle Les Nuits d’Ete), and with Ann Masina and Bham Ntabeni used voice as an element of Miller’s soundscape for the piece.