 Here we are in Luxembourg. You've been here for 10 days. How does it feel after this long stretch of time with the pandemic surrounding you? You've been in a state of siege but with the pandemic around you and not political situations such as when you underreported. How does it feel being out of it? How does it feel being in it and how does it feel being out of it? Well, let's first talk about being out of it. So it's been remarkable generosity on the part of Moudam and Bihar to the Grand Theatre, the whole of the Red Bridge project to bring the company, not just me, but performers, composers, dancers, singers for five different projects into Luxembourg. And it meant that for the last 10 days there have been between 15 and 25 friends and collaborators together in the same hotel doing different projects which is kind of inconceivable, has been inconceivable for the last 15 months even though we live in Johannesburg most of us quite close to each other to gather in this number and to have the conversation, the late night conversations or at breaking the curfew on the hotel terrace, all of those things. So on the one hand that's felt extremely open. I'm also aware of this is a much more law abiding and diligent community than we used to in Johannesburg in the middle. Everybody is wearing their masks. No one has their masks under here. There are all these good gaps between the theatre where you're in a sold out performance with 80% empty seats. I mean, that's why you have very, very low infections, I'm sure, and it's been well done. But so ironically in Johannesburg where we haven't really yet had vaccinations on a large scale and where there's much less control of what's happening with Covid, restaurants have been open, they've been performances with small audiences for a while. In the studio, because most of the people in the studio had Covid last year we were in a kind of post-Covid situation. If nobody's had it, then you don't need to be social distance and with masks and all of these protocols. So in fact for most of the year it's been a kind of open studio, 20 of us having lunch together every day in the garden. It turns one sense it feels more closed down here in the day-to-day controls but it's been astonishing within that to have this gathering of all the people together. I mean, I'm sure we can talk about the, not the irony, it's the paradoxes of the pandemic. And as a visual artist where I have the studio in the garden even in the most extreme lockdown circumstances it was possible to keep doing my work. It was more than possible, it was a pleasure. Every performance and exhibition was either cancelled or postponed. And so instead of having usually the five or six or eight trips to different institutions a year they were none. So I've had 15 months at work in my studio. I've never had, I haven't had that for 45 years. You refer to this as a sabbatical? It's a kind of sabbatical. So I'm aware that from a selfish point of view what was possible for me, it was a kind of a blessing. But at the same time I'm completely aware that for many of friends and colleagues and collaborators who are in musicians or dancers or performers it's been calamitous, it's been calamitous. Not only in that there was no income because of all the cancelled projects but many people were not able to practice their metier. They weren't able to practice as a dancer, as a musician. The studios were shut, they were isolated on their own. They weren't with a group of performers that they need to be with. And so I think for... I'm aware the ease of me saying yes for me it was an easy time and aware of how desperate it was and still is for many, many people that I work with very closely. William, just going off slightly at a tangent. Here in this wonderful exhibition at this museum at the Midam there is more sweetly play the dance. And if I'm not mistaken, some of the characters in the procession were actually inspired by the news of the Ebola outbreak. Am I right? Yes, there were more than just the news of them, by the images of them. That was the first time we saw this high-tech medical costuming which one is used to seeing in an emergency room or intensive care out in the world, people with these hazmat suits with plastic visors and beekeeper-like suits around them, leading people with trip sets around hospitals. So this was in 2015, 14, 15 or 16, in West Africa which was an epidemic that in the end was restricted to West Africa but sort of started alerting the world to the sense of this mortality that was around, these dangers that were about. So in retrospect, yes, that film is about plague, about epidemic even though it's not this but it was made a couple of years before the current crisis. So it's to Suzanne's credit that she had the prescience to say this will be a key work in this exhibition which was planned in the months before the start of the epidemic. The reason I mentioned Banksy is because I am constantly astounded not only by your originality and inventiveness but at the same time by your constant awareness of what other people have done before you and how that previous autistic activity might enter your work and you gave me one more example of this this morning because among all the phrases that are reproduced in one of the films upstairs which is the film with the oak leaves it's called Waiting for the Sybil and one of the phrases is something about insects with moustaches what's the exact phrase? Beware of insects with moustaches Thank you, this is Beware of insects with moustaches and I said I was standing with William watching this film and I said where does that one, where did you get that and you answered? Well the phrase beware of insects with moustaches was to strike me. The text of Waiting for the Sybil both the film and the kind of libretto for the chamber opera that's at the Grand Teatre is a mixture of sutu proverbs, twana proverb should I say that I found phrases that I've written and a lot of lines that come from different poets in translation, none of them are English poets in fact sometimes transformed sometimes as they are and there was a Yev Tashenko poem which had this line about insect with moustaches and that kind of what can that mean and it was explained to me that in the 1970s and 80s one of the ways of controlling dissidents in the Soviet Union was to have them consigned to mental institutions as being not politically dissident but as being crazy and one of the questions that psychiatrists, military psychiatrists or police psychiatrists asked detainees to make this assertion that you were crazy was do you see insects with moustaches and there's no answer I think if you did see them you were crazy or if you didn't see them you were crazier most probably either answer was enough to have you certified but that's where that phrase came from it's kind of just enough of a strange phrase to try to imagine a kind of either a caterpillar with a moustache or a beetle that's got a kind of moustache it's like Gogol and suddenly it makes all like Kafka George Samsa who gets turned into a cockroach and maybe still retains his must probably whispery moustache he'd had before I can't help going off at a tangent again I remember when we were students William and I were not at university together we went to the same university I remember when we were students that those of us who were particularly interested in poetry were reading almost anything but English speaking poetry and certainly not very much South African poetry and you've just said that most of the extracts you've taken were from non-English speaking poets why should that be? I'm trying to think there is something about the weight of the traditions of English language that obviously are difficult for me in the sense of almost every project I've done whether it's the Zauberflöte or Lülle or Wozzeck or Ubu or Memorias Postmus to Braskubas or Confessions of Zeno are all writers not writing in English initially all in translation La Vidune Boyd, the great Cameroonian novel another case in point I've never constantly made a decision for that but retrospect if I look back they're all from... there's something about the dislocation that happens in translation which for me unlocks more possibilities the imperfection of translation the fact that it's one of many possible ways of thinking about your original text is a given, that's not going to change if you read the Rilke poem the Rilke poem stays the Rilke poem in German but there are so many different... there's a whole book about the different translations of that poem and when you connect to one of those you understand it's something in you that links to that translation that talks to you and there is obviously an important connection between the original and its translation but it's not the same thing at all I mean as they say in a... and Schwarzbrot are not the same object when you eat them not at all, not at all is it also that in the suffocating atmosphere of South Africa when we were studying there we needed to get as far away from that language anything to do with the British culture we needed to breathe somewhere and this foreign... these foreign sources were part of our oxygen does that thought make any sense to you? it makes a lot of thought I mean I think it was for me one of the great revelations was understanding that English positivist philosophy of taking facts as facts was not the only way of understanding the world so when it started in my case it was the 1970s the German Marxist to the alternative the new way of thinking about the world the sudden way of understanding the world as process the world as transformation the world not as fact but facts as one moment in a series of transformations was a revelation to have the kind of openness to play with form that one found either in Gogol short stories or in Machado de Assis was kind of a revelation compared to the traditions of English literature of Dickens and the great English novels which were so very different much as I love those English novels they were never something that made me think this is something I want to work with always connected to my work I mean I love watching sport on television but I don't expect it to be nourishing of the other work that's done it was a bit like that with English literature actually I think that of all the countries outside South Africa France really has a special status for you perhaps ever since the Jacques Le Coq Mime School and perhaps the French language with it is that possible? Of all the languages which aren't English that's certainly the one that I can that I feel I can understand with the most facility and the one I feel least embarrassed about massacring as I speak it but it also I think you have particular moments so this was a period of I suppose how old Anne and I were 25 when we went to Paris in 1980 a whole new world also of thinking about what art was coming through the rigors of the training at the Jacques Le Coq Theatre School which still for me is the bedrock of what I've learnt about drawing filmmaking, theatre making the particular experiences you have either as an adolescent or a young adult or a child which even I think God it's now 40 years since I was there surely I must have learnt something new and then part of it is now what you learnt then was what you've got that's where you're going to work from so yes there's a very close sense of this image of what it was to be in France at that era and at that age which stays with me so if I'm in France now there's part of me that still feels 25 even though 99% of the rest of me says no no forget it that's not who you are anymore I want to come back to the question of language just a little bit later but before that I was thinking well let's put this book on the table just for a while during this conversation and how am I going to do that and there was just one quote that leapt up at me so this is you speaking in English I'm afraid and the subject is more sweetly play the dance which we'd been listening it was 2014 and we'd been listening to the music for this piece in your studio and at the same time you were preparing Wozak so there was Albenberg's music around as well and in this little extract you start off talking about the tuba which is played in more sweetly play the dance and this is what you say what is it in those low notes of the tuba that reaches one's soul so deeply because it's not just the notes by themselves it's obviously how a note comes after the note before it before the note after it the soundtrack of the other people around it but it reaches a deep point of satisfaction which is obviously what Berg is completely trying to avoid all the composers from the atonal school are trying to avoid the comfort which comes with the resolution of a chord developing a 12 tone system to say the world is no longer so amenable and taking this to mathematical extremes with the rigorous working out of the 12 tone system whereas with the brass band musically we are still in a world of hope we are still in a world of possibility so here we have these two different kinds of music these two visions of the world would you say that the friction between the two of them is central to your work I think so, I mean in the piece that you'll hear tonight that we are performing waiting for the Sibyl the composer on Trampton I spent time listening to some stockhausen and there's a whole piece Stimul which is all done on the note B flat it's one note and variations of voices and the way we worked with it I would take one section not me let me say it's in Trampton I don't know who would do this we would say let's start by playing one of the many variations which is five voices very accurately starting on B flat and doing minimal transformations and then in Trampton I would say to the singers alright you're going to copy exactly what we're hearing very accurately and they would meld together the stockhausen and the singers who are going to be in waiting for the Sibyl and then at a certain point the music recording would be the volume would be taken down and we'd still be in the stockhausen world of these very closely connected voices at that note and then gradually we would start to leave Germany and start to make our way home and new things would start to emerge in the voices and different rithisms and emphases and punctuations and grammar and it became an extraordinary thing it was not the same as stockhausen but it was not like saying let's just take a traditional South African song it was an extraordinary shift between and in this as an example of the tension between those two kinds of music is what's very much there in it but it's important that that's not all that there is the music that we're doing in this opera and in many other pieces isn't simply that mathematical question and that what constitutes the rest of their described as hope in what you were quoting to me but for me it's like taking it out into the world letting it walk, letting it have a place to go is what the other part that happens in the music and so fundamentally I think I still understand I think I understand what he meant when he said that not me, the other him I understand, I think or at least the other me understands but I wanted to come back to the question of language as I said it seems to me that white English speaking South Africans are among the most monolingual and monocultural people in the whole wide world even today and here you are you not only have brought this whole wealth of African culture to a new kind of Kentridge surface but in addition now when I look on your extraordinary website and I see the rehearsals for waiting for the Sibyl I haven't yet seen the piece I notice once more that you're working with people who are speaking in and singing in other languages African languages which you and I when we were growing up were not able to understand more than a couple of words of how does this get to you now what does it do to you how does it reach you that you should be working with these people who are working themselves in these other languages it's a good and hard question and I'll answer it in different ways so one yes there is a kind of a shame at being so monolingual at university I tried to learn the sutu southern sutu and failed at it had a year of it and wasn't able to so there is this and it's a residue of what it is to grow up in South Africa so monolingual so there is a gap but it's both a kind of but there's a different point to to understanding language and music and maybe it is a South African childhood growing up but listening to opera which I did a lot in my childhood and others and listening to other songs there was a sense of hearing words but not understanding them of knowing a broad arc of what an opera was but never really needing to expect to understand all the words of a soprano singing the aria of the Queen of the Night or other songs in the opera repertoire with their in German, French or Italian and one understands that the singers need to understand what they're singing they need to know what words they're singing but an audience does not you pick it up from so many other senses in fact when you finally get to hear or you read the libretto of a song that's being sung listen to the actual words even in English, even in rock songs even in popular music there are many songs where you've heard the words but they don't register as a text so I think there's a difference between what are the demands and responsibilities of the performer and of the listener it was a a bit like Desmond Tutu the archbishop was being given an honorary doctorate at Yale as I was told by the head of Yale University and there was a formal meal and the the provost the chancellor of the university said to Desmond Tutu wouldn't you like to say grace and he did and he said a long grace but he didn't say it in English he did the grace in the Twaimler or Zulu and at the end the chancellor said okay that was wonderful but you know I didn't understand what you were saying and he said well that doesn't matter I wasn't talking to you I was talking to him who understood it and there's a way in which language and music have a strange relationship between needing to have meaning and needing to not have a specific meaning so I asked the chancellor sometimes what are the meanings of the people of the songs of a line that someone is singing and sometimes it is a connection but it's a distant connection to the word that's being translated to the word that we see and it's always a very poetic connection which is vital for the singers and we hear a sense in it even if we don't understand the specifics so it's an evasive answer because as I say to get back to the first point there's a big part of me that is hiding against a kind of shame at not having an access to that language yes and yet unlike a lot of artists who've come out of the same context as you that feeling along with all the guilt and whatever else one might put in the package has not stopped you making this work that's part of the miracle yeah I mean I think it certainly should just look the work is happening so it's not stopped the work and it's certainly but it's work that is completely nourished in the space that you are describing it would be very different you said okay we're only going to sing in English every once that everybody can follow each word it's also saying from the group of people who are working with what is their wellspring or voice or text and working with that one last question before I allow the audience to intervene here it concerns fate fate was a central issue in the refusal of time the story of Perseus who could not refuse could not escape his fate here we have the oak leaves of the sable and fate is once again on the table but you personally don't strike me as someone who's necessarily accepts that there is such a thing as fate or destiny am I right or am I wrong no you're right you're right in the sense that no but what I understand obviously all the retrospectively we can say this was your fate this was what was going to happen I'm intrigued by the idea of evasive action meeting the decisive strike so as you think you're avoiding something you're in fact going right into its path there's the story of the death in Samara the story of the merchant in Baghdad who sends his servant into the market to buy some food and the servant comes back very shaken and says master when I was there buying food a person called me over to him and I went over and I saw under his cloak that it was death calling to me so I ran away enough come back here what must I do and the merchant said oh you must hide and run so he ran off to Samara and later the merchant himself went out into the streets and there again he came across this person with his hood and realized this must be the figure of death and went to to him and said what were you doing terrifying my servant and he said death said to him yes I was a little bit surprised to see him here because I've gotten a point with him this afternoon in Samara so that sense of heading towards it as you try to avoid it that's that's why those stories of Persia's and of the civil strikes so deeply a childhood fear of are you running into danger or away from danger but an acceptance of that openness of that uncertainty