Catherine Meyburgh

Berg’s 20th-century shocker stars baritone Peter Mattei in the title role, with Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin on the podium and soprano Elza van den Heever as the long-suffering Marie. Groundbreaking visual artist and director William Kentridge unveils a bold new staging set in an apocalyptic wasteland.

South Africa’s wealth and white privilege has been funded by large scale maiming and killing of people by the gold mining industry. Today gold miner communities across Southern Africa have nothing to show for the wealth they produced except extreme rural underdevelopment and the world’s worst epidemic of TB and silicosis. Through testimonies from communities in mining families throughout Southern Africa and extensive use of contrasting archive materials DYING FOR GOLD tells the story of how we have arrived at this extraordinary situation. DYING FOR GOLD brings to the surface the real cost of South

William Kentridge’s multi-layered production of Berg’s masterpiece stars charismatic soprano Marlis Petersen in the title role—the enigmatic and alluring woman who is equal parts femme fatale, innocent girl, and abused victim. The men around her, whose lives she forever alters, are Johan Reuter as newspaper publisher Dr. Schön; Daniel Brenna as his composer son, Alwa; Paul Groves as the Painter; and Franz Grundheber as Schigolch. Susan Graham sings Countess Geschwitz, and Lothar Koenigs conducts Berg’s landmark score.

The gangster Manysia is given a second chance after his release from prison. Reverend Jacob Musi takes him under his wings, both as a promise to Manysia’s father and as an act of benevolence. Reverend Jacob thinks that everyone deserves a fresh start and his family generously welcomes Manysia, especially the reverend’s son. But soon the past will cast its shadows over them again.

Little Bird's first South African production, SOPHIATOWN has won the award for Best Documentary at the Cape Town World Cinema Festival 2003. SOPHIATOWN celebrates the great popular jazz music of the 1950's in South Africa; a rich tradition deserving international attention. Director Pascale Lamche, traces the music, uncovers the artists who created it and the unique culture in which it thrived, concentrated in Sophiatown, Johannesburg's own Harlem, which fuelled by liberation politics until its destruction by the Apartheid regime. The film features Nelson Mandela and such household names from the jazz world as Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, Abdullah Ibrahim, Jonas Gwangwa and Caiphus Semenya.

Charcoal animation, taken from from Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image (2003).

A journey into the mines provides a visual representation of a journey into the conscience of Kentridge's invented character, Soho Eckstein, the white South African property owner who exploits the resources of land and black human labour which are under his domain. Throughout the film the imagery shifts between the geological landscape underground inhabited by innumerable black miners and Soho's world of white luxury above ground. When Soho, breakfasting in bed, pushes down the plunger of his cafetière, its movement is transformed into a rapid descent through the tray, through the bed and into the mine-shaft. Here the miners' world of overwhelming misery is depicted in claustrophobic tunnels where they are trapped digging, drilling and sleeping, embedded in rock. Above ground, Soho sits at his desk in his customary pin-stripe suit and punches adding machines and cash registers, creating a flow of gold bars, exhausted miners, blasted landscapes and blocks of uniform housing.

A pilot is the only hope to stop the mutiny of a spacecraft by its security crew, who plot to sell the crew of the ship into slavery.

William Kentridge (1955) was inspired in this case by the novel by Italo Svevo The Conscience of Zeno (1923). Kentridge concentrates on the main character whose fears and interior torments reflect the social violence and the brutality of the First World War. Through Zeno, the artist explores the development of notions of history and belonging as well as the way in which our identities are defined by social and political changes. Unlike traditional animated cinema based on thousands of drawings, Kentridge composes his work using a small series of drawings which are successively erased, redrawn and photographed throughout the various stages of creation, which he then mixes with paper cut-outs and archive images. This technique, which he has made his own, thus perfectly illustrates the process of memory which erases, alters and gives rise to multiple images.