Stage Director

Dramaturge

When death claims his wife on their wedding day, Orpheus must brave the Underworld to rescue her. Can his music move the gods themselves? A classic myth brings together Monteverdi’s powerfully expressive score and a new staging by artist and Olivier Award-winning director William Kentridge.

L'Orfeo

Glyndebourne

When death claims his wife on their wedding day, Orpheus must brave the Underworld to rescue her. Can his music move the gods themselves? A classic myth brings together Monteverdi’s powerfully expressive score and a new staging by artist and Olivier Award-winning director William Kentridge with Jonathan Cohen conducting.

L’Orfeo

Creating a film to accompany a symphony is something special, after all, classical music is something abstract and leaves a lot of room for associations. But perhaps that is precisely the key. William Kentridge, to whom the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden have dedicated a focus in 2025, had plenty of associations with Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony and turned them into an impressive film for a visually-acoustic experience. Michael Sanderling, who enjoys an excellent reputation as a Shostakovich specialist, conducts this symphony while Kentridge's film is simultaneously shown on the big screen.

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Kentridge and Shostakovich

Palace of Culture

Under the direction of Michael Sanderling, Dmitri Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony will be performed on the Dresden Memorial Day, a work deeply influenced by the experiences and traumas of the Stalin era. In it, Shostakovich processes darkness, pain, and hope that wrestle with each other in a very unique way. South African artist William Kentridge has created a film titled "Oh To Believe in Another World" for this piece, which interprets Shostakovich's symphony in a fascinating manner. With his characteristic collages, animations, and drawings, Kentridge takes a poetic look at the themes of loss and longing that resonate in the music. Music and film merge into a unique work of art that connects remembrance and art, while also forming a final accent of the Kentridge focus of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden 2025 (with exhibitions at the Albertinum, Kupferstich-Kabinett, and in the Puppet Theater Collection).

Based on actual events, The Great Yes, The Great No takes place aboard an ocean liner bound for Martinique from Vichy France and carrying a who’s who of mid-20th century thinkers. South African artist William Kentridge adds a layer of fiction to his retelling of this wartime voyage. To create a meaningful group portrait, Kentridge has augmented the ship’s manifest of real passengers (French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, et al.) with several other famous figures (among them Martinican philosopher Frantz Fanon and French entertainer Josephine Baker). The ship’s captain is none other than Charon, mythical ferryman of the River Styx.

The Great Yes, The Great No

Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts

Myth, magic, music, movement, and mesmerizing imagery combine in revered South African visual artist William Kentridge’s newest production.
Presented in two parts, SIBYL is inspired by the Greek myth of the Cumaean Sibyl, and wrestles with the human desire to know our future, and our helplessness before powers and technologies that obscure that knowledge from us. The chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl features nine vocalists and dancers interacting with Kentridge’s distinctive stage design, which energizes the action of the performers with hand-painted sets, animated ink drawings, swirling projected text, collage, and shadow play.
Kentridge has taken the opera world by storm in recent years with his strikingly original productions of works by Berg, Mozart, and Shostakovich, which have graced such illustrious stages as the Metropolitan Opera, the English National Opera, the Théâtre National de l’Opéra (Paris), the Staatsoper (Berlin), and the Sydney Opera House, among many others.

William Kentridge's SIBYL

University of California, Berkeley

The Greek National Opera opens the 2026/27 season with a new grand international co-production with two leading opera companies from Europe and the United States: the Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the New York Metropolitan Opera. Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo—a landmark work in the history of music that marks the birth of opera as a complete dramatic art—is presented for the first time by the GNO. Bearing the stamp of the renowned and versatile artist William Kentridge, this emblematic work transforms into a multilayered audiovisual landscape, where themes of memory, time, and loss take on form, movement, and material dimensions. L’Orfeo will run from 30 October for eight performances at the Stavros Niarchos Hall. The production is made possible by a grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) to enhance the GNO’s artistic outreach.

Stage Director, Dramaturge

William Kentridge

Events

Upcoming events

Oct 30 - Nov 14, 2026

L’Orfeo · Greek National Opera

Past events

23 - 25 Jul, 2026

L'Orfeo · Glyndebourne

18 - 25 Jul, 2026

L’Orfeo · Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment

About

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