Set Designer

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

In 1897, three scientists set out to fly over the North Pole in a gas balloon. They never returned. Then, a discovery. Their fate, shrouded in mystery for decades, is revealed through a found camera and rolls of film that were buried in the ice for 33 years. This theatrical exploration blends dance, music, film, and projection to tell a poetic and impressionistic distortion of the true story. A loving tribute to photography and its capacity to expose the power, beauty, and fragility of the environment, this show is a metaphoric comedy about memory, destiny, legacy, and hubris in the face of nature’s force.

White Box

Emmett Robinson Theatre at College of Charleston

This landmark of 20th-century music is brought to life in a new production from the extraordinary imagination of South African artist William Kentridge, offering audiences an immersive, interdisciplinary experience described as “a breathtaking masterpiece... a work of art across many genres."

EPSG:4326

Wozzeck

Canadian Opera Company

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.

Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC)

In Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, a traveller wounded by unrequited love treks through a desolate winter landscape, longing for the restfulness of death. This song cycle is one of the composer’s last and one of his most poignant. In the concentrated format of the lied, he succeeds as no one else in suggesting a wide spectrum of emotions, from intense desire to a bottomless sense of conflict and abandonment.

Set Designer

Sabine Theunissen

Events

Upcoming events

Oct 30 - Nov 14, 2026

L’Orfeo · Greek National Opera

Apr 14, 2027

Winterreise · La Monnaie / De Munt

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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