Calder and Kentridge: Two Visions of the World at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma

The Teatro dell'Opera di Roma hosted a double bill titled Calder/Kentridge, pairing Alexander Calder's 1968 Work in Progress with William Kentridge's 2019 Waiting for the Sibyl. Curated by Carlo Fuortes and Alessio Vlad, the show premiered on September 10. Calder's 19-minute piece, created for the Teatro Costanzi in 1968 at the invitation of Massimo Bogianckino, Giovanni Carandente, and Filippo Crivelli, features white curtains with hand-drawn suns, moons, and starfish, set to electronic music by Maderna, Castiglioni, and Clementi. It presents an optimistic, playful world of mobiles, cyclists, and abstract landscapes. Kentridge's Waiting for the Sibyl, inspired by the Cumaean Sibyl from Dante's Paradiso, explores humanity's desire to know the future. The opera opens with a Black Sibyl contorting and emitting disjointed sounds before two large accounting sheets, with shadow projections of animals, objects, and leaves, interspersed with poetic and dramatic oracular phrases. The central scenes question decision-making after the oracle and the inevitability of fate, using complex sets with fixed and moving elements and shadow projections reminiscent of Calder's mobiles, accompanied by music composed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepard. Kentridge's work casts a sinister light on a future dominated by algorithms, asking whether there is still room for a human, non-technological sibyl.