South African-born William Kentridge is one of today’s best-known contemporary artists: his animated films, installations and drawings address sensitive socio-political issues and traumas in a language all his own. Play the Dance Softer is a monumental work of summarising ambition: a video installation depicting the endless march of human silhouettes across a barren landscape.
The shadow figures dancing to the music of devotion can be associated with the motifs of ancient reliefs, the iconography of woodcuts depicting triumphal processions and the tradition of the danse macabre, while also placing the cast shadow, an old topos in the history of painting and philosophy (Plato and Pliny the Elder), in a new context. The title of the work recalls a line from Paul Celan’s Death Fugue (“play death more softly”), and is thus saturated with traumatic content, evoking an experience of destruction, exile, perpetual wandering, existential anguish, which is different in every age.
Kentridge’s installation More sweetly play the dance has been shown with great success around the world, first at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and at the Lichtsicht Biennale in Bad Rohenfelde in 2015. The artist has already appeared in Budapest in 2011: his video installation I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008), based on Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol’s short story Nose, attracted considerable interest at the Museum of Fine Arts.