Latest news with #Kentridge
Yahoo
5 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
State track and field preview: What to watch for at Mount Tahoma this weekend
The WIAA's State Track and Field meet is on the horizon at Mount Tahoma Stadium in Tacoma. Here's what to watch, events to follow and schedules for the three-day championship from May 29-31. Don't blink, or you just might miss a slew of South Sound runners in this year's 100-meter dash. Locals make up five of the state's 10 fastest-recorded sprints this spring, including each of the top three. Curtis senior Nicholas 'Nico' Altheimer (10.35) and Kentridge teammates Berry Crosby (10.43) and Jordan Miller (10.48) are chasing the gold medal this weekend from the 4A ranks — a race projected to feature all three seniors on the podium. They'll run in Thursday's preliminary heats at 3:10 p.m. for their chance to race in Saturday's 100-meter 4A final at 11:40 a.m. Altheimer continues his quest to be crowned Washington's top sprinter, the Vikings standout with the state's best 100-meter (10.35) and 200-meter (21.02) times this season. He runs the final leg of Curtis' state-record 4x100 relay and will contend in the 4A Boys 300-meter hurdles (39.34). Can he bring multiple gold medals back to University Place? 'He's a really special athlete,' Curtis head coach Ben Mangrum said of Altheimer. 'They don't come around very often like him. Just really natural, but also has worked really hard for a long time at this. 'His talent is remarkable, but his work ethic is pretty excellent as well. He's like 6-foot-4, probably 200 pounds, but just eats up the track every step.' When Curtis' 4x100 relay team dashed to victory at the West Central District III championships at Kent-Meridian High School May 21, it became the first in state history to break the 41-second mark (40.97). Now, they've arrived at the state's biggest stage. Jayden Rice-Claiborne, Isaac Brooks, Kamil Ross, and Altheimer are the favorites in Saturday's final, should they advance through Friday's preliminaries. 'Those guys have been working hard for a long time, so it's no accident that they're running really well right now,' Mangrum said. 'They've put in the time to do that.' And who's right on their tails? Kentridge's Crosby-Miller sprinting duo join Jacob Satchell and Josiah Brown to comprise the Chargers' 4x100 relay, whose 41.18-second race at the NPSL Championships on May 14 stood as the state's best time for a week (before Curtis stole the top of the leaderboard for themselves). The South Sound remains rich with 4x100 relay talent, including 4A's Curtis and Kentridge quartets. Lincoln will contend in 3A with Ramon Jones, Eddie Bruner Jr., Kasey Williams, and JoMierre Askew-Poirier. The Abes claimed last week's district relay title with a personal-record 41.59 — second-fastest among 3A programs in 2025. And look for Tumwater's speedy 4x100 relay, tops in 2A so far this spring. Xavier Bunn, Cash Short, David Malroy, and Blake Kirkpatrick ran a 41.99-second race on May 9, the classification's best time statewide. Kanai Kennedy just took the West Central District III championships by storm. Will he save his best run for last on his home track? Mount Tahoma's budding freshman stole the show in the 3A 100-meter run at Kent-Meridian last Wednesday, notching a personal-record (10.61) that cleared the field by nearly a quarter-second (10.85). It's the seventh-fastest 100-meter time spanning all classifications in Washington this season, placing Kennedy directly in contention at home this weekend. He'll run in three events at Mount Tahoma Stadium: The 3A Boys 100-meter, 200-meter, and 4x100 relay as the final leg. ▪ Curtis features a trio of contending distance runners: Kellen McInelly (1600m, 3200m), Dima Serafimovici (3200m) and junior Owen Mangrum (1600m, 3200m). McInelly broke three-decade-old Curtis records in both events and is 'one of the more dangerous guys in the state right now,' Mangrum said. Owen Mangrum, Ben's son, makes 'everything fun' for Curtis' head coach. 'When I was about 10 or 12 years into coaching, my kids were growing up and they were starting to get into activities, and I saw that I was missing out on what they were doing,' Ben Mangrum said. 'I actually coached Owen in baseball for a number of years. ... I've never had to be the coach that comes down hard on his own son. He's always been a great example for everybody else. 'He took on running a couple of years ago, and it was kind of a blessing for me because I didn't want it to be something that was mine. It was something that he chose, that he wanted to do, and then it totally snowballed into something that he cared more about than I could have imagined.' ▪ Bonney Lake distance specialist Latham West goes for gold in this weekend's 4A Girls 1600- and 3200-meter runs. The Panthers junior is the state's reigning 3A Girls 1600-meter fourth-place finisher and grabbed the state's top seed in the 3200 with a dominant, 16-second win at last week's district championships at Kent-Meridian (10:31.58). ▪ Federal Way's Geron White is a heavy favorite to claim repeat titles in the boys high jump at Mount Tahoma. White battled unrelenting wind and rain to win last year's 4A Boys title (6-6) and competes from 3A with the Eagles this spring. White has already cleared the 6-10.25 mark, the event's top seed by more than a six-inch margin. ▪ Emerald Ridge sophomore Iren Derricks burst onto the local track scene by capturing last year's 4A Girls 100-meter title (12.23) as a freshman last spring and enters this year's meet with a personal-best 11.90. Can she bring home gold once again? ▪ Lincoln's Eddie Bruner Jr. sports the state's fastest 400-meter dash this spring (47.38) and defends his title at Mount Tahoma this weekend. The Abes star claimed last year's 3A Boys 400-meter title (48.53) over Liberty's Jackson Moffitt (48.95). Mount Tahoma Stadium — Tacoma, WA (May 29-31) Thursday: Events begin at 1 p.m. Field events are held from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., and running events begin at 2 p.m. Final awards and team scores are announced at 8 p.m. Friday: Events begin at 9:50 a.m. Field events are held from 9:50 a.m. to 3 p.m., and running events begin at 11 a.m. WIAA Academic Awards are announced at 1:40 p.m. and final awards are revealed at 6:25 p.m. Saturday: Events begin at 10:20 a.m. Field events are held from 10:20 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., and running events begin at 10:30 a.m. Final team scores and awards begin at 4:35 p.m. Here's a full, detailed schedule of this weekend's state meet provided by the WIAA.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Decatur and Kentridge wage crossover battle ahead of next week's baseball action
Baseball playoff fates were decided for Decatur and Kentridge long before they stepped onto the field at Hogan Park at Russell Road in Kent for a non-league game against each other Thursday afternoon. Both are set to open District 3/4 action Tuesday, with Decatur coming in as the North Puget Sound League Class 3A champion and Kentridge as the No. 3 entry from the league's Class 4A division. The Gators posted a 15-1 record in taking the 3A No. 1 spot, falling to 18-2 overall with a 6-3 loss to the host Kentridge Chargers Thursday. The Chargers improved to 13-6 overall with the win after going 9-5 in 4A division play. Decatur is the No. 2 District 3/4 seed and will host No. 7 Peninsula to open Tuesday in double elimination action at a time and location to be announced. Kentridge is seeded No. 9 in 4A and knows it will host No. 16 South Kitsap for a loser-out opener at 4 p.m. Tuesday back at Hogan Park. 'This game didn't mean a whole lot, but it's a momentum thing,' said Shane Stober, who assists his brother Sheldon as a Kentridge coach. 'It's good to keep the momentum going.' Decatur sixth year head coach Chris Fox enjoys his team's 3A championship status coming off a 10-13 season in 2024 including playoffs as a 4A team. 'It's been a really, really good season,' he said. 'We're good to go. Good senior leadership has been huge for us this year.' The Gators have clicked in many departments. 'On the field it's been the bats that have carried us,' Fox said. 'We've hit 12 or 13 home runs, so we've got a lot of power in the middle of our order.' And there is more in their favor. 'Our pitching 1-3 has been solid,' Fox said. 'And our defense is good up the middle at catcher, shortstop and second base.' It was Kentridge that came out and won Thursday, though, starting off with one run each in the bottom of the first and third innings. Teegan O'Brien doubled over the left fielder's head to score Owen Finlayson all the way from first base in the first inning and Ethan Sugimoto walked and came around on a Finlayson double and a Manny Harris sacrifice fly in the third. Three unearned runs were added on two errors on one play in the fourth for a 5-0 Chargers lead after Levi Baca singled and Brendyn Malapitan and Landon Todd both walked to load the bases. Donovan Lopez hit into a two base error down the right field line and a relay throw was also missed. Decatur answered with three runs in the top of the fifth to cut the advantage to 5-3. Nate Gilmore blasted a double to deep center, advanced to third on a Tyler Buol grounder and scored on a single by Landon Le. Landin Parker singled to load the bases. Eric Davili singled in Buol ahead of an RBI sacrifice fly by Spencer Holloway. Kentridge came back with one in the bottom of the sixth as Malapitan walked and scored on an infield single by Cordo del Fierro and ensuing errant throw. The Chargers held on as the Gators tried to put together a two out rally in the top of the seventh and final inning. Holloway hit an infield single and CJ Gatterson doubled to put runners on second and third before Finlayson fielded a grounder at shortstop and fired to first for the final out.
Korea Herald
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
William Kentridge returns with provocative works that ask rather than answer
South African visual artist and filmmaker's 'Sibyl' and 'Shostakovich 10' to be presented in Seoul in May This month, audiences in South Korea will once again encounter the haunting, layered world of the South African artist known for collapsing the boundaries between drawing, film, music and performance. Returning to Korea for the first time in nearly a decade, William Kentridge presents two of his recent works under the GS Arts Center's Artists series: "Sibyl," and multimedia symphonic project 'Shostakovich 10: Oh To Believe in Another World' (2024). These are not works that deliver answers. Rather, they raise questions that resonate long after the lights dim: 'What does it mean to confront death?' 'In whose land can someone be called 'illegal?'' 'What is the relationship of a composer to an authoritarian regime?' To be performed Friday and Saturday at the GS Arts Center, "Sibyl," a double bill comprising 'The Moment Has Gone' and 'Waiting for the Sibyl,' offers Kentridge's signature blend of visual art, performance and political commentary. 'They are like two short stories in a collection,' he said during a press conference Wednesday. 'From the same world, not narratively linked, but they are linked by performers and both confront death.' 'The Moment Has Gone,' a 22-minute film with live singers, unfolds across three dimensions: footage of Kentridge drawing in his studio, poetic evocations of Johannesburg's informal labor and the physical presence of the singers onstage. In contrast, 'Waiting for the Sibyl' transforms the ancient Roman myth of the Cumaean prophetess into a contemporary meditation on uncertainty. In the myth, seekers would write questions on oak leaves and leave them at the Sibyl's cave, only to find that the wind had scattered their answers. 'You'd never know if you were getting your answer or someone else's,' Kentridge said. "The question of uncertainty, of not knowing one's fate, of what one's relationship was to one's death. These are all questions on the stage," he noted. Both "The Moment Has Gone" and "Waiting for the Sibyl" feature music by composer and associate director Nhlanhla Mahlangu, who also hails from South Africa. They described their creative partnership as one that brings a 'vertical' dimension to Kentridge's 'horizontal' practice. When they started working together Kentridge asked Mahlangu, "Can we find something that also goes down? So we've got the movement across, but to find music that winds down into our souls?" Their collaboration would often lead to robust conversations that revealed quite different experiences of growing up in the same city of Johannesburg, a city marked by stark racial and economic divides that persist long after the official end of apartheid. "('The Moment Has Gone') challenges the status quo and it challenges our lives. We are confronted with something very specific: that we grow up in the same city, experiencing different things within the same city. It is a work that puts us in a robust conversation," Mahlangu said. "And the robust conversation is the illegal miners, in whose land are they illegal?" On May 30, 'Shostakovich 10: Oh To Believe in Another World,' Kentridge's visual response to Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10, will be performed with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, led by conductor Roderick Cox. Projected behind the orchestra will be a film composed of cardboard models, cut-out masks and stop-motion imagery — a Constructivist visual universe that evokes Stalinist Russia. 'The symphony was first performed just months after Stalin's death,' Kentridge noted. 'Now we hear it as pure music, but it's important to understand the context in which it was made.' Characters such as revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky appear as cardboard silhouettes in a rusted, stiff puppet world. 'It becomes a kind of stuck history,' Kentridge said, 'with awkward, hard moves.' "While the music flows continuously, the visuals hold tension,' he added. Despite the political overtones, Kentridge resists the notion that his works preach. 'In many ways, the arts, whether it's with music and theater or image, it is a place where these different questions come together not with an answer but to be discovered in the activity of making,' he said. An official at the GS Caltex Arts Center explained that the two works were chosen to showcase contrasting aspects of Kentridge's artistry. ''Sibyl' best encapsulates William Kentridge's signature style,' the official told The Korea Herald. 'In contrast, the other piece presents a different facet of his work — it engages not with African music but with classical music, and the medium shifts from charcoal to paper. These contrasts were compelling, which is why we decided to include both works.' gypark@
Daily Maverick
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Kentridge — An artist's evocation of meaninglessness
Inspired mostly by the Dadaists, William Kentridge's latest exhibition plays with the absurd. William Kentridge's solo exhibition, To Cross One More Sea, was a multimedia showcase displayed at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, with drawings, puppets, prints, sculpture and a three-channel film. The 19-minute projection explored a part-historical, part-fictional ocean journey of artists, particularly surrealists, who fled Vichy France in the early 1940s. The artworks reflect the artist's unique sensibilities and his decades of experience, which show his evolving expertise with certain materials. As always, he wittily intertwines the everyday with the political to give power to his themes – forced immigration, colonialism, despotic power – often combining images of historical figures with modern environments. Kentridge has often claimed to have wanted to be an actor, but that he was not accepted in the field. As an artist, his charcoal film productions involve him as an actor of sorts and as a director of theatre actors, so I suppose he got his wish in the end. Bronze sculptures and puppets Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (Still Life: Her Sleep Was Everything) enters into dialogue with Kentridge's film series that debuted during the Venice Biennale in spring 2024 and is now streaming on the platform Mubi. It is an invitation to the artist's studio, offering a glimpse into his key processes and methods. Aphorism and Aviary, displayed for the first time in this exhibition, are sculptural works that continue Kentridge's exploration of symbolism and language through a series of bronze glyphs, which will be a key element of his Yorkshire Sculpture Park solo show in June. New in the series and following Cursive (2020), Lexicon (2017) and Paragraph II (2018), these small bronzes began as a collection of ink drawings and paper cut-out silhouettes, and then, as Kentridge put it, he took 'something as immaterial as a shadow and gave it heft'. This continuing exploration includes a repertoire of everyday objects or implied words and icons, many of which have appeared in previous projects. The sequence of glyphs can be arranged to construct sculptural sentences that give a glimpse of 'the possibility of meaning in their order', which can then be denied and reconstructed when they are rearranged. Some sculptures are enormous – to be displayed outside – while others are mid-sized, and still others are tiny. All possess a gestural simplicity that reminds me of Pablo Picasso's Cubism. Several new puppets, made with costume designer Greta Goiris and crafted from old tools and found materials, draw a connection between the exhibition and Kentridge's expansive five-channel projection, Oh To Believe in Another World. The film, made in response to Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No 10, interweaves a series of images and narratives set in a cardboard model of an imagined Soviet museum. The story covers the events from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the death of Stalin in 1953. Mixing human, object and animal In To Cross One More Sea, Kentridge continues his use of the puppet as a performative object to relay complex stories. The character of each puppet emerges from working with the form of the tools and found materials to create an anthropomorphic figure. They reminded me of the strange Cubist costume once worn by the founder of the Dada movement, Hugo Ball, when he performed his abstract poetry. Though there are unique elements, the puppets maintain hints of Kentridge's typical technique. The print section of the exhibition is also reminiscent of the works of the Dadaists. The images are collaged on top of scripts with figures mixed with objects and animals, all of which play with scale. Some are images of land and old urban cityscapes. The collages appear jumbled and seem never to arrive at a clear message, hinting at the surrealists' evocation of meaninglessness. DM Bongo Mei is an artist and curator.
Los Angeles Times
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Review: William Kentridge's ‘The Great Yes' at the Wallis: A dazzling meditation on a world out of kilter
'The Great Yes, the Great No' is a great title. And William Kentridge's latest chamber opera, which is having its U.S. premiere at the Wallis in Beverly Hills, lives up to that title as one of the celebrated South African artist's most astonishing works. Concept, direction, set and costume design, projections, video, text, music, choreography and performances by a vast company of singers, dancers, actors and equally vast creative team — all simply great. Great, to be sure, but this 'Great Yes' happens to be a project of Kentridge's Centre for the Less Good Idea, a Johannesburg workshop he's dubbed an 'interdisciplinary incubator.' For Kentridge, attachment to a great idea can lead to entrapment, closing your mind to other, unthought-of fertile ideas. He cites a South African proverb: 'If the good doctor can't cure you, find the less good doctor.' That doctor may have more imagination. Ideas, however you want to weigh them, always proliferate in Kentridge's varied and layered work, which can be a single charcoal sketch, an elaborate video, a complex installation or an eye-popping opera production. The extravagant Kentridge show 'In Praise of Shadows,' at the Broad museum two years ago, brought together history and the present, oppression and fantasy, colonialism and the power of the individual, humor and sadness, ecstasy and pain. The Broad palpitated with energy. A previous chamber opera, 'The Refusal of Time,' seen at UCLA's Royce Hall seven years ago, was a supercharged planetary exploration of 19th century South African colonialism. In 'The Great Yes,' Kentridge turns to a creaky old cargo ship smelling of rotted oranges that sailed from Marseille to Martinique in 1941 overcrowded with some 300 passengers escaping Vichy France. Among them were a bevy of noted artists, writers, intellectuals and revolutionaries. We know about the voyage of SS Capitaine Paul-Lemerle primarily from the opening chapters of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss classic 'Tristes Tropiques.' He describes the conditions as being horrific but the company as being exhilarating. On the voyage he became friends with one of the founders of surrealism, novelist and theorist André Breton. Others on board included modernist Russian poet and a Trotskyite anarchist Victor Serge, Martinican poet and a founder of the anticolonialism Négritude movement Aimé Césaire, Cuban painter Wifredo Lam; influential Marxist psychiatrist and Pan-Africanist Frantz Fanon, along with fascinating others. Kentridge, though, doesn't stop there. He merrily throws onto the passenger manifest the likes of Josephine Bonaparte, Josephine Baker, Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin. What the voyage now represents is the unmaking of ideas from some of the great thinkers and creators of the age. Their yeses and great noes no longer mean anything. They are leaving, we are told, a place where they will not be missed and going to a place where they will not be welcomed. Theirs is the plight of the eternal exile. Kentridge likens the captain to the ferryman, Charon, in Greek mythology transporting the dead across the river Styx to the underworld. These remarkable characters parade, dance, argue and make love. Newly unmoored, they are, while in limbo, living. Freedom fighters, they are free to be themselves. That great yes comes at the price of a great no. Having lost everything, they suffer filth, hunger and disease during a months-long voyage to uncertainty. Still, for 90 nonstop minutes, Kentridge's characters dazzle. They sport large painted masks of themselves and costumes that mirror their artwork. The video backdrop continually changes, one minute a drawing, another an abstract animation, another black-and-white documentary film. Documentary and fabrication conjoin. Kentridge's libretto is an assemblage of the characters' words and a range of other historical sources. The 'Embarkation,' for instance, begins with a jubilant seven-member South African women's chorus singing in Zulu lines from Aeschylus, Brecht and many others. Why, the chorus asks, quoting Anna Akhmatova, is this age worse than others? 'The world is leaking!' the Captain — a spoken role enacted with brilliant aplomb by Tony Miyambo — explains. He will become our congenial, riotous, seductive, wise guide throughout. What follows is a succession of scenes, each a different kind of theater, a different kind of music, different movement, different visuals, with mostly different characters. Yet all are, so to speak, in the same boat. One thing flows into another. On screen, Nazi tanks are seen on the Champs-Élysées; soon after we're in the world of dancing espresso pots. Text is visually presented on the screen in a host of ways — via roulette-wheel graphics, as post-it notes, as banners. An arrestingly versatile quartet of musicians led by percussionist Tlale Makhene (joined by Nathan Koci on accordion and banjo, Marika Hughes on cello and Thandi Ntuli on piano) seems to hold the whole world of music in their hands. One minute, it's Schubert; another it's Satie-esque, and many more South African splendor. Enough cannot be said about the singing, the dancing, the music-making. How can such a miserable voyage hold so much life? Glamorous as the exiles are, Kentridge does not glamorize them. Revolutionary art, revolutionary poetry won't patch the leak in the world. 'I shout my laughter to the stars,' Fanon says in despair. 'Get used to me.' Exile is emptiness. The passengers survive a terrible storm before landing where they will be mistreated. 'Love no country, countries soon disappear,' a member of the chorus sings in Zulu (a translation of a line by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz) with thunder in her voice. 'The world is out of kilter,' she later tells us. 'We will reset it.' 'The Great Yes,' which had its premiere last summer in Arles, France, was commissioned by the Luma Foundation, the exhibition center designed by Frank Gehry. Kentridge brings it to America thirsting for even less good yeses and noes. (The Wallis is a co-commissioner as is Cal Performances in Berkeley, where the opera will be presented next, in March. If I read Kentridge correctly, he warns us of the fiction that we protect ourselves by deporting immigrants. Not only do countries soon disappear, but in a rapidly evolving post-truth-or-consequences era, it may be reality that soon disappears, leaving us all unmoored. In the end, 'The Great Yes, the Great No' reveals the collective might of exile. The proof theatrically is that the production is a rapt and riotous collective with a long list credits all seemingly on the same wildly unpredictable page. Nhlanhla Mahlangu is both choral conductor and associate director. Greta Goiris' costumes and Sabine Theunissen's set design bring Kentridge's visions to life. Sound, lighting and projection are individually exquisite. Kentridge's collective spirit, moreover, translates beyond the Wallis. The previous weekend, Kentridge returned to UCLA to present boisterous Centre for the Less Good Idea works in progress at the Nimoy. That was followed by performance artists at the Broad museum offering their own less-good-idea-inspired efforts. The American Cinematheque has just announced that it will screen Kentridge's complete 'Drawings for Projection' Feb. 21 at the Aero Theatre.
