Phillip Miller - Black Box Chambre Noir

Composer Philip Miller approached Mozart's music 'completely unfearful - the only way to do it - but probably because I didn't know the opera that well! William suggested certain pieces, but I used other fragments via electronic processing and as quotes in my own compositions.' Miller also employed field recordings of traditional music from Namibia, where he worked with musicologist Professor Minette Mans. The aural landscape, like the visual one, is layered and broken. 'I don't think there are hard rules of combination for bringing these different musics together,' he says. 'Sometimes they dovetail, sometimes they collide, sometimes they go past one another. You must just let the alchemy happen.' Black Box/Chambre Noir turns Mozart's narrative of benevolent enlightenment on it's head. Into his original scale model of a theatre, Kentridge introduces a range of found papers: as background images, structures, or simply pages to draw over. There are southern African mine ledgers from the early 1900s; maps of early Johannesburg and Windhoek; travelers' notes, Mrs Beeton's advice on planning a dinner for a hunting party; and General von Trotha's 1904 order to eliminate the Herero people. These papers - the flotsam of imperialist culture in Africa - provide the backdrop for sketched scenes: the Namibian countryside; electricity lines, heliographs and mining gear; human skulls, maps and measurements. The sketches transform the stage. It now reflects Europe's 'civilization' of Africa - particularly Germany's 1904-7 genocide of some 85% of the Herero people of Namibia. It becomes not The Magic Flute's enlightened celebration of reason, but it's opposite: a trauerarbeit - literally, a work of grief. That term, with it's inescapable echoes of the slogan at concentration camp gates, arbeit macht frei, was also one of the frames of reference for Miller. For the work's Dance Macabre, he overlays a Herero women's song from (male) traditional singer Vevangua Muuonjo, with an original composition featuring 'some manic German oompah sounds: music you might have heard at a Weimar cabaret,' Miller explains. With it's jagged discontinuities, the dance evokes the scoring of Hans Eisler or Kurt Weill. Kentridge is well aware that the debris used to construct his stage model comes almost exclusively from the conquerors, not the conquered. He acknowledges this is an issue: the Herero people have little left of their remains to add to his 'black box' of memory, only the skulls of the dead. 'There are no records of the Herero dead, no names, no details; but there are written pages listing every German soldier who died,' he says. The Magic Flute becomes an animated megaphone, honking of death and destruction, with Papageno's magic notes electronically slowed and deepened to a death-rattle. A wren appears as the shadow-play of children's hands against the Namibian landscape. It transmutes into the imperial German eagle, it's wings casting a giant shadow over a skull that becomes the world. Mine gear becomes shadow soldiers beating a man into the ground, a massacre. There are macabre links - acknowledged by Kentridge in his catalogue notes - to Plato's cave, where reality is cast as shadows on the wall. For him, Black Box removes 'the veil behind which selective, subjective memories are crafted into grand narratives of history.' The instruments of mathematics, measurement, mapping, and calibration - Enlightenment symbols of scientific progress and the Great Architect - are on this stage the instruments of war, conquest and ultimately racist oppression. The skulls of massacred Hereros were sent to Berlin to be measured, in a racist distortion of science. They provided data for the taxonomies of race types later employed by the Nazis. In the Magic Flute the transformations are joyful and fantastical. On the Black Box stage, people and animals are reduced to simple mechanical parts, the automata so beloved of 18th Century inventors, continuing to perform the actions of the living beings they replace: a visceral alienation from humanity. A rhinoceros symbolises the living landscape of Namibia: a solid, lumbering beast, savouring it's brief moment as a floating, freely dancing spirit. Like the Herero, the rhino is reduced to near extinction. Film footage of the period shows it cut down by the bullets of jolly Teutonic huntsmen who shake hands over it's twitching corpse before it, too, transforms, briefly, into an automaton. As they shoot and celebrate, Mozart's wise ruler Sarastro sings 'We will not take vengeance.' Kentridge the artist leaves none of these interpretations to chance. He constructs his multiple meanings and implications deliberately, and with immense skill; we cannot dodge the conclusions. He talks of the work shifting from 'the Enlightenment; the autocrat as optimistic leader bringing light to the people, to the picture today: post-Holocaust, post- imperialism, a darker world.' His exhibition tells inescapable truths - not only about 250 years of Mozart and Eurocentric civilisation striking into Africa or the massacre of the Herero by German imperialism, but also about apartheid, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. As a visual and emotional construct, Kentridge's art sits within the frame of our own visual culture, beside the stark charcoal graphics of Dumile Feni, Thami Mnyele, Azaria Mbatha and John Mufuangejo. These are surely not unconscious echoes. Kentridge's work - despite and because of it's acknowledged reference to Europe's cultural impact on our past - joins these ranks: he, too, breaks the silence about our innumerable outrages. We walk out of the performance with the shocked recognition of a changed perspective. This is, very intimately, art that speaks to us. When the shock subsides, other questions remain. Black Box/Chambre Noire compels us to ask whether we have free will in the cultural construct that is our world. Is there space for resistance and creativity? Sometimes The Black Box seems to rub out elements of the human - the few sketched people work, fade, transmute, die; we are left as numbers on a scale, insubstantial shadows in the cave, magic flutes that play only a dirge. We inhabit the world's stage; the real challenge is how we perform upon it.