Using the original music of François Sarhan (with the composer himself in pantomime) and texts of Daniil Harms, the South-African artist William Kentridge proposes a 45 minute medium-format, between musical theatre, animated video images and installation. Evocation of the stalinian 20s in Russia: futurism and constructivism mix in with the minutes of the trial of Fiodor Bukharin. Disappearance, threat, and oppression are masked by the grotesque, the speed, the vitality: terror installs itself, but in a wave of frenzy and unbridled artistic imagination. On a canvas painted in the manner of an old magazine boasting the advances of science, Kentridge projects a turbulent theatre of human shadows that run towards the victory of the new man. Sarhan's music, modern sky at will, precipitates the race. But the representation gets out of control: at any moment, censure interrupts.

About the music

In phase with Kentridge's images, the music of "Telegrams" scrolls through a series of hurried, scratched out, dislocated "Shostakovian vignettes". It is a work of memory and allusion, without any direct quotations. As always with Sarhan, it is the text (the spoken voice) that carries him away: here the composer pursues his quest for a modern melodrama. An a-lyrical narration, like a voice sample imported direct from everyday life (or an archive or old film), is used as the guiding thread, attaching a rich harvest of instrumental events to itself like glue.