Medicinal Uses of Phyllantus Amarus (EYIN OLOBE in Yoruba)

Stop Making Sense: At Performa, William Kentridge Recited a Dadaist Sound Poem

It’s never easy to hold anyone’s attention for a particularly long time these days, so it was amazing that, earlier this month, for his Performa 17 commission, South African artist William Kentridge was able to engage a rapt crowd for a full hour at the Harlem Parish in New York. And it was all the more impressive for one strange reason: not a single intelligible word was uttered for the entire performance, titled Ursonate, in homage to Kurt Schwitters’s 1932 sound poem of the same name.

After the performance, I caught up with Kentridge, who explained how he first got interested in this odd form of verse. The performance had its roots in the year 1970, when, as a high school student in Johannesburg, Kentridge came upon Hans Richter’s book Dada: Art and Anti-Art. “I was completely struck by the wonderful mixture of sense, absurdity, and sound,” Kentridge said of Richter’s Dadaist sound poems. They reminded him of the language of Lewis Carroll’s “The Tale of the Mouse” from Alice in Wonderland, and of “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking-Glass, the opening lines of which Kentridge can still recite from memory:

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