William Kentridge: More Sweetly play the Dance

William Kentridge’s More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015, opens with a presentiment of the procession, not its presence: the Dance of Death. Across eight screens, the non-landscape around Johannesburg - grass, tracks, culverts, pipes, and power lines - at first appears flat and uneventful amid a threnody of wailing and drumming. Johannesburg suffers from a lack of geography, but it has all the forebodings of allegory, the mise-en-scène of myth.