Notes

William Kentridge has produced a number of flipbooks during his career. They offer a mode of viewing not that dissimilar from the rudimentary animation technique of drawing and redrawing motion in his celebrated cycle of artist films. Breathe shows a woman in a long dress dancing and slowly pirouetting over the pages of a Russian encyclopaedia published in 1953. Kentridge drew the figures with India ink on blank pages. His drawings were scanned and imaged to positives, exposed onto aluminium plates, and finally hand printed into 50 numbered books at The Artists’ Press, White River. Mark Attwood supervised the process, which involved deconstructing the original books for printing purposes; his team diligently sewed and bound the printed work into book form. Breathe contains a DVD with a 34-second animation of the dance. A 2008 commission to create a film for the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, informed the content of this flipbook. Titled (REPEAT) from the beginning / Da Capo (2008), Kentridge’s film depicts fragmented figures achieving cohesion and then dissolving again; it was projected onto the safety curtain of the Venice stage.