I think I am interested in awkward operas. Operas in which there are unsolved riddles. Operas in which there is a space, both musically and thematically for a world to evolve and be imagined around the story. There has to be a challenge somewhere in it. It has to be a machine for thinking.

For every project that I do, there needs to be a meeting of the material and the project. So there has to be a theme in the project that can be thought about in a particular material. With Lulu it was the black ink, which is both a kind of blood of all the victims but also something of the harshness of woodcuts and the possibility of tearing the sheets of paper and fragmenting the desire, which is the heart of Lulu. With Wozzeck there was something much more about the graininess, the grey sky of a charcoal drawing. Lulu is an entirely interior opera and Wozzeck, by and large, is an exterior opera. And for the landscape – and particularly the skies – there is something about the graininess of the charcoal drawing that seemed essential. Within the production, there is the large cyclorama, the backdrop, in which the projections which we show are the imaginings of Wozzeck – of explosions, of fires, which are there in the Buchner play from 1837 but which are in a sense a premonition of what came to be in 1914, the period in which Berg was writing the opera. These massive explosions, going up to the heavens, are a premonition of the First World War.

To do a project like Wozzeck, an essential part of it are two workshops in my studio in Johannesburg, in which I asked some dancers and some actors to come and work with us, with a team of set and lighting designers, in which we work with recordings but try to see how we could stage a scene. What would be the language of the movement of the performers. One has to think, what is the violence in Wozzeck that takes him into the state in which he would kill that which he loves most: Marie? Obviously, it is a long tradition of men’s violence against women. It’s a long tradition of people who are depressed, finding their only relief in violence, to make themselves feel alive – either to suffer violence or to inflict violence. So long before he kills Marie, there is part of him that knows the way it is going to end.