William Kentridge's work Notes Towards a Model Opera was the centrepiece of his first solo exhibition in China. From the origins of ballet in Paris, Kentridge overlays the aesthetic and ideological transformations of ballet as it is transplanted across the globe, an arch of influence juxtaposing contexts as disparate as Moscow, Shanghai and the artist's native Johannesburg.Inspiration behind the film?The project began with a distracted reading and looking. I read the books of Lu Xun, a modernist whose sensibility placed him with Japanese writer Akutagawa and European writers in the tradition of the absurd modern like [Nikolai] Gogol and [Franz] Kafka. The language pulled me in, the exhortations, the instructions, the clamour of incredible and unstoppable enthusiasm.Similarities between South Africa and China as expressed in this work?China in Africa today is a series of questions rather than any answers. Are we here the tethered goat waiting for the tiger? Easy pickings? Here in South Africa the periphery is even more obvious. The city centre surrounded by townships, informal settlements. The truth of the centre is comprehensible only in relation to that outside of it. More than that, the meaning of the centre is made by the periphery. Our gold mining history has always been subsidised by the rural areas.Your collaboration with Dada Masilo in this exhibition?The work on the project itself began with a morning's improvisation with Dada Masilo, a South African dancer. In the first hour on the dance floor, there were strangenesses, unexpected connections and collisions in the dance and the dance in relation to the music from the model operas, of music from the 1950s, African colonial dance bands.How does this exhibition fit in your artistic process?What should an artist paint? Revolutionary narrative in a familiar form? The Peking Opera? The ballet en pointe ? Or a new way of making art in which the ostensible subject matter was never the real subject of the art? It's cultural revolution but also inevitably the question of hope behind the failure. Opens at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, on January 21..