South African artist William Kentridge’s latest work, “The Great Yes, The Great No,” is a chamber opera inspired by a 1941 sea voyage from Marseille to Martinique. This creation is a collaboration with choral conductor and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and theater maker Phala Ookeditse Phala, and it is co-commissioned by Cal Performances.
The boat and its journey are rooted in the historic WWII escape from Vichy, France, across the Atlantic, involving, among others, the surrealist André Breton, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, along with a fictionalized cast of historical passengers including Josephine Baker, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin, and even brief cameos by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Kentridge brings together this menagerie of thinkers, creators, and revolutionaries to connect “surrealism and the anticolonial Négritude movement, a cultural and political movement founded by a group of African and Caribbean students in Paris in the 1930s.” These students aimed to reclaim the value of Blackness and African culture, which serves as the underlying current of this production, making this work relevant to today’s world. Another significant theme is colonialism.
As the audience settles into their seats, they are greeted by a cluttered stage of the ship’s deck, featuring building-sized graphic renderings illuminating the stage, including an ensemble of musicians downstage of the set. When the graphics begin to spin, mimicking nautical charts rotating at various speeds, the master of ceremonies, the ship’s captain (Hamilton Dhlamini), also rotates, but from a turntable with a megaphone pressed to his ear. This visual of different planes spinning, like simultaneous realities, all moving to their unique rhythm, is a theme that will persist throughout this ninety-minute, visually overwhelming, and materially dense production.
The captain is a sinister figure who embodies Charon, the ferryman of the dead. “Where you’re coming from, you won’t be missed. And where you are going, no one will like you.” His pessimism is reinforced by the laments of the chorus, who hold masks—black-and-white portraits of the characters they represent. They carry these oversized masks before their faces, lowering them to sing solos. “We shall call for the sun, and it will not rise.” From their first note, the chorus of seven women establishes that despite all the visual phenomena, horizontal staging, and spinning plates in this production, their African vocals will elevate the show and maintain interest. “Here the poets feel their heads capsize,” flashes across the stage. The chorus also embodies the migrants who survive sea crossings and urges us to remember those who do not. “A sense of shame has vanished from man.”
A poem by surrealist Aimé Césaire is interspersed between the chorus and serves as a central element of the libretto. Nancy Nkusi, portraying Suzanne Césaire from her cabin surrounded by her personal belongings, delivers this seminal French poem in French as the cabin glides across the deck. Rich in visual and philosophical surrealism, the poem is provocative, engaging, and worth listening to. However, the rapid translations projected at the top of the stage detract from fully enjoying the rest of her performance. Understanding this delivery will likely be challenging, even for French-speaking people.
“The Great Yes, The Great No” narrative is never centralized but instead dissected into numerous condensed components, which fascinates Kentridge, who aims to explore “anti-rational ways of approaching language.” However, despite its many gems, this rich production begins to turn in on itself. As its four central themes unfold simultaneously, they transform into four distinct tracks—the chorus, visuals, staging, and music all playing at once, all vying for the central theme or primary narrative. Over time, they become neutralized and start to look and sound similar. “The world is leaking.” “The Great Yes, The Great No” is spilling over.
Yes, despite the archival footage of the Nazis occupying France, Kentridge’s signature renderings, which sometimes resemble Wayne Thibaud’s drawings of saucers and plates, the stunning operatic vocals of Xolisile Bongwana as Aimé Césaire, and a jaw-dropping film clip of Nancy Nkusi crawling across a black-tie table setting while colonialists prepare to consume her with silver cutlery—it fails to evoke a predominant emotion of urgency or create an arc in this lengthy and heady dissertation or offer what holds these threads together. Within a ninety-minute production, how is it possible to lack the time to digest one substantive topic before the chorus serves dessert? “Sing sorrow, but good will work out in the end.”
David e. Moreno
