THE GREAT YES, THE GREAT NO
Internationally renowned for his drawings, films, plays and operas, South African artist William Kentridge presents his latest work for the stage, a play/oratorio/chamber opera set during a fateful 1941 sea voyage from Marseille to Martinique.
The Great Yes, The Great No is inspired by a historic escape from Vichy France by, among others, surrealist André Breton, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam, Communist novelist Victor Serge and writer Anna Seghers, and fictionalizes the voyage by adding Aimé Césaire, the Nardal sisters (co-founders with Césaire of the anti-colonial Négritude movement in Paris), West Indian Marxist philosopher Franz Fanon, Joséphine Bonaparte, Joséphine Baker, Trotski, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Stalin to the passenger list.
The ship is steered by Charon, the ferryman of the dead, and the beating surrealist heart of the work is amplified by the confusion of the voyage with other forced sea crossings, historical and contemporary, and by the dissolution of rational, verbal and visual languages.
