The Great Yes, The Great No

Marseille, 1941: a liner sails for Martinique. Fleeing Vichy France, on board are surrealist André Breton, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, Communist novelist Victor Serge and exiled German author Anna Seghers. The Great Yes, The Great No adds its layer of fiction to history, augmenting this very real passenger list with several other famous figures: Martiniquan writers Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Jeanne and Paulette Nardal, in whose salon in Paris the theorized concept of ‘négritude’ was born, in dialogue between Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor (a Senegalese writer) and Léon-Gontran Damas (a Guyanais poet). Also on board are philosopher Frantz Fanon, Joséphine Bonaparte (another Martiniquais), Joséphine Baker, Trotsky and even Stalin. All are united by the symbolic power of the crossing, experienced in turn as uprooting, exile or reinvention - from Africa to the Caribbean, from the Caribbean to Europe, from war-torn Europe to a new elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that Kentridge conceived of the Captain as an incarnation of Charon - the ferryman of the Underworld on the River Styx: this wartime transatlantic voyage takes characters and spectators into another world, governed by a deconstruction of signs and words. In addition to the writings and words of these famous thinkers and artists, which find their way into the text of the play in fragments, the Captain constructs his lines from snippets taken from Bertolt Brecht, Anna Akhmatova, Wislawa Szymborska, Marina Tsvetaeva and others. Created with associate director Phala Ookeditse Phala, choral conductor and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and dramaturg Mwenya Kabwe, The Great Yes, The Great No is part play, part oratorio, part chamber opera. William Kentridge’s breathtaking visual inventiveness, particularly linked to the spirit of surrealism, is in dialogue with Nhlanhla Mahlangu’s musical composition, in a dramaturgy combining a ‘Greek choir’, actors and dancers, projections, masks and shadow play. The fertile ground of the Black Paris of the 1940's, the poetics of Martinique, Surrealism and the Négritude movement form the background to the libretto. The Great Yes, The Great No is led by these anti-rational ways of approaching language and image. Finding strange beauty in the unexpected, the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional, surrealism has been described as Negritude's creative weapon, and The Great Yes, The Great No captures the poetic and the revolutionary as it gestures towards a more free future possibility.