“The Great Yes, the Great No” is a great title. And William Kentridge’s latest chamber opera, which is having its U.S. premiere at the Wallis in Beverly Hills, lives up to that title as one of the celebrated South African artist’s most astonishing works. Concept, direction, set and costume design, projections, video, text, music, choreography and performances by a vast company of singers, dancers, actors and equally vast creative team — all simply great.
Great, to be sure, but this “Great Yes” happens to be a project of Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea, a Johannesburg workshop he’s dubbed an “interdisciplinary incubator.” For Kentridge, attachment to a great idea can lead to entrapment, closing your mind to other, unthought-of fertile ideas. He cites a South African proverb: “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.” That doctor may have more imagination.
Ideas, however you want to weigh them, always proliferate in Kentridge’s varied and layered work, which can be a single charcoal sketch, an elaborate video, a complex installation or an eye-popping opera production. The extravagant Kentridge show “In Praise of Shadows,” at the Broad museum two years ago, brought together history and the present, oppression and fantasy, colonialism and the power of the individual, humor and sadness, ecstasy and pain. The Broad palpitated with energy. A previous chamber opera, “The Refusal of Time,” seen at UCLA’s Royce Hall seven years ago, was a supercharged planetary exploration of 19th century South African colonialism.
In “The Great Yes,” Kentridge turns to a creaky old cargo ship smelling of rotted oranges that sailed from Marseille to Martinique in 1941 overcrowded with some 300 passengers escaping Vichy France. Among them were a bevy of noted artists, writers, intellectuals and revolutionaries. We know about the voyage of SS Capitaine Paul-Lemerle primarily from the opening chapters of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss classic “Tristes Tropiques.” He describes the conditions as being horrific but the company as being exhilarating. On the voyage he became friends with one of the founders of surrealism, novelist and theorist André Breton.
Others on board included modernist Russian poet and a Trotskyite anarchist Victor Serge, Martinican poet and a founder of the anticolonialism Négritude movement Aimé Césaire, Cuban painter Wifredo Lam; influential Marxist psychiatrist and Pan-Africanist Frantz Fanon, along with fascinating others. Kentridge, though, doesn’t stop there. He merrily throws onto the passenger manifest the likes of Josephine Bonaparte, Josephine Baker, Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin.
What the voyage now represents is the unmaking of ideas from some of the great thinkers and creators of the age. Their yeses and great noes no longer mean anything. They are leaving, we are told, a place where they will not be missed and going to a place where they will not be welcomed. Theirs is the plight of the eternal exile. Kentridge likens the captain to the ferryman, Charon, in Greek mythology transporting the dead across the river Styx to the underworld.
These remarkable characters parade, dance, argue and make love. Newly unmoored, they are, while in limbo, living. Freedom fighters, they are free to be themselves. That great yes comes at the price of a great no. Having lost everything, they suffer filth, hunger and disease during a months-long voyage to uncertainty.
Still, for 90 nonstop minutes, Kentridge’s characters dazzle. They sport large painted masks of themselves and costumes that mirror their artwork. The video backdrop continually changes, one minute a drawing, another an abstract animation, another black-and-white documentary film. Documentary and fabrication conjoin. Kentridge’s libretto is an assemblage of the characters’ words and a range of other historical sources.
The “Embarkation,” for instance, begins with a jubilant seven-member South African women’s chorus singing in Zulu lines from Aeschylus, Brecht and many others. Why, the chorus asks, quoting Anna Akhmatova, is this age worse than others?
“The world is leaking!” the Captain — a spoken role enacted with brilliant aplomb by Tony Miyambo — explains. He will become our congenial, riotous, seductive, wise guide throughout.
Tony Miyambo as the Captain in Kentridge’s “The Great Yes, The Great No” at The Wallis
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
What follows is a succession of scenes, each a different kind of theater, a different kind of music, different movement, different visuals, with mostly different characters. Yet all are, so to speak, in the same boat. One thing flows into another. On screen, Nazi tanks are seen on the Champs-Élysées; soon after we’re in the world of dancing espresso pots. Text is visually presented on the screen in a host of ways — via roulette-wheel graphics, as post-it notes, as banners.
An arrestingly versatile quartet of musicians led by percussionist Tlale Makhene (joined by Nathan Koci on accordion and banjo, Marika Hughes on cello and Thandi Ntuli on piano) seems to hold the whole world of music in their hands. One minute, it’s Schubert; another it’s Satie-esque, and many more South African splendor.
Enough cannot be said about the singing, the dancing, the music-making. How can such a miserable voyage hold so much life? Glamorous as the exiles are, Kentridge does not glamorize them. Revolutionary art, revolutionary poetry won’t patch the leak in the world. “I shout my laughter to the stars,” Fanon says in despair. “Get used to me.” Exile is emptiness.
The passengers survive a terrible storm before landing where they will be mistreated. “Love no country, countries soon disappear,” a member of the chorus sings in Zulu (a translation of a line by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz) with thunder in her voice. “The world is out of kilter,” she later tells us. “We will reset it.”
“The Great Yes,” which had its premiere last summer in Arles, France, was commissioned by the Luma Foundation, the exhibition center designed by Frank Gehry. Kentridge brings it to America thirsting for even less good yeses and noes. (The Wallis is a co-commissioner as is Cal Performances in Berkeley, where the opera will be presented next, in March. If I read Kentridge correctly, he warns us of the fiction that we protect ourselves by deporting immigrants. Not only do countries soon disappear, but in a rapidly evolving post-truth-or-consequences era, it may be reality that soon disappears, leaving us all unmoored.
In the end, “The Great Yes, the Great No” reveals the collective might of exile. The proof theatrically is that the production is a rapt and riotous collective with a long list credits all seemingly on the same wildly unpredictable page. Nhlanhla Mahlangu is both choral conductor and associate director. Greta Goiris’ costumes and Sabine Theunissen’s set design bring Kentridge’s visions to life. Sound, lighting and projection are individually exquisite.
Kentridge’s collective spirit, moreover, translates beyond the Wallis. The previous weekend, Kentridge returned to UCLA to present boisterous Centre for the Less Good Idea works in progress at the Nimoy. That was followed by performance artists at the Broad museum offering their own less-good-idea-inspired efforts. The American Cinematheque has just announced that it will screen Kentridge’s complete “Drawings for Projection” Feb. 21 at the Aero Theatre.
