The Spasms of History: Inside William Kentridge’s The Great Yes, The Great No
“the spasms of history”: abrupt moments of transformation—perhaps even of illumination—triggered by the unresolved traumatic memories of those who have been colonized
By Thomas May, Cal Performances-commissioned writer, critic, educator, and translator
A new production by William Kentridge is always a major event. Few other artists at work today span so many media while at the same time reimagining them: drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, animated film, and musical-theater performance are all encompassed within his practice. But what makes Kentridge especially resonant for a global audience is how his innovations push beyond merely aesthetic considerations to pose big, open-ended questions about history and identity.
Following his inspiring Cal Performances residency in 2022–23, which culminated in the first US production of Kentridge’s chamber opera Sibyl, the internationally acclaimed South African artist returns in early spring to present the Bay Area premiere of his latest live performance work, The Great Yes, The Great No (March 14–16, Zellerbach Hall). The highly anticipated production, which was co-commissioned by Cal Performances, is the linchpin of this season’s Illuminations programming on the theme of “Fractured History.”
With its splicing together of recorded events and associative fiction to generate provocative new narratives, The Great Yes, The Great No seems almost tailor-made for this season’s Illuminations programming. The passage from Marseille to Martinique undertaken by a group of refugees from the Nazis serves as the initial premise of the storyline. In Kentridge’s treatment, however, this factual source readily opens up to accommodate multiple layers of connection and inquiry.
“The historical specificity is a launching pad for broader questions,” Kentridge said in a recent interview from his studio in Johannesburg. The Great Yes, The Great No grapples with issues that remain urgently significant, including artistic, philosophical, and political critiques of the enduring legacy of colonialism; experiences of migration and displacement; and what Kentridge terms “the spasms of history”: abrupt moments of transformation—perhaps even of illumination—triggered by the unresolved traumatic memories of those who have been colonized.
Rather than offer an “historical reenactment of an event,” The Great Yes, The Great No “becomes a commentary on the themes that were running through the world at that time, as well as contemporary reflections on the historical event,” says Jeremy Geffen, executive and artistic director of Cal Performances.
Audiences who experienced Sibyl during Kentridge’s previous Berkeley engagement will encounter a markedly different approach here. “Though it will be recognizable as a William Kentridge artwork, the style is very different from that of Sibyl,” says Geffen. Because it takes off from an actual historical event, The Great Yes, The Great No becomes “a much more narrative work, but even the color palette has changed and the Surrealist elements of the piece take you out of the story that it tells in multiple ways; as a result, you can have different perspectives on it.”
Geffen continues, observing that The Great Yes, The Great No “ventures into absurdity in a very Kentridge-ian way. It’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between what is actual history and what is reflection. There is drama, but there is a lot of humor as well. All of it is so engaging.”
From Marseille to Martinique: A Story of Wartime Escape
If you’ve seen the Netflix miniseries Transatlantic (2023), you’ll already be familiar with the historical context of the refugees depicted in The Great Yes, The Great No as sailing aboard the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle—a long-haul cargo ship repurposed to transport passengers from Marseille to Martinique in the eastern Caribbean. These individuals were fleeing the grim prospect of capture by the Nazis, with whom the Vichy government in control of southern France was actively collaborating.
Inspired by a paper on the historical voyage by the South African sociologist Ari Sitas, Kentridge became intrigued by the presence of prominent artists and intellectuals among the several hundred refugees who set sail on March 24, 1941 (two months before such rescue missions on behalf of those in imminent danger were forced to cease operations).
Especially notable passengers on this famous crossing included André Breton, the poet and exponent of Surrealism, with his second wife (Jacqueline Lamba) and their daughter; the Afro-Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, who collaborated on a project with Breton; the social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss; the Russian Communist novelist, poet, and historian Victor Serge; and the German-Jewish antifascist writer Anna Seghers, who had published a novel warning of the Nazi danger the year before Hitler seized power. Of these figures, The Great Yes, The Great No homes in on Breton and the dissident power of Surrealism to challenge the established narrative of rationalism undergirding colonial power.
Because Martinique was a French colony, the strategy was to regard it as a stopover point that was still legal, from which refugees unable to attain coveted visas could eventually obtain access to the US or elsewhere in Latin America. (Nowadays, Martinique is governed as an “overseas department” of the French Republic.)
Imaginary Fellow Travelers
The irony that these passengers were escaping Europe by sailing toward a destination it had colonized is fundamental to Kentridge’s vision. “The journey across became a way of thinking about the relationship of Martinique to France,” he explains. “The question of the connection between the colonies and the center is an ongoing question in my work.” Kentridge’s 2018 hybrid performance piece The Head & the Load, for example, sets out “to recognize and record” the forgotten role of African porters among the colonizers in conflict during the First World War.
To center the issue of colonialism, The Great Yes, The Great No expands the ship’s roster, blending passengers who were actually on board the historical voyage with a list of 20th-century figures pivotal in the development of anti-colonialist thought and activism. As imaginary fellow travelers, Kentridge includes the Martinique-born writers Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, both of whom had made the journey from Marseille back to their homeland two years before Breton & Co.
Aimé Césaire’s “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (“Journal of a Homecoming”) from 1939—nothing less than “one of the great poems of the 20th century,” according to Kentridge—provides the “bedrock” of his concept for The Great Yes, The Great No. Kentridge’s title, which he envisioned from the start (even before he hit upon the historical angle of the ship’s journey from Marseille to Martinique), is taken from the 20th-century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, a writer he has long admired. Cavafy in turn was expanding on a phrase he found in Dante (“che fece … il gran rifiuto”—“he who made the great refusal…”).
The title’s stark opposition implies the ambiguity of meaning that lies between dogmatic certainties, or, in Kentridge’s formulation, “between words at the edge of meaning.”
“Cahier d’un retour” served as a foundational text of the literary and political affirmation of Black identity that Césaire dubbed the Négritude movement while living in Paris in the 1930s. “It becomes a way of looking at questions of the racial-colonial divide with Africa,” Kentridge observes. Other leading members of this circle who enter into the world of The Great Yes, The Great No include the Martiniquais sisters Jeanne and Paulette Nardal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas.
Also accompanying this transatlantic journey is the anti-colonialist political philosopher Frantz Fanon, a former student of fellow Martinican Aimé Césaire. In actual historical terms, Fanon would sail a few years later in the reverse direction, from Martinique to Morocco, and then on to France to fight the Germans during the Second World War. Profoundly disillusioned by his experiences of racism, Fanon rose to prominence in the 1950s and early 1960s through his groundbreaking work on the devastating legacy of colonialism—a body of work that continues to wield enormous influence today.
The simultaneous layering of different timelines is a signature of The Great Yes, The Great No and extends backward to bring on board Joséphine Bonaparte, who was born in Martinique in 1763 and became the first wife of the French Emperor Napoleon—another wrinkle in “the strange connection between France and this tiny island Martinique,” as Kentridge puts it. She is “twinned” with the US-born dancer, singer, and actress Josephine Baker, another transplant to Paris. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera also appear, as do Leon Trotsky—though he had been assassinated in Mexico City a half-year before the voyage—and even Stalin.
Imaginary Fellow Travelers
The irony that these passengers were escaping Europe by sailing toward a destination it had colonized is fundamental to Kentridge’s vision. “The journey across became a way of thinking about the relationship of Martinique to France,” he explains. “The question of the connection between the colonies and the center is an ongoing question in my work.” Kentridge’s 2018 hybrid performance piece The Head & the Load, for example, sets out “to recognize and record” the forgotten role of African porters among the colonizers in conflict during the First World War.
To center the issue of colonialism, The Great Yes, The Great No expands the ship’s roster, blending passengers who were actually on board the historical voyage with a list of 20th-century figures pivotal in the development of anti-colonialist thought and activism. As imaginary fellow travelers, Kentridge includes the Martinique-born writers Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, both of whom had made the journey from Marseille back to their homeland two years before Breton & Co.
Aimé Césaire’s “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (“Journal of a Homecoming”) from 1939—nothing less than “one of the great poems of the 20th century,” according to Kentridge—provides the “bedrock” of his concept for The Great Yes, The Great No. Kentridge’s title, which he envisioned from the start (even before he hit upon the historical angle of the ship’s journey from Marseille to Martinique), is taken from the 20th-century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, a writer he has long admired. Cavafy in turn was expanding on a phrase he found in Dante (“che fece … il gran rifiuto”—“he who made the great refusal…”).
The title’s stark opposition implies the ambiguity of meaning that lies between dogmatic certainties, or, in Kentridge’s formulation, “between words at the edge of meaning.”
“Cahier d’un retour” served as a foundational text of the literary and political affirmation of Black identity that Césaire dubbed the Négritude movement while living in Paris in the 1930s. “It becomes a way of looking at questions of the racial-colonial divide with Africa,” Kentridge observes. Other leading members of this circle who enter into the world of The Great Yes, The Great No include the Martiniquais sisters Jeanne and Paulette Nardal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas.
Also accompanying this transatlantic journey is the anti-colonialist political philosopher Frantz Fanon, a former student of fellow Martinican Aimé Césaire. In actual historical terms, Fanon would sail a few years later in the reverse direction, from Martinique to Morocco, and then on to France to fight the Germans during the Second World War. Profoundly disillusioned by his experiences of racism, Fanon rose to prominence in the 1950s and early 1960s through his groundbreaking work on the devastating legacy of colonialism—a body of work that continues to wield enormous influence today.
The simultaneous layering of different timelines is a signature of The Great Yes, The Great No and extends backward to bring on board Joséphine Bonaparte, who was born in Martinique in 1763 and became the first wife of the French Emperor Napoleon—another wrinkle in “the strange connection between France and this tiny island Martinique,” as Kentridge puts it. She is “twinned” with the US-born dancer, singer, and actress Josephine Baker, another transplant to Paris. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera also appear, as do Leon Trotsky—though he had been assassinated in Mexico City a half-year before the voyage—and even Stalin.
The Fragmentary Nature of Knowledge
Asked how he decided on which figures to introduce among his gathering of imagined passengers, Kentridge points to a variety of associations that sprang to mind from the migrations back and forth, between the Old and New Worlds: a connection between the Harlem Renaissance and the Négritude movement, for example, or a “dancing duet” between distant eras: “It’s both a push away from and a pull towards the center. That’s really the heart of the piece.”
This transhistorical assembly of characters even crosses over into the realm of myth with the casting of Charon in the role of ship captain. The shadowy ferryman from ancient Greek mythology became a gatekeeper controlling which souls to transport across the River Styx in the Underworld.
The mosaic of personalities featured in The Great Yes, The Great No has a counterpart in the collage of extracts that make up the libretto. Kentridge fashioned a found text of fragments from a variety of sources: along with Aimé Césaire’s revolutionary “Cahier,” brief excerpts from the writings of Suzanne Césaire, Fanon, Breton, Léon-Gontran Damas, Aeschylus, Anna Akhmatova, Bertolt Brecht, and others are incorporated.
The result is an “almost-coherent text,” Kentridge says, whose layout reflects “how we construct, of necessity, our understanding of the world.” Collage technique is not only a significant artistic process—and one that acquired special prominence in the modern era—but a reminder that “all knowledge is partial,” a function of the “different weights” we give to the fragments we receive.
“Whether it’s an archive, an oral history, a memory, books of literature: from all of these, one constructs a possible coherence of the past, but it’s always a provisional one”—a fractured history, in other words.
The late novelist Hilary Mantel articulated a similar situation in her introduction to a series of lectures on the craft of historical fiction she gave for the BBC in 2017: “Is there a firm divide between myth and history, fiction and fact: or do we move back and forth on a line between, our position indeterminate and always shifting?”
Such humbling recognition of epistemological limitations challenges the dogmatic certainties that colonial ideology and, for that matter, fascist or other totalitarian worldviews rely on to enhance their power. For Kentridge, Surrealism in this context shares the anti-colonialist perspective of the Négritude movement by imagining anti-rationalist alternatives to the prevailing historical exploitation of language and image.
The Capitaine Paul-Lemerle’s journey from the center to the colony upends the dominant narrative of an enlightened Europe. It foregrounds the “paradoxes and contradictions” of colonialism, Kentridge suggests. The quest for liberation becomes “a plea for non-dogmatic understanding, for taking into account the vulnerabilities of all of our understandings.”
Collective Creativity
Kentridge stresses that The Great Yes, The Great No is an intensely collaborative work built through exchange with his creative colleagues at the Centre for the Less Good Idea—the studio he founded as an “incubator space” for cross-disciplinary artistic experimen¬tation in Johannesburg (where Kentridge was born, in 1955, to a prominent anti-Apartheid activist couple). The studio’s peculiar name derives from a Tswana proverb: “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.”
In contrast to the familiar model of a composer setting a ready-made libretto to music to create an opera, which is then brought to the stage through subsequent contributions by performers, directors, and designers, Kentridge says “the whole process of construction of the piece happens together.” He has a team of collaborators such as the theater maker Phala O. Phala, dramaturg Mwenya Kabwe on the libretto, Greta Goiris on the distinctive costume designs, and Sabine Theunissen on staging and set design. Text, music, stage direction, and images are all developed side-by-side.
Obviously defying categorization, The Great Yes, The Great No might be termed a chamber opera—with the understanding that, like Sibyl, it posits a radical new form of opera that mirrors the give-and-take of collaboration. The composer, vocalist, and choreographer Nhlanhla Mahlangu worked with the chorus of seven women singers who perform in the piece to try out polyglot settings of the textual fragments Kentridge proposed. The women translated these into their mother languages (among them isiZulu, siSwati, Sepedi, and Setswana) and developed the music together with Mahlangu.
Kentridge describes how they tried out “which versions are the most melodious. That’s not something an audience that doesn’t speak any of these languages will pick up, but it is there in the deep structure of how the music flows with the chorus.” They also experimented with a variety of rhythmic deliveries and “harmonies that come from overlaying different rhythms.”
The music for The Great Yes, The Great No, which unfolds without intermission in about 80 minutes, was thus created from a mixture of inputs: from the seven choral singers and vocalist/actor Xolisile Bongwana, from Mahlangu, and from the ensemble led by percussionist and music director Tlale Makhene. “The variety of music that comes from a very small instrumental ensemble is virtuosic and inspiring,” says Geffen. “It refers both to European cultures and to the sound worlds of the colonies.”
Flexibility is an essential part of this process. Geffen recalls that “the piece had changed considerably” between a workshop he saw in Johannesburg in September 2023 and the dress rehearsal for the world premiere in France last summer at LUMA Arles. “There’s a continuous development.”
The never-finished creative process of molding a work like The Great Yes, The Great No resembles the variability of history itself and how it becomes increasingly fragmented as we attempt to make more certain sense of it. “There are incontrovertible historical facts and events,” says Geffen, “and then there is how we process those facts and how we link them together.”
