William Kentridge
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: Martinican writers Suzanne and Aimé Césaire; and Jeanne and Paulette Nardal, in whose salon in Paris the theorized concept of “négritude” was born, in dialogue between Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor (a Senegalese writer), and Léon-Gontran Damas (a French Guianese poet). Also on board are philosopher Frantz Fanon, Joséphine Bonaparte (another Martiniquais), Josephine 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 William 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, Wisława 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. 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 1940s, 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.

A Note from William Kentridge
In March 1941, when the cargo ship Capitaine Paul-Lemerle sailed from Marseille to Martinique, its passengers, escaping Vichy France, included the surrealist André Breton, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, the communist novelist Victor Serge, and the author Anna Seghers.

This boat and its journey are the starting point for The Great Yes, The Great No. The captain on the boat is, of course, Charon, the ferryman of the dead, crossing the water. Charon calls other characters up onto the boat. From Martinique, there are Aimé 
Césaire, who had actually made the journey from Marseille to Martinique two years earlier with his wife Suzanne, and Jane and Paulette Nardal, who—together with the Césaires and Léopold Sédar Senghor—had founded the anticolonialist Négritude movement in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Frantz Fanon, also from Martinique, jumps back in time and appears on the boat, as well. The other Martinican on board is Joséphine Bonaparte, twinned with another famous Parisian “Josephine,” Josephine Baker. Trotsky, who had been killed in Mexico six months before the sailing of the boat, is there, too. Even Stalin makes a brief appearance.

The journey is the 1941 crossing of the Atlantic, but earlier crossings from Africa to the Caribbean are also there, as well as contemporary forced sea crossings. The fertile grounds of Paris and Martinique, Surrealism, and Négritude, are the background to the libretto. Aimé Césaire’s seminal poem “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (“Notebook of a Return to the Native Land,” 1939) is its bedrock. New anti-rational ways of approaching language and image are in play. Charon’s dyspeptic thoughts come from many sources, from Breton’s Surrealism, the Afro-Cubism of Wifredo Lam, and the poetry of Léon-Gontran Damas, to writings from Senghor, Suzanne Césaire, and Paulette Nardal, and the 1930s poems of Bertolt Brecht.
—William Kentridge

A Chorus of Seven Women
The world is leaking—The dead report for duty—The women are picking up the pieces.

This poetic phrase by William Kentridge inspired the thinking behind the Chorus of Seven Women that is at the heart of The Great Yes, The Great No. Among a cast of historical figures who are called up from the dead, the chorus represent the migrants who survive sea crossings and insist that we remember those who do not. Their seven voices allow for a balancing of harmonies in the choral composition, but also stand as a symbol of cyclical completion and connect us to myth and legend. It is a Chorus of Seven Women that comes after the journey, after the war, after the storm, after the party, after the decay, to pick up the pieces and to rebuild. An offering of possibility after the wreckage.

The role of the choral composer is to facilitate finding a kind of depth and honesty of sound that human voices are capable of. In the case of The Great Yes, The Great No, the choral composition, led by Nhlanhla Mahlangu, is enabled through the elements of dance, movement, and somatic memory to discover sound in a way that allows the chorus to work with physicality and cultural and historical depth. The libretto is made up of extracts of texts from a wide range of sources, which are then translated into the multiple languages spoken by the singers: isiZulu, isiXhosa, Setswana, SiSwati, and Xitsonga. During workshops, discussions among the chorus members about meanings were followed by locating a personal context from which to understand what is being communicated across time and geography, and from there, from a place that is felt in the body. This lead to a search for musical coherence in the form of melody, rhythm, song, and chant. The work of the chorus is specifically located, yet creates a deeply felt sense that translates across distance.

Translation is a central feature of the work of the chorus, as the singers work with and through the original languages that compose the libretto (including French, English, and Creole). The texts serve as gifts, prompts, and provocations for the work of translating, for carrying over experiences, ideas, understandings. This invokes the travel from one place to another, the journey by boat from Marseille to Martinique on which the Chorus of Seven Women is moved and inspired towards sonic (mis)translation. The chorus captures the great asymmetries of the world and the marvelous potential of new understandings, and in this way, it completes the strange, magical, and unexpected surrealist experience of The Great Yes, The Great No, asserting the power of the unconscious, of chance, and of dreams.
—Nhlanhla Mahlangu
Associate Director, Choral Composer
—Mwenya Kabwe
Dramaturg

This essay was originally commissioned and published by LUMA Foundation for the premiere of The Great Yes, The Great No in Arles, France, July 2024.