Internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre and operaproductions, South African artist William Kentridge presents his latestwork for the stage, a play/oratorio/chamber opera set on a fateful 1941 seavoyage from Marseille to Martinique.

The Great Yes, The Great No takes a historical escape from Vichy France by, among others, the surrealist André Breton, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam, the communist novelist Victor Serge, and the author Anna Seghers, and fictionalizes the journey by adding to the passenger list Aimé Césaire, the Nardal sisters (co-founders with Césaire of the anti-colonial Négritude movement in Paris), the West Indian Marxist philosopher Franz Fanon, Josephine Bonaparte, Josephine Baker, Trotsky, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Stalin. 

The ship is captained by Charon, the ferryman of the dead, and the beating surrealist heart of the work is amplified by the voyage’s conflation with other forced sea crossings, historical and contemporary, and by the dissolution of rational languages, verbal and visual.  

Charon’s language in directing the proceedings incorporates pieces of the passengers’ own works, as well as the poems of Bertold Brecht, and as the story unfolds among this fantastical menagerie of thinkers and makers, meaning becomes elastic. The Great Yes, The Great No is expansive and confounding, like nothing before it, and like everything that has been – it is the rarest of rare works of art for the stage: something novel.