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The Great Yes, The Great No
A chamber opera created by William Kentridge
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.
OH TO BELIEVE IN ANOTHER WORLD
A film by William Kentridge for Shostakovich Symphony No. 10
"How to make a film to accompany a live orchestral performance of a symphony? There are already 80 musicians in the orchestra. There is the shine of the brass. The excitement of watching the relationship between the conductor and the musicians. Behind this, to put a film.
The key task in making the film Oh To Believe in Another World to accompany the Shostakovich symphony no. 10, is to find something that does not turn the symphony into film music - a series of images and narratives that overwhelm the music itself; nor to have something that disappears, that runs simply as series of anodyne backdrops. But the story of Shostakovich and his complicated relationship to the state in the Soviet Union, from its early days just after the 1917 revolution, all the way through to Stalin’s death in 1953, provides the material for thinking visually about the trajectory that Shostakovich had to follow, from the early days of the Soviet Union to the writing of the symphony.
This is a retrospective look at the four decades of the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, from the perspective of 1953 when both Stalin died and the first performance of the symphony was presented. In the 1920s there was the death of Lenin; in the 1930s the suicide of Mayakovsky; in the 1940s, the assassination of Trotsky; in the 1950s the death of Stalin – and here we are, almost 70 years later. The report that remains of these decades is in the music of Shostakovich, the one who against expectation got away, and survived.” William Kentridge
Commissioned and performed by the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester
in association with the Teatro di Napoli
Conducted by Michael Sanderling
Director
William Kentridge
Editors
Janus Fouché, Žana Marović, Joshua Trappler
Costume & Puppet Designer
Greta Goiris
Set and Model Designer
Sabine Theunissen
Cinematographer
Duško Marović
Video Control
Kim Gunning