In his monumental displays of structure, history, movement and sound—operatic compositions that unabashedly aspire to the now-“traditional” status of Gesamtkunstwerk, William Kentridge has become a leading voice not only in contemporary art but in the world’s cultural and social discourse. At this point, after decades of engagement with the immoralities of apartheid in his native South Africa, Kentridge doesn’t so much speak on behalf of his Black countrymen—a necessarily awkward advocacy—as speak about and, in works like “The Great Yes, The Great No,” around the legacy left to a country like South Africa by a fraught modern history.
The quasi-opera concerns itself with a moment where Europe’s artists and intellectuals, having exoticized their subjugated African counterparts, had reason (need, really) to move closer to the civilization that so infatuated them. In this instance, that civilization was found not in Africa, but from Africa, in the Caribbean. In 1941, André Breton fled France’s Vichy regime by sailing to Martinique, where his Surrealist movement was already providing a theoretical basis for anti-colonialist sentiment. Also on board were Aimé Césaire and his wife Suzanne, African citizens of France who were crucially involved in the Surrealist/Black nationalist movement négritude (which would later play a role in the liberations of France’s sub-Saharan colonies).
Such an admixture of politics, aesthetics, history and drama appeals deeply to Kentridge, who allows himself some factual liberty to drive home his modernist fantasy (such as placing Cuban Surrealist painter Wifredo Lam and post-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon aboard ship). The whole incident becomes bigger than itself in Kentridge’s hands, a pretense that might irk some scholars but which in fact marks the multimedia production not as an historical pageant but as an (art-)historical vision.
William Kentridge, “The Great Yes, The Great No,” 2025, at The Wallis. Courtesy of The Wallis.
The chorus-like staging, replete with masks, moves and stage meanders, does maintain a pageant quality. The music is choral, accompanied by a four-instrument band. From their appearance, accents, and choreographies (individual and group), the actor-singers are apparently South African. For Kentridge these are not performers engaged in exotic ritual, but his neighbors and sometimes fellow strugglers. Aimé Césaire, Wifredo Lam—genuine Surrealists outside Europe—are figures from recent history who clearly inspire the artist’s awe. As he unapologetically demonstrated in his retrospective at the Broad last year, Kentridge is a Modernist fanboy par excellence.
The set for “The Great Yes, The Great No,” mostly chairs and benches downstage, is backed by an expansive diagrammatic rendition of a ship’s deck, actually taken from that of a South African ferry (if I understood correctly), above which pinwheel myriad different images and, often, slogans appearing in response to dialog on stage. The chorus-like ensemble moves fluidly before this droll firmament; their fractured processionals, along with the maze-like backdrop, recall the manically bisected performance spaces of another neo-Modernist impresario, the late Richard Foreman. Foreman was himself more of a Surrealist than Kentridge, but their passions are shared, as they also embrace Bauhaus theater and dance, stage-work of the Russian Avant Garde, Dada provocation, and of course the manifold pretenses of opera, grand and especially chamber. William Kentridge has many boxes and thinks outside all of them.
