“There’s your story, there’s my story, there’s the truth,” says a character in The Great Yes, The Great No. “And then there’s actually what happened.”
The man who poses that teasingly philosophical conundrum in William Kentridge’s multi-valenced theatrical and musical astonishment at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall is the Captain (a bighearted Hamilton Dhlamini) of a ship that actually did set sail in 1941. Traveling from Marseille to Martinique, the vessel carried passengers, including prominent artists and writers, in flight from the Nazis.
Kentridge, the sui generis South African creator and director who dazzled Berkeley audiences two years ago with his Greek myth-inspired chamber opera Sibyl, isn’t about to be tethered to documentary realism. What transpires in his new work — at sea, in life, in history, in the hearts and minds of the refugees and in ours as their witnesses — is poetic, mysterious, tragic, surrealistic, comical, stirring, and furrowed with keenly felt life.
A collaboration between multiple organizations, including co-commissioner Cal Performances, The Great Yes, The Great No opened a three-day run to a packed house on Friday, March 14.
Riding on the braided currents of poetry, acting, dance, masks, scenography, projections, animation, a nimble four-person band, and a surging seven-member chorus, the work charts a course through deep and swirling waters. The legacies of colonialism and slavery are the powerful undertows, invoked in excerpts from playwright Bertolt Brecht, revolutionary activist Frantz Fanon, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and others. In 90 minutes that seem at times to take on more than they can possibly handle, there’s also room for instructions on table manners and an aside, delivered by an actor with a gigantic cartoon hand, on the theory and practice of yawning.
Like any work by Kentridge, whose credits include everything from museum art installations to an ebullient 2010 staging of Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose for the Metropolitan Opera, The Great Yes, The Great No generates its own cosmology. More language-heavy than Sibyl, this piece activates its ideas with a shifting congeries of images and sounds. As the Captain roams the multilevel set (designed by Sabine Theunissen), narrating and commenting on the action, the stage is in fluid, labile motion.
The performers pose and prance in flat but formidable masks. There’s singer Josephine Baker. And here’s not one but two André Bretons, a neat riff on the surrealist poet. Joseph Stalin, not on the original ship’s manifest, gets a cameo appearance in this fragmented history. So, anachronistically, does Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife, Joséphine.
Projections open out the ship’s decks. Nautical-looking set pieces roll across the stage, rotate, and reveal some new character, masked and eye-poppingly dressed (costumes by Greta Goiris). In one amusing animation that conveys the ship’s rolling motion, cakes slide back and forth across a table. Even a hanging light, hitched to a guy wire, gets in on the act, performing an aerial ballet. The ship, which travels back in time to recall the colonial era of the slave trade, is at once viscerally realized and vividly imagined. It seems perfectly natural that some of the passengers have heads made of metal coffeepots or pineapples. Several fish-headed figures attend an onscreen dinner party.
Nothing carries the evening more strongly than the incantatory part singing by the Black South African chorus, led by choral composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu. In multiple languages, the singers lament and rejoice, testifying to both the cruelty and resilience of the human spirit. “Why is this age worse than others?” a line of projected text asks. The chorus answers with a universal plea and prayer for recognition and justice. The onstage band, ranging from softly chittering percussion to calypso to neo-Romantic music, comments on and complements this refugee journey.
The Great Yes, The Great No arrives, with poignant timing, a week after the death of Athol Fugard, the anti-apartheid playwright and Kentridge’s fellow white South African. In addressing both the Nazi terror and the imperialist and pain-scarred history of a French Caribbean colony, Kentridge’s work appeals to our collective conscience, as Fugard’s plays do.
“Love no country,” a line near the end of The Great Yes, The Great No warns. “Countries soon disappear.”
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
