(Bay Area Premiere; Cal Performances Co-commission)
Internationally acclaimed for his visual art and theater productions, South African artist William Kentridge returns to UC Berkeley with his latest creation for the stage, a chamber opera set on a 1941 sea voyage from Marseille to Martinique. Conceived in collaboration with theater maker Phala Ookeditse Phala and choral conductor and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu, The Great Yes, The Great No fictionalizes the historic wartime escape from Vichy France by, among others, the surrealist André Breton, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam—and imaginatively adds a distinguished and colorful cast of characters to the passenger list, like Aimé Césaire, Josephine Baker, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin.
In Kentridge’s hands, the ship becomes a fantastical menagerie of thinkers, makers, and revolutionaries in a production that merges real-life events with lush South African choral music, dance, poetry, and anti-rational approaches to language and image. Kentridge’s visual inventiveness combines animated drawings, video projection, masks, shadow play, and bold sculptural costumes with spoken and projected text that explores the relationship between surrealism and the anticolonial Négritude movement.
An Illuminations: “Fractured History” event. Visit calperformances.org/illuminations for details.