“The Great Yes, the Great No” is a great title. And William Kentridge’s latest chamber opera, which is having its West Coast premiere at the Wallis in Beverly Hills, lives up to that title as one of the celebrated South African artist’s most astonishing works. Concept, direction, set and costume design, projections, video, text, music, choreography and performances by a vast company of singers, dancers, actors and equally vast creative team — all simply great.
Great, to be sure, but this “Great Yes” happens to be a project of Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea, a Johannesburg workshop he’s dubbed an “interdisciplinary incubator.” For Kentridge, attachment to a great idea can lead to entrapment, closing your mind to other, unthought-of fertile ideas. He cites a South African proverb: “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.” That doctor may have more imagination.
Ideas, however you want to weigh them, always proliferate in Kentridge’s varied and layered work, which can be a single charcoal sketch, an elaborate video, a complex installation or an eye-popping opera production. The extravagant Kentridge show “In Praise of Shadows,” at the Broad museum two years ago, brought together history and the present, oppression and fantasy, colonialism and the power of the individual, humor and sadness, ecstasy and pain. The Broad palpitated with energy. A previous chamber opera, “The Refusal of Time,” seen at UCLA’s Royce Hall seven years ago, was a supercharged planetary exploration of 19th century South African colonialism.
In “The Great Yes,” Kentridge turns to a creaky old cargo ship smelling of rotted oranges that sailed from Marseille to Martinique in 1941 overcrowded with some 300 passengers escaping Vichy France. Among them were a bevy of noted artists, writers, intellectuals and revolutionaries. We know about the voyage of SS Capitaine Paul-Lemerle primarily from the opening chapters of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss classic “Tristes Tropiques.” He describes the conditions as being horrific but the company as being exhilarating. On the voyage he became friends with one of the founders of surrealism, novelist and theorist André Breton.