William Kentridge loves to bake. When his children were little, he often made their birthday cakes: a giraffe with a patchwork ochre coat, a pirate chest full of gold coins. Baking, with its careful weighing, its set oven temperatures and precise cooking times, is sponge-engineering, which may be why it appeals to him. It’s so very different from the spiralling gyre of art-making that has filled his normal working day for the past half-century.
Three years ago, shortly before he was due to gather together the cast of his latest theatre project for the first time, the only certainties in Kentridge’s mind were that the work would feature a chorus of seven women and the figure of death, and that it would be called The Great Yes, The Great No, from a poem by the Greek master Constantine Cavafy. Not until he reread an article by a friend about the last ship to leave Marseille, the only major port to remain free after the fall of France during the Second World War, did Kentridge begin to see how the piece might take shape.
The Capitaine Paul-Lemerle was a converted cargo vessel that had seen better days. It was commandeered in Marseille in early 1941 by a young American, using funds raised in New York by Albert Einstein and Peggy Guggenheim, to help carry refugees to safety. “The Germans had invaded and conquered France,” Kentridge told me earlier this year during a break in rehearsals. “And so there were many refugees trying to flee France from the Nazis. It’s communists, it’s homosexuals, it’s artists, it’s Jews. It’s many people trying to leave across the Atlantic Ocean.”
The real Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, which was bound for the French Caribbean island of Martinique, had André Breton onboard, “wrapped in his thick overcoat, he looked like a blue bear,” Claude Lévi-Strauss, another refugee-passenger, would later remember. Kentridge makes the captain of his ship Charon, the ferryman of the Greek underworld, who carried souls across the River Styx. He adds his own passengers from history, including Joséphine Bonaparte and other islanders: the anti-colonialist hero Frantz Fanon, his mentor, Aimé Césaire, a revolutionary poet, and Césaire’s wife, Suzanne. Fleeing war in Europe, Kentridge’s Capitaine Paul-Lemerle almost capsizes in a terrible storm. The vessel only just makes it to the small island on the other side of the ocean.
Throughout, Kentridge hears “echoes of migrants trying to flee one country for a place of safety today [and] echoes of earlier journeys across the Atlantic, of enslaved people who were brought from Africa to the Caribbean”.
Born in Johannesburg in 1955, Kentridge has now lived half his life under apartheid and half in a free South Africa. He has always resisted being pigeonholed as an artist, perhaps an unconscious reaction to growing up in a country where people were categorised with such absurd cruelty that the divide between being black and being “coloured”, or mixed race, was often decided by whether a pencil stood up in your hair.
Kentridge has always resisted being pigeonholed as an artist
As a boy, he took art classes every Saturday, but Kentridge was never comfortable with painting in oils and was uneasy about using colour. What he wanted most was to expand what being an artist could mean. He preferred drawing, first in pencil and then in charcoal. On the advice of a close friend who is a filmmaker, he began turning his charcoal drawings into animations. He’d film a drawing, rub out the outline, draw a fresh one over the residue and film the new image. The process is captivating to watch, but it is so painstaking that a nine-minute film can take as many months to produce. Fascinated also by the theatre, but convinced he could not mix art and stage, Kentridge stopped drawing in his late twenties to focus on acting. But then he quickly found he couldn’t act, so he began mixing everything up: drawing, animation, film, performance. “One can always write one’s biography in terms of the failures which have saved you,” he told a museum audience recently.
In the studio, if drawing, Kentridge works alone, sometimes pacing for hours in circles before applying hand to paper. In his theatre work, as is clear from a huge career retrospective that opened in September at the United Arab Emirates’ Sharjah Art Foundation, he draws energy from collaborating closely with other people, whether artists or stagehands. “I try to keep the balance between the months when I’m on my own in the studio, just working, making, drawing or sculpting, and the energy of collaboration after months on my own.”
When in Johannesburg, Kentridge has the choice of two workplaces: a compact building at the bottom of the garden of his childhood home in Houghton, where he and his wife, Anne Stanwix, have lived for many years; and a big studio for sculpture and rehearsal in Maboneng, a vibrant creative district on the eastern side of the city. Over the years, Kentridge has been buying adjacent workshops and studio spaces. In 2016, he and Bronwyn Lace, another artist, turned these holdings into an arts incubator space, which they named the Centre for the Less Good Idea (after a Tswana proverb, “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor”). Musicians, choreographers, dancers, singers and performers are invited to work on different programmes, at the end of which they are required to create a short work; more than 1,200 artists have produced work here since it opened. Until recently, Kentridge funded the $500,000 annual cost of the centre himself.
Most of the operas Kentridge has worked on—The Magic Flute or Alban Berg’s Lulu—used existing librettos. The Great Yes, The Great No is the first piece to be born of and in the Centre for the Less Good Idea.
It began with a script. That, in itself, is no surprise. “But it’s not a text I have written,” Kentridge explains. “It’s a collage. I’ve assembled it from much better writers, people who know how to write. And so, for example, the first chorus: I’ll just read it to you so you understand how it’s put. ‘Now the House of Justice has collapsed. There has been wrong done. I ask for right.’ That’s from Aeschylus, the Greek classical writer. ‘You whom I could not save, listen to me. Try to understand this simple speech.’ That’s from Czesław Miłosz, a Polish poet. ‘No foreign sky protected me. No stranger’s wing protected my face. I ask this bed, I ask this chair. Why? Why is this age worse than others?’ That’s from Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet. ‘Misfortune flows as from a watermain.’ That’s Vladimir Mayakovsky, another Russian poet. ‘Sing Sorrow, but good will out in the end.’ That’s Aeschylus again.”
To shape the main characters, Kentridge drew on the help of Mwenya Kabwe, a Zambian-born theatremaker and scholar who teaches at the University of Cape Town. The writings of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon provided her with phrases to flesh out their parts. Suzanne Césaire’s words were harder to find, but Kabwe managed to draw out some gems from her essays, poems and letters. Suzanne emerges as one of the work’s finest voices.
As Kabwe explains: “There’s a way that South African theatre gets made, thought about, historically, that is very much about using what is in the room, immediately: the people, the things, the objects—the ideas that are in the room—as a different way to make than starting with a play text. It grows out of the protest theatre era, where having a play text was a bad idea. Legally. You didn’t want to be caught with your play text that was anti-government in any way. It was much safer to make work if there was no evidence that you were making work.”
It also grows out of the way that Kentridge’s choreographer, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, works. Born and raised in the townships, Mahlangu is a choral composer who doesn’t work with written music. He calls himself a “body orchestrator”. “The chorus is working with a composer who is a choreographer, who has so much body awareness. I don’t say, ‘Okay, it’s a sad note, therefore, it’s a minor key.’ I don’t think like that. I ask, ‘Where do you feel the sadness in your body? Can you push your voice from that part of the body?’”
“There are certain things that are based on a traditional melody or a familiar melody. But then they shift and change”
For Kentridge, working with Mahlangu is an act of trust. “This is the way Nhlanhla has explained it to me. I give them the text of the chorus of women, which comes from Aeschylus or Mayakovsky or Brecht or Césaire—lines by 15 different authors that we’ve put into an order so it has a logic. Nhlanhla and the women then do a translation of that text into their mother tongue, whether it’s isiZulu, isiXhosa, siSwati, or Setswana, and begin improvising different melodies.
“They go away for a few hours into a different space and come back and make a presentation. And as far as I can follow, that’s the kind of way that it comes together. There are certain things that are based on a traditional melody or a familiar melody, that may be a hymn. But then they shift and change. Because they’re soloists, they have very different qualities of voice. And one of the great things that Nhlanhla does is to know, ‘Okay, this is a lyrical part, Setswana is a much more lyrical-sounding language, isiZulu is a much more violent-sounding language. Let’s put this melody, or this line, which is a love line, into Setswana. And let’s keep the isiZulu for this next line.’”
There is further improvisation as the instrumentalists join the fray: cellist Marika Hughes, pianist Thandi Ntuli and Tlale Makhene, a Soweto-born percussionist who has dozens of instruments to hand, some of which he’s made himself. “It’s a form of unlearning,” says Hughes, who is from New York. “In the States it’s a very different kind of process. There’s someone who is the orchestrator. There’s the person who writes the music. There’s an arranger. The musicians don’t participate at all in the making of it. You just get there at the end to actualise the notes on the page. Here there is no page. We’re making the pages, which I love because we’re all improvising musicians and writers ourselves.” Every jamming session is recorded or filmed, so Kentridge and Mahlangu together can decide which to go with. Only at that point is the music codified and written down.
At the first dress rehearsal, the house lights go down and a spot shines on Charon the Captain, a heroic Hamilton Dhlamini in turquoise frockcoat and pink sash. Under his guardianship are the grumpy Breton, Fanon, the Nardal sisters, who were famous salonistes in Paris, and the two Joséphines, Joséphine Bonaparte and Joséphine Baker. Even Stalin and Trotsky have walk-on parts. Xolisile Bongwana, diminutive as Aimé Césaire, tugs at your heart when he sings; for so long the poetry of anticolonialism was a poetry of longing. Suzanne Césaire, played by Nancy Nkusi, a Rwandan actor with a beautifully sculpted face and the voice of a dreamer, reads on-deck from her own writings. “Freedom is at once madly desirable and quite fragile, which gives it the right to be jealous,” she warns. Suzanne died at 50, three years after divorcing her husband. He lived on for almost another half-century, and hardly mentioned her name in public again. Charon watches over them both. He’s a cynic who’ll do anything for money. He won’t admit it, but he also has a heart. He’s half in love with the beautiful Suzanne himself, which adds an unexpected sadness to the work.
At the heart of the piece, keeping a watchful eye on them all, is the chorus of women. Behind it was a real incident dating from 2012, perhaps one of the most shocking events since the end of apartheid, when 34 striking workers at the Marikana platinum mine were gunned down by police. Their widows’ protest inspired a musical two years afterwards and, later, a choral piece called Umthandazo, the Zulu word for prayer, at the Centre for the Less Good Idea. As Kentridge often says, when speaking of The Great Yes, The Great No, “the women pick up the pieces”.
Kentridge himself watches the dress rehearsal from a table in front of the stage, a single lamp lighting up his domed head, his pince-nez tied to a buttonhole in his shirt with a shoelace. He takes few notes, but misses little. Afterwards, he goes onstage and speaks to each actor in turn. There is quiet praise, but also suggestions about moving, about holding the audience’s attention. He does not argue, nor raise his voice. Nor does he ever seem impatient. As an artist, he relishes the energy that rises out of collaborating with other artists. As a director, he knows his is the final decision.
His last task before opening night is to review the piece as a whole, and take its pulse. Visitors who know his work will recognise old props and familiar visual puns: Marshal Pétain and his shouty Vichy henchman as coffeepots, shrill and metallic; the Joséphines dancing like a pair of geometry dividers dressed in crimped paper skirts; the procession, this time across water rather than along a pier by the River Tiber as in 2016’s Triumphs and Laments. What is harder to see is where the energy springs from, and when it dies. The final weekend before opening night is spent cutting: repeats that go on too long, whole scenes that drain and confuse the audience. Some started as those short performances created by the actors and dancers of the Centre for the Less Good Idea; now they have served their purpose. Every cut has a knock-on effect on the work as a whole, but so can not cutting. “He is killing his darlings,” Kentridge’s wife told me later. “That can be harder even than creating.”
Based on a single journey, The Great Yes, The Great No feels universal as well as historic
Kentridge is fascinated by creation. How does art get made? How does making happen? No one who was at the Centre for the Less Good Idea for that first workshop three years ago would have foreseen, least of all Kentridge himself, that what would emerge would be his most talismanic work, blending half a century of experimentation on a stage that was far bigger than the work he has made about South Africa, far bigger even than The Head and the Load, which was about the entire African continent and the First World War. Based on a single journey, The Great Yes, The Great No feels universal as well as historic. It’s not an opera in any conventional sense, more a meditation on exile, loss and longing.
Like many artists, Kentridge finds the process of creation hard to deconstruct and explain; he just knows when it’s happening and he recognises that often it starts with a few disparate scraps: a title, perhaps, a chorus, a lone figure from Greek mythology.
In 2012, a dozen years before the first staging of The Great Yes, The Great No, the artist was invited to give the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. He originally called the series “Drawing Lessons”, delighting in the pun. At the very end of the final talk, he returned, as he often does, to the bank at the edge of the River Styx, where the boatman drops off those who are headed for the bleak darkness of Hades. “He keeps in his boat the attributes they have shed,” he told the rapt audience: a suitcase of teeth, a pile of shoes, a sheaf of words, an old stone discus. “Held in trust on account, waiting to be decoded, for the shards to be rearranged, to be made new.” He was speaking of Charon, of course. But he could so easily have been talking about himself.
The Great Yes, The Great No is at the Arsht Center, Miami, from 5th to 7th December, and in 2025 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Los Angeles, at Cal Performances at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Bergen International Festival in Norway
