At The Arsht, William Kentridge Converges Visual Arts, Music and Theater For Miami Art Week

William Kentridge’s “The Great Yes, The Great No” is a visual arts-musical-theatrical spectacle at the Arsht Center programmed during Miami Art Week from Thursday, Dec. 5 through Saturday, Dec. 7. (Photo by Monika Rittershaus/courtesy of the Arsht Center) 

It was 2022 when South African artist William Kentridge brought his monumental “The Head and the Load” as part of an epic pageant during Miami Art Week.

The production required that the spacious backstage of the Ziff Ballet Opera House inside the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts be splayed open to accommodate the plethora of performers, projections, and props. The work was a sometimes dizzying, ultimately stunning choral, dance, and multimedia collage.

The subject matter brought into sharp relief the African theater of World War I and the ill-compensated, nearly forgotten Black conscripts who kept the absurd but implacable war machine moving, hauling impossible loads on their backs across the continent in service of their white colonial officers.

Kentridge returns for Miami Art Week 2024 and the Arsht Center along with a brilliant cadre of collaborators from The Centre for the Less Good Idea” “The Great Yes, The Great No” from Thursday, Dec. 5 through Saturday, Dec. 7. It too, he says, examines the “paradoxes and questions of colonialism.”

Costumes and sets are “big meaning makers” in the piece, according to dramaturg Mwenya Kawbe. Pictured: Hamilton Dhlamini. (Photo by Monika Rittershaus/courtesy of the Arsht Center)

As with “The Head and the Load,” Kentridge collaborator and dramaturg Mwenya Kabwe explains that in this piece “set and costume really do some big meaning making in a big way.” Great projected images play across the screen at the back of the stage—images of archival photographs, altered maps, typewritten lines of text, and of course, Kentridge’s hand-drawn charcoal animations. Kentridge, she reminds us, “is a visual artist at the end of the day, so this work led with the visual.”

The piece treats another historical event, this time a 1941 boat journey which departed Marseilles bound for the Caribbean island of Martinique. Fleeing the authoritarian, Nazi-adjacent Vichy regime, the ship’s passenger list included such luminaries as poet and writer André Breton, who penned the 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism,” Cuban painter and Picasso protégé Wilfredo Lam, and the anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi Strauss.

To fictionalize the journey, Kentridge adds other passengers to the ship’s manifest. Frida Kahlo, Josephine Baker and Frantz Fanon, among others. Death himself, in the form of Charon, the mythical ferryman of the River Styx, captains the boat. Most importantly, Kentridge gives berths on the ship to two of the Caribbean’s influential 20^th century thinkers, the writers Aimé Césaire and his wife, Suzanne.

As a young intellectual in 1930s Paris, Suzanne Césaire (played here by Nancy Nkusi) helped usher the philosophy of Négritude onto the world stage, but later in life destroyed much of her own writing. (Photo by Monika Rittershaus/courtesy of the Arsht Center)

The fertile soil of tiny Martinique was a fecund birthplace for poets and philosophers. Some of them, like Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Roussi, would find their way to Paris, a city whose art world was abuzz with a revolutionary creative fervor. There Aimé and Suzanne would meet, marry and lay the foundation for the Négritude movement of the 1930s. Inspired by the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude called for Black artists and thinkers to embrace an aesthetic centered on the cultures of Africa rather than those of Europe. It was Aimé Césaire who declared that we must “decolonize our mind, our inner life, at the same time we decolonize society.”

The two writers also embraced Surrealism, which Suzanne Césaire would call “a permanent readiness for the Marvelous.” Kentridge has long had an affinity for the Surrealists’ style of art making, says Kabwe. He found its embrace of freedom, chance, collage and the world of dreams seductive, and this show incorporates their methods as much as it does their aesthetic.

Kentridge explains that, although he and his collaborators don’t use chance in precisely the same way the Surrealists did, they do rely on “the category of recognition, being aware of something that you hadn’t expected and holding onto that.”

“Collage,” he says, “is also an important way of working in ‘The Great Yes, The Great No,’ taking fragments and seeing if those fragments add up to more than simply a catalogue of items . . . whether one just has a number of different ingredients separate one after another or if they cook into more than that.”

At Kentridge’s Johannesburg Centre for the Less Good Idea, performers play a critical role as co-creators of the work in progress. Pictured left to right are Khokho Madlala, Nomathamsanqa Ngoma, Asanda Hanabe, Nokuthula Magubane, Anathi Conjwa, Mapule Moloi, Zandile Hlatshwayo. (Photo by Monika Rittershaus/courtesy of the Arsht Center)

Kabwe emphasizes that Kentridge’s performance work “tends to evade easy definition by design,” so it was her task as dramaturg to help him find a path of congruity in this decidedly non-linear piece. “In spite of not following a narrative, there is still coherence to be made. And a question is, ‘What is the structure of that coherence?’” This presents a particular challenge when the work in question treats a group who completely radicalized the way the Western world would look at art.

There is an emotional core, however, in “The Great Yes, The Great No,” says Kabwe. That throughline can be found in the human voice, through seven female singers “who really sit at the center of the show and who … hold the emotional heartbeat of the work.”

Kentridge, too, points to the centrality of these women, not just to the performance itself but also to the creation of the work:

“They come together in a remarkable way, and they’re not simply performing music that’s been given to them, that’s been done, but are very much active in the construction of the different choral pieces, writing different lines, translating texts, working with each other to find how harmonies and rhythms work together.”

Surrealism’s intersections with the Négritude movement are brought into sharp focus in “The Great Yes, The Great No.” From left are Nancy Nkusi, playing writer Suzanne Césaire and Xolisile Bongwana as her husband, poet and politician Aimé Césaire. Above, on platform: William Harding; Nancy Nkusi on film. (Photo by Monika Rittershaus/courtesy of the Arsht Center)

In the end, Kentridge asks that the audience simply give itself over to the too-muchness of the piece, to the “drowning excess” onstage that will be plenty to take in all at once. “Take it in,” he says, “the way a child would take it in.” Relax, and follow wherever your eyes and ears take you. The show that you see will be different than the one the person sitting next to you sees, but that is the nature of the work, and the nature of the world.

Finally, Kentridge is grateful for the support that the Arsht and Miami has afforded his recent performance work. “I think that Miami—and Florida—contains different worlds within it,” says Kentridge. “We’re looking forward very much to coming back to the audience and the world that we met two years ago.”

WHAT: “The Great Yes, The Great No” by Willliam Kentridge and associate directors Phala O. Phala and Nhlanhla Mahlangu

WHERE: Knight Concert Hall at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Dec. 5-7  

COST: $50 – $226

INFORMATION: 305-949-6722 or arshtcenter.org

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