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Los Angeles Times
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Review: William Kentridge's ‘The Great Yes' at the Wallis: A dazzling meditation on a world out of kilter
'The Great Yes, the Great No' is a great title. And William Kentridge's latest chamber opera, which is having its U.S. 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. Others on board included modernist Russian poet and a Trotskyite anarchist Victor Serge, Martinican poet and a founder of the anticolonialism Négritude movement Aimé Césaire, Cuban painter Wifredo Lam; influential Marxist psychiatrist and Pan-Africanist Frantz Fanon, along with fascinating others. Kentridge, though, doesn't stop there. He merrily throws onto the passenger manifest the likes of Josephine Bonaparte, Josephine Baker, Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin. What the voyage now represents is the unmaking of ideas from some of the great thinkers and creators of the age. Their yeses and great noes no longer mean anything. They are leaving, we are told, a place where they will not be missed and going to a place where they will not be welcomed. Theirs is the plight of the eternal exile. Kentridge likens the captain to the ferryman, Charon, in Greek mythology transporting the dead across the river Styx to the underworld. These remarkable characters parade, dance, argue and make love. Newly unmoored, they are, while in limbo, living. Freedom fighters, they are free to be themselves. That great yes comes at the price of a great no. Having lost everything, they suffer filth, hunger and disease during a months-long voyage to uncertainty. Still, for 90 nonstop minutes, Kentridge's characters dazzle. They sport large painted masks of themselves and costumes that mirror their artwork. The video backdrop continually changes, one minute a drawing, another an abstract animation, another black-and-white documentary film. Documentary and fabrication conjoin. Kentridge's libretto is an assemblage of the characters' words and a range of other historical sources. The 'Embarkation,' for instance, begins with a jubilant seven-member South African women's chorus singing in Zulu lines from Aeschylus, Brecht and many others. Why, the chorus asks, quoting Anna Akhmatova, is this age worse than others? 'The world is leaking!' the Captain — a spoken role enacted with brilliant aplomb by Tony Miyambo — explains. He will become our congenial, riotous, seductive, wise guide throughout. What follows is a succession of scenes, each a different kind of theater, a different kind of music, different movement, different visuals, with mostly different characters. Yet all are, so to speak, in the same boat. One thing flows into another. On screen, Nazi tanks are seen on the Champs-Élysées; soon after we're in the world of dancing espresso pots. Text is visually presented on the screen in a host of ways — via roulette-wheel graphics, as post-it notes, as banners. An arrestingly versatile quartet of musicians led by percussionist Tlale Makhene (joined by Nathan Koci on accordion and banjo, Marika Hughes on cello and Thandi Ntuli on piano) seems to hold the whole world of music in their hands. One minute, it's Schubert; another it's Satie-esque, and many more South African splendor. Enough cannot be said about the singing, the dancing, the music-making. How can such a miserable voyage hold so much life? Glamorous as the exiles are, Kentridge does not glamorize them. Revolutionary art, revolutionary poetry won't patch the leak in the world. 'I shout my laughter to the stars,' Fanon says in despair. 'Get used to me.' Exile is emptiness. The passengers survive a terrible storm before landing where they will be mistreated. 'Love no country, countries soon disappear,' a member of the chorus sings in Zulu (a translation of a line by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz) with thunder in her voice. 'The world is out of kilter,' she later tells us. 'We will reset it.' 'The Great Yes,' which had its premiere last summer in Arles, France, was commissioned by the Luma Foundation, the exhibition center designed by Frank Gehry. Kentridge brings it to America thirsting for even less good yeses and noes. (The Wallis is a co-commissioner as is Cal Performances in Berkeley, where the opera will be presented next, in March. If I read Kentridge correctly, he warns us of the fiction that we protect ourselves by deporting immigrants. Not only do countries soon disappear, but in a rapidly evolving post-truth-or-consequences era, it may be reality that soon disappears, leaving us all unmoored. In the end, 'The Great Yes, the Great No' reveals the collective might of exile. The proof theatrically is that the production is a rapt and riotous collective with a long list credits all seemingly on the same wildly unpredictable page. Nhlanhla Mahlangu is both choral conductor and associate director. Greta Goiris' costumes and Sabine Theunissen's set design bring Kentridge's visions to life. Sound, lighting and projection are individually exquisite. Kentridge's collective spirit, moreover, translates beyond the Wallis. The previous weekend, Kentridge returned to UCLA to present boisterous Centre for the Less Good Idea works in progress at the Nimoy. That was followed by performance artists at the Broad museum offering their own less-good-idea-inspired efforts. The American Cinematheque has just announced that it will screen Kentridge's complete 'Drawings for Projection' Feb. 21 at the Aero Theatre.
Los Angeles Times
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
William Kentridge's Centre for the Less Good Idea, and more L.A. arts and culture this weekend
A big Los Angeles welcome to the Centre for the Less Good Idea, a Johannesburg-based interdisciplinary incubator co-founded by William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace, for its weeklong residency here. And we Angelenos are in for a treat: Back in 2017, Times classical music critic Mark Swed reviewed a Kentridge installation and called him 'an amiable, professorial emcee' who 'surrounded himself with fabulous dance; potent singing, operatic and otherwise (mostly otherwise); multidimensional video imagery; quirky music; even quirkier machinery on stage.' Collectively titled 'Three Less Good Ideas in Los Angeles,' the residency begins at UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance with 'A Defense of the Less Good Idea' (8 p.m. Saturday), which featuring a series of three short form works — 'Mnquma,' 'Commission Continua' and 'Umthandazo' — and a performance-based lecture by Kentridge and Lace. Combining elements of text, live performance and video projection, the Nimoy Theater event is the Centre's definitive talk about art, meaning and understanding. The exploration continues at the Broad with 'Unsettled Voices' (1 p.m. Sunday), in which Tongva educator and musician Lazaro Arvizu Jr. and Khoi Khoi violist Lynn Daphne Rudolph will perform a new work at Oculus Hall. During the Indigenous music, visual and spoken word performance, the audience will partake in a creative call-and-response and dialogue that considers what reconciliation means in the land of today's L.A. (This is also connected to the museum's 'Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature' exhibition and local reforestation effort.) It all concludes at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts with five performances of 'The Great Yes, The Great No' (Feb. 5-8), a chamber opera about the historic 1941 escape from Vichy France by surrealist André Breton, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam, communist novelist Victor Serge and author Anna Seghers aboard a cargo ship bound for Martinique. Conceived in collaboration with theater maker Phala Ookeditse Phala and choral composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and directed by Kentridge, the production merges surrealist imagery with real-life events and South African choral music, dance and poetry. I'm Times staff writer Ashley Lee, here with my colleague Jessica Gelt with more Essential Arts headlines and happenings: 'Appropriate'I missed previous stagings of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' domestic drama, including L.A.'s 'muscular production' in 2015 and Broadway's three-time Tony-winning revival. But the Old Globe's production of the ensemble piece, in which estranged siblings reunite to settle their late father's Arkansas estate, left me agape in its brilliant indictment of how white Americans (do or don't) deal directly with their historical legacies. Directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, this San Diego premiere runs through Feb. 23. Old Globe Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way, San Diego. Doug Varone and Dancers'Condense Doug Varone's elongated commentary about his choreographic processes down to his most significant insights, and it would be these: that his dances are kinetic artwork about human passions, and that every single move has a carefully crafted context,' dance critic Laura Bleiberg wrote for the Times in 2013. The acclaimed choreographer and his company will take the stage in Orange County to perform three pieces — one of which will also feature Chapman University dance students, as part of the company's education performance project. 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Musco Center for the Arts at Chapman University, 415 N. Glassell, Orange. 'Arteonica*: Art, Science, and Technology in Latin America Today''A fascinating look at the convergence of art and electronics that gave rise to a relatively obscure art movement in Latin America,' Gelt writes of the PST Art exhibit that draws from the work of Brazilian artist Waldemar Cordeiro, whose 1971 show 'Arteônica' examined the computer as a tool for positive change. The exhibition, on view at the Museum of Latin American Art through Feb. 23, also includes works by artists that have expanded on Cordeiro's ideas, as well as modern thinkers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru. Museum of Latin American Art, 628 Alamitos Ave, Long Beach. — Ashley Lee FRIDAYOrange County Museum of Art Two new openings: 'Searching the Sky for Gold,' painter Su Yu-Xin's first solo museum exhibition outside of Asia, and 'Unearthed,' a group show exploring the connection of ceramics to land, place and May 25. OCMA, 3333 Ave. of the Arts, Costa Mesa. SATURDAYCelebrating MTT Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the L.A. Phil and pianist Yuja Wang in his own compositions and works by Debussy, Poulenc, Gershwin and Britten. Update: Due to illness, Michael Tilson Thomas and Yuja Wang will not appear. Susanna Mälkki, Edwin Outwater and Jon Kimura Parker will instead perform the scheduled program.8 p.m. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. Pacific Jazz Orchestra Broadway and West End star Eva Noblezada joins the ensemble to kick off the Jazz at Naz fest.8 p.m. The Soraya, Cal State Northridge, 18111 Nordhoff St. SUNDAYRoots and Renewal: Honoring the New Year of the Trees The Skirball reopens with a free community day featuring artist-led talks, a curated Tu B'Shevat experience, food samples, guided campus walks, panel discussions, art making and more.11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd. Tick, Tick … Boom! Chance Theater presents Jonathan Larson's autobiographical musical about a struggling young composer in New York City, circa through Sundays, closes Feb, 23. Chance Theater, Bette Aitken Theater Arts Center, 5522 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim. Larissa FastHorse is the first Native American playwright to be produced at Center Theatre Group's Mark Taper Forum. Her new satire, 'Fake It Until You Make It,' is currently staging its world premiere more than a year after being put on hold when the Taper shut down indefinitely in 2023. Ashley Lee sat down with Fasthorse for a discussion about the play and its journey to stage. Read the Q&A. The Hammer Muesum announced the 27 artists participating in its highly anticipated Made in L.A. biennial, which runs from Oct. 5 to Jan. 4, 2026. The seventh edition of the biennial is curated by Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha, who told The Times that they tried to avoid any particular theme. 'There is a conversation happening between the artists, the work that they make and the context in which they make it — and that context being Los Angeles,' Pobocha said. Find out who the artists are. 'Evanston Salt Costs Climbing' — a play about two salt truck drivers and an administrator at the city's public works department — is receiving its Southern California premiere in a Rogue Machine production at the Matrix Theatre. Written by Will Arbery, the show is 'a most delectably weird play, experimental in form and frenetically playful in language,' Times theater critic Charles McNulty writes in his review. Don't be fooled by the dry title. In response to President Trump's executive order halting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the Smithsonian announced that it is shuttering its Office of Diversity and freezing all federal hiring. The art world is lamenting a brash heist in the Netherlands that resulted in the theft of a 2,400-year-old golden helmet and 2,000-year-old gold bracelets, which have been traced to Romanian royalty. Thieves blasted open the door to the Drents Museum in the northeastern town of Assen and stole the artifacts, which date to the Dacian kingdom in present-day Romania. Soon after a leaked memo written by Louvre Director Laurence des Cars shed light on alarming maintenance issues at the famous museum, including leaks and an inability to sustainably cope with the annual massive number of visitors, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that the facility would undergo a major renovation costing around $730 million. The president also announced that the museum's crown jewel — Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa — would be housed in a new custom built room all her own. — Jessica Gelt Behold — a Guinness World Record for visiting the most museums in 24 hours.
