William Kentridge’s ship of fools
‘The Great Yes, The Great No’, the South African artist’s most original piece of musical theatre, opens in America this month. We watched its creation
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.