THE GREAT YES, THE GREAT NO North American Premiere is Coming to the Arsht Center

For three days only during Miami Art Week 2024, the Arsht Center will exclusively present the latest creation by internationally acclaimed contemporary artist William Kentridge. The Great Yes, The Great No is Kentridge’s new breathtaking performance, combining live music, dance, projections, sculptural costumes and the South African artist’s own animated drawings. The Arsht Center performances (December 5, 6 and 7) will mark the North American premiere of the work and only the third presentation since its world premiere in Provence, France this summer.

The Great Yes, The Great No will be performed in the Arsht Center’s Knight Concert Hall at 8 p.m. on December 5, 6 and 7. Tickets range from $50-$226 and can be purchased online at arshtcenter.org or by calling the Arsht Center Box Office at (305) 949-6722.
 
The Great Yes, The Great No marks the Arsht Center’s second collaboration with Kentridge, who is internationally acclaimed for his visual art and theater productions. In 2022, the Center co-commissioned and presented The Head & the Load, which became a “must see of Miami Art Week” (The Miami Herald).
 
Co-commissioned by the Arsht Center, The Great Yes, The Great No is a chamber opera set on a 1941 sea voyage from Marseille to Martinique. Conceived in collaboration with theater maker Phala Ookeditse Phala and choral conductor and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu, The Great Yes, The Great No fictionalizes the historic wartime escape from Vichy France by, among others, the surrealist André Breton, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam—and adds a distinguished and colorful cast of characters to the passenger list, like Aimé Césaire, Josephine Baker, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin. In Kentridge’s hands, the ship becomes a fantastical menagerie of thinkers, makers, and revolutionaries in a production that merges surrealist imagery with real-life events, lush South African choral music, dance, poetry and anti-rational approaches to language and image. Kentridge’s breathtaking visual inventiveness combines animated drawings, video projection, masks, shadow play and bold sculptural costumes with spoken and projected text that explores the relationship between surrealism and the anticolonial Négritude movement.
 

Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus

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