The Opera Tattler

* Notes * 
William Kentridge’s The Great Yes, The Great No (pictured, photograph by Monika Rittershaus) had a Bay Area premiere at Cal Performances last weekend. The choral music was composed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu and also performed by her and six other singers. The music director was Tlale Makhene who played percussion in the small ensemble that included cello, accordion/banjo, and piano. The performance was impressive, including singing, dancing, words in many languages, and Kentridge’s own singular visual vocabulary.

The work follows the trip of the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle from Marseille to Martinique in 1941 Aboard the ship are 350 refugees whose numbers include artists and intellectuals. This historical narrative does include fictional and even surrealist flourishes, and is strikingly different from Kentridge’s last chamber opera SIBYL. The performers use oversized flat masks held in one hand to cover their faces. Some of the masks depicted people, but there were, delightfully, coffee pot heads and a pineapple one too. The coffee pots in fact have some lines in French admonishing one to speak proper French. The libretto has snippets of Bertolt Brecht, André Breton, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Frantz Fanon.

There was a lot packed into the 90 minutes of the performance, which felt both very long and very short somehow. The chorus of women sang in English and French but also the Bantu languages of isiSwati, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Setswana, and Xitsonga. The singers sounded absolutely beautiful, for me they were the highlight of our Sunday matinée.The small quartet played with much verve and were also quite enjoyable.

Martinican Surrealist writers Aimé and Suzanne Césaire were not actually on the ship, but figure prominently in this performance. Key figures in the Négritude movement, they bring up themes of colonialism, fear, and freedom. Suzanne has a prominent scene with the chorus that has the feel of Greek tragedy. André Breton, who was friends with the Césaires and was on the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, also shows up in this piece. There is a very funny part where there are two André Breton, one is the leader of Surrealism and the other a “general misanthrope.”

* Tattling * 
The performance, which did not have an intermission, started late. Even still there were many latecomers that made whole rows have to stand up to let them in as the music was happening. There was also some quiet talking, which I did not appreciate but I was thankful that I didn’t hear any electronic noise.