For three days only during Miami Art Week 2024, the Arsht exclusively presents 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 performances 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

Adrienne Arsht Center | Knight Concert Hall
December 5, 6 and 7
8 p.m.
Tickets $50 to $226
Click Here for Tickets
305-949-6722

Co-commissioned by the Arsht, 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.

The Great Yes, The Great No is commissioned by lead commissioner LUMA Foundation with co-commissioners, the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County with lead sponsor support from Adrienne Arsht; CAL Performances; and Centre d’Art Battat. Foundational commissioning support for the development and creation of The Great Yes, The Great No is provided by Brown Arts Institute at Brown University. The Great Yes, The Great No acknowledges the kind assistance of Goodman Gallery, Lia Rumma Gallery and Hauser & Wirth in this project. It is co-produced by Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg and Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen in Germany.

William Kentridge is an internationally acclaimed South African artist, renowned for the evocative power of his work, which has thrilled audiences around the globe. His exhibitions and large-scale, staged performances delve into the history of colonialism in Africa and the aspirations and failures of revolutionary politics, while engaging a wide range of visual and aural references – from European high modernism to African traditional and contemporary music and dance. Operating on a grand scale, his work has been shown and collected by museums all over the world.