William Kentridge

To Cross One More Sea, 2024

‘To Cross One More Sea’ is a three-channel film that premiered at LUMA, Arles, in July 2024. Created in parallel with ‘The Great Yes, The Great No’, Kentridge’s semi-historical, semi-fictional chamber opera which was also first performed there, this triptych relives an Atlantic odyssey between Marseilles and Martinique in 1941. The boat is populated with myriad figures ostensibly escaping occupied Vichy France, including those who were on that actual journey, and those who couldn’t possibly have been on the same vessel together.

So, two André Bretons argue with each other and converse with key figures of the Negritude Movement, such as Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, the Nardal sisters and Leon-Gontran Damas; Josephine Baker vaudevilles alongside Josephine Bonaparte; whilst Claude Levi-Strauss, Stalin, Trotsky, Kahlo and Riviera complicate the deck’s dynamics and dances.

Through its layered, powerful imagery, searingly emotive songs, interwoven historic doctrine and letter extracts, ‘To Cross One More Sea’ revisits complex narratives of exile and resilience as this rusty, fetid merchant ship and its strange cargo journeys through literal and figurative storms and doldrums - with choruses and a libretto sung, spoken and shouted in French, English, Isizulu, Setswana, Isiswati, Isixhosa and Xitsonga - finally reaching the shores of the Caribbean.