In The Atrium of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, a crowd is gathered beneath a criss-crossing canopy of danger tape and dangling signs. At the centre of the scene is a grave of bottled water, with a body beneath it. From it, emerges the performer Sello Pesa, and so begins Ngoana oa Noka ea Kubetu.

Driven by the lamenting keys of the harmonium, and the chant-like, poetic recitations of Pesa, Ngoana oa Noka ea Kubetu is conversation with water in the form of a 20-minute-long installation of song, movement, and poetic ritual.

Ngoana oa Noka ea Kubetu is part of Nokeng Ya Kubetu, a series of performative inquiries, snippets and fragments interrogating a reweaving our relationships with the other-than-human world. As co-creators of the work Sello Pesa and Phala Ookeditse Phala explain, “The production tackles the issues of how the bottled water industry transforms water from a public good and fundamental human right into an exclusive commercial as result bottling a human right.”

— David Mann

CREDITS

CONCEPTUALISERS | Sello Pesa & Phala Ookeditse Phala
DIRECTOR | Phala Ookeditse Phala
PERFORMER | Sello Pesa
MUSICIAN | Molatudi Phasumane

Vincent Mantsoe steps into a desert landscape. He moves with a stooped gait, low and slow, with small, precise steps. He is alone on stage, though his presence fills the space. 

In Desert Poems, Mantsoe explores, through dance, the allure and tranquillity of an environment characterised by extremes. Early on in the performance, it becomes clear that Mantsoe is not alone on stage. A descendant of a long line of Sangomas, Mantsoe participated, from childhood, in traditional song and dance rituals. Almost all of his performances bear the traces of this history. Here, he is leaning into other worlds, communing with the ancestors. His energy is contained, grounded, rooted. His hands are outstretched, searching, guiding, receiving, energy entering his body and dissipating into the room.  

Desert Poems is a series of dance-driven, narrative vignettes. Mantsoe is stamping, hopping, and burning on the hot sand, taking the audience on the slow journey through an open, endless, barren landscape. It’s a precarious and poetic move between the gasping hot air and the darkened night sky. 

It ends in tears, and Mantsoe takes a while to come back to the performance, to return to the room. Ultimately, Desert Poems is as much a choreographed performance as it is a ritualistic waking up of the body through dance and physicality.

— David Mann

CREDITS

CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe

A work about death, grief, and the moments in between, Shanell Winlock-Pailman’s Oh Death! Where is Your Sting? is a playful and profound work that sits somewhere between dance work, theatre, and act of mourning.

It begins with Winlock-Pailman and Billy Langa, setting up the funeral, swapping jokes and memories, gossiping. They mime all of this, a prerecorded track sounding out and providing great comedic relief. And so we listen to them talk through their gestures, their facial expressions, and their bodies.

“Let’s dance!”, comes the call, the activation, and suddenly there is so much energy and exertion to mourn the dead, to perform grief and loss. They are jumping, jumping, jumping, shaking off the grief, and bringing life back into the body. 

They are joined by the pastor who reads out a eulogy, a textual backdrop to powerful, surreal solos by Langa and Winlock-Pailman where chairs become stages, and bodies begin to leave the ground.  

Death, they posit, is simply a comma, not a full stop.  

— David Mann

CREDITS

CONCEPTUALISER | Shanell Winlock-Pailman
DRAMATURG | Namatshego Khutsoane
PERFORMERS | Shanell Winlock-Pailman, Billy Langa & Namatshego Khutsoane

With thanks to Pastor Hubert Tiger

Using theatremaker Mallika Taneja’s guest performance Be Careful, and the global Women Walk at Midnight project as a springboard, this In Conversation between Taneja and Maboneng Community Policing Forum member Duduzile Maseko covers the act of challenging fear, patriarchy, and the limitations imposed on women’s freedom of movement in public spaces. 

Moderated by The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s co-founder and director, Bronwyn Lace, the conversation begins with a simple question: Why do you do what you do? 

For Taneja, the combination of a family history of migration and loss, a mother tied to a domesticity she didn’t recognise, and being born in New Dehli in a time when great theatre was happening hold the origins of her practice. Maseko cites a history of violence in her childhood home, and the resultant sense of duty and of justice she inherited as the motivation she needs to keep the streets of Maboneng and Jeppestown safe for women.  

What follows is a uniquely generative conversation that ranges from discussions around the need to unsettle conventional theatre practices to the artistic, cultural, patriarchal, and post-colonial parallels between South African and India.  

The three also discuss the notion of the feigned allyship of the city. “We encounter the city and the system daily as citizens,” says Taneja. “We can understand allyship here as men shifting from the centre, moving aside, but what is the allyship of the city? We are the city. We create that allyship. We layer new images onto the city by occupying it.” 

There are also the big, existential questions – how can women be safe? In the city and in the private home? How can young women adopt agency as a strategy against violence, as power and as necessity? 

Rather than seeking neat answers or resolutions, these questions are left to hang in the room, inviting in the audience and, by extension, the greater community of Johannesburg, to think alongside them. 

— David Mann

CREDITS

DISCUSSANTS | Mallika Taneja & Duduzile Maseko
MODERATOR | Bronwyn Lace

Money Miss Road is an In Conversation that sees award-winning Nigerian journalist and author Dele Olojede enter into a sonic a sonic call-and-response with South African vinyl selector, Nombuso Mathibela, around the theme of Money Miss Road, a Nigerian phrase that means money is wasted, thrown away, or spent on frivolous things. 

Moderated by The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s Impresario, Neo Muyanga, the conversation begins with a reflection on music as a powerful form of cultural production, and the various forms of oppression that have attempted to silence this production. “That’s why they banned things like the drum, the percussive, the choral, because it’s unifying, it’s powerful,” says Muyanga. 

This sets the tone for a conversation that rises and swells, ranging from anecdotes around the arrest of Fela Kuti to the musical legacy of Miriam Makeba. At key moments, Mathibela leaves her seat and takes her place behind the decks, selecting and mixing South African songs and sound-bites that speak to the conversation. Spikiri’s Money Talks mixed with a Free State parliamentary inquiry is one such example, while a live recording of Miriam Makeba’s Tula Dubula with Abdullah Ibrahim is another.  

Further discussion between the three touches on the idea of music as narrative, and journalism as the keeper of this narrative, as well as seeing sound bites as fragments or pieces of history that we collect and collage with. 

— David Mann

CREDITS

DISCUSSANTS | Dele Olojede & Nombuso Mathibela
MODERATOR | Neo Muyanga

The lights come up, and on stage is Mallika Taneja, bare, still, open, vulnerable, and confrontational as she stares out into the audience. 

In Taneja’s acclaimed solo performance, Be Careful, this opening moment sets the tone for a work that challenges the notion of safety as it’s prescribed and practiced in women’s lives, particularly in city spaces.

In a performance that leads with satire, but delivers a heavy pragmatic punch, this lengthy opening – this protracted moment of nudity, silence, provocation, shock, and vulnerability – both unsettles the audience and endears them to her. By the time Taneja makes her first movement – the slow, gentle act of tying up her hair – it is already a devastating performance. 

From here, she begins to put on clothing. Underwear, shorts, pants, shirts, jackets. One by one, she places items of clothing on her body, while she dialogues with us about the lived realities of women. As she speaks, the clothes become a clock, a medium, an extended metaphor, but also an absurdity, and a great sadness. 

Here, we see her labour under such a collective heaviness. It is too much to hold, to carry. She ends up buried beneath layers of clothing, her breath fogging up the visor of a motorcycle helmet, as if suffocating. 

— David Mann

CREDITS

CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Mallika Taneja
PRODUCTION MANAGER | Drishti Chawla

Incubated at the Tadpole Repertory as part of their show ‘NDLS’