In July 2019, The Centre for the Less Good Idea participated in the Holland Festival, the largest international performing arts festival of the Netherlands and one of the oldest festivals of Europe.

For two weeks, the Frascati theatre became the home of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an intervention leveraged off an invitation to founder of The Centre, William Kentridge to participate in the Holland Festival’s programming. One larger theatre and two smaller theatres were effectively translated into the spaces of The Centre, housing works, installations and exhibitions of work from The Centre’s previous Seasons.

The performance programme was made up of, Enyangeni, Requiem Request, Ursonate, and Defence of the Less Good Idea, with the latter giving way to a performance of Blind Mass Orchestra, a work that allowed for moments of rich collaboration between South African and Dutch performers. Season 4’s performance installation Vehicle was reinstalled, with Dutch violinist Diamanda La Berge replacing Kyle Shepherd to perform alongside Shane Cooper, another cross-continental collaboration that ultimately added to the work, eliciting new sounds and ways of engaging with the vehicle as object and instrument.

Finally, the Invisible Exhibition occupied a room at the Frescati, with The Centre’s Augmented Reality works as well as its 360 Virtual Reality performances curated in a way that was able to provide a sense of place and atmosphere of downtown Johannesburg, and demonstrated The Centre’s unique approach to new media – the lack of reliance on digital editing and the dedicated use of performance inside of this technology.

It was a challenging programme that was very well received. Positive responses came in the form of reviews (notably The New York Times), feedback from audiences and festival directors, and through word-of-mouth at the festival. After performing to about 60% capacity on opening night, The Centre’s performance programme garnered 100% capacity on the second evening and continued to perform to capacity audiences throughout its run.

While the works staged as part of The Centre’s performance programme are distinct, often employing modes of performance and grappling with subject matters that are unique to South Africa, they nonetheless hold universal notions, subtly communicated through performance. The works performed at The Holland Festival were chosen in part for their ability to illustrate The Centre’s interests and ways of working, but the idea was not to simply replicate these performances. Rather, it was to expand upon them and to open them up to further development and collaboration.

Another marker of success, and one of The Centre’s core aims, is that the performances at the Holland Festival brought opportunities to the participating artists. Other global festivals in attendance reached out to artists, subsequently extending opportunities and invitations to perform further abroad.

Throughout the festival, there were also a number of public talks in which Kentridge was involved, many of them coinciding with a solo exhibition of his film work, exhibited at Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum. Also opening at the time was The Head & The Load, the talks for which allowed Kentridge to highlight and better contextualise the role of The Centre in its workshop and rehearsal phases.

– David Mann

CREDITS FOR HOLLAND FESTIVAL:

CURATOR | Brownyn Lace
ADMINISTRATOR | Dimakatso Motholo

The Octopus Programme is a guided research-based educational programme that encourages artistic research and production-based collaborations across academies and art institutions; students and professionals; diverse presentation modes; and processes of research and documentation in different geographies.

Since the inception of The Octopus Programme in 2019/2020, The Centre for the Less Good Idea has been a consistent collaborator and partner, with both organisations consciously and consistently working on the periphery of contemporary artistic practice, research and methodology.

The main phase of The Octopus Programme took place in 2020/2021 and saw partnership with University of Applied Arts Vienna; Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunis; Konstfack – University College of Arts, Crafts, Stockholm; Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation; The University of Pretoria, Pretoria; The Centre for The Less Good Idea, Johannesburg; Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah; Birzeit University, Birzeit; the Palestinian Museum, Birzeit; SAHA Association, Istanbul; Publics; and Saastamoinen Foundation, Helsinki.

Occupying these peripheral spaces, while still being connected by central cultural and artistic institutions such as The University of Applied Arts Vienna or The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, became an important contributing factor to the way the programme was curated, and how it brought together various participants and partners from across the globe.

For the main phase of the programme, 12 artists/participants from Europe, the Mediterranean and Africa were selected, with the two South African-based participants being selected by The Centre. Over the course of the programme, the participants took part in peer-to-peer educational sessions, online and class discussions, research field-trips, workgroups, collaborative production-based workshops and lectures, as well as the two-semester course, Spectral Encounters. The Centre’s director Bronwyn Lace was also one of the nine curators and facilitators of the programme. Lace, along with The Centre’s founder William Kentridge, and its animateur, Phala Ookeditse Phala, participated in a number of talks, lectures, and presentations as part of the programme.

From 10 to 16 April 2022, the 12 participants travelled to Johannesburg, South Africa, where they visited the University of Pretoria, The Cradle of Humankind, and were able to spend two generative days at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, participating in The Centre’s ideation workshops for it’s 9th Season of work – a season premised on the theme and provocation of ‘translation’.

Here, the Octopus Programme participants were able to share their work with the The Centre’s participating artists, as well as participate in the processes and methodologies of the ideation workshop. By participating in the morning warm-ups and workshop exercises, the Octopus Programme participants were active and engaged in the particular processes and methodologies of The Centre, and were able to engage in the collaborative, experimental and incidental ways of working that have become synonymous with The Centre. In addition to the contribution of their ideas and approaches, the presence of several ‘foreign-language’ speakers from the Octopus Programme also provided a unique contribution to the space and the way participants were able to think about the act, the process and the project of translation.

Reflecting on these two days, Lace explains that, despite the various geographical, linguistic and cultural differences, what was most evident was “that we shared a culture of empathy, intimacy and trust. That we prized questioning and risk-taking over being polished or complete and that, rather than insisting artists are correct or complete, we simply asked artists to be present. I believe it is due to this shared approach that the resulting two short but intensive days together were generative and generous for both the organisations and the artists.”

The Octopus Programme concluded with the Octopus exhibition at Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab. Curated by Basak Senova, the Octopus also featured artworks, talks and performance lectures from certain guest lecturers who have influenced the programme, including The Centre’s William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace.

Finally, a collaboration between Senova and the Octopus Programme participants saw the creation of seven booklets, each one reflecting on a central theme that emerged over the course of the programme. The series of booklets was launched at the Octopus exhibition.

– David Mann

The publication derives from Collectively, an international forum with 80 participants on the art of thinking, working and living together, organised at Konstnärsnämnden in Stockholm from 24 to 26 May 2019. The contribution of texts in this publication is a polyphony of the participants’ different voices, perspectives and reflections.

“If art collectives, and the various forms of collective practice in the field of culture, are often understood in opposition to the artist as individual genius, echoing non-hierarchical forms of organisations and alternative ways of living, today this form is not necessarily a synonym of subversion or emancipation. Parallel to recent developments of network technologies, many collective methods and values have been assimilated by engineering, management, marketing, and by most contemporary political ideologies. It becomes necessary to inquire into how collective practices can foster better social understandings, encourage new forms of solidarity, and improve living conditions for everyone.”

The forum was conceived as a self-organised sharing space: the relations between participants were developed through various scores, instructions and protocols proposed to be tested together. During the day, workshops were also led by the participants. Each day ended with a dinner and evening of performances, screenings and talks. Collectively created an environment to test, share, learn and unlearn different forms of knowledge and life tactics, a space to present unforeseen associations between a diversity of contemporary practices and to speculate on the hopes they generated.

With texts by: Grégory Castéra, Sebastian Dahlqvist, Ravi Govender, Laura Huertas Millán, k.ö.k, Bronwyn Lace, Georgy Mamedov, Ana Mendes, Johan Pousette, farid rakun, Frida Sandström, Werker Collective and WochenKlausur.

More information here.