In 2021, William Kentridge was the featured artist of the Red Bridge Festival, which resulted in collaborations with the Philharmonie, installations at Mudam, and performances at the Grand Théâtre: three of Luxembourg’s major cultural institutions.

Leveraged off this event was The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s participation in the Red Bridge Festival, through The TalentLAB, and an invitation was extended to The Centre to co-curate and participate in, a cross-disciplinary laboratory, festival and training programme.

Through TalentLAB, established in 2016, artists across the disciplines of opera, theatre and dance are ordinarily selected and are brought to Luxembourg to incubate a new work for a period of approximately two weeks, resulting in a scratch performance. With the invitation of Kentridge and The Centre, however, the programme grew to facilitate a number of different workshops and mentorships, with the hopes of being exposed to and benefitting from the interdisciplinary and experimental methodologies of The Centre.

Launching the TalentLAB was an introductory talk by Director of The Centre, Bronwyn Lace, who unpacked both the history of The Centre and the development of its ways of working over the years. Four short, sharp staged works were then presented by The Centre, namely Godo-logue in Gauteng, Footnotes, Plunge Avatar and Commission Continua. Selected from The Centre’s 5th and 7th Seasons of work, the performances sought to present new ways of thinking and making performance. Collectively, the pieces are generators of text and composition, engaging with the themes of language, land, power, displacement, the body, desire, bureaucracy and isolation, all of them providing valuable insight into the kind of work being produced by The Centre and its network of collaborators.

As part of The Centre’s participation in TalentLAB programme, a selection of four artists – Bongile Lecoge-Zulu, Zarcia Zacheus, Iman Isaacs and Micca Manganye – were invited to begin the workshop process and to develop a work in response to the provocation of breath and breathing again. Led by Lecoge-Zulu, the artists entered into a process of enacting the involuntary action that seeks to stage the ultimate source of energy, vitality and life.

While many of the ideas and concepts of the fellow participants were already thought out and, in some cases, tested beforehand, The Centre made full-use of the workshop format, the space and the mentors to generate and test a brand-new work. Here, The Centre’s core methodologies – collaboration, play, process and the pursuit of the emergent incidental – became most apparent. Lecoge-Zulu and her team developed the scratch performance, Breath Refrain which, in the spirit of the workshops was not a fully realised work, but rather an open rehearsal of a performance in process. As such, many of the ideas, gestures and meditations from this work ended up informing the ideas and approaches of The Centre’s 8th Season.

Lecoge-Zulu remained on for the duration of the TalentLAB programme and was joined by a fellow collaborator of The Centre, Thandazile Sonia Radebe, who worked as a mentor and choreographer for the programme.

In addition to his installations, performances and showings of works including Ursonate, The Moment Has Gone and Paper Music, a number of talks and workshops were given by Kentridge, Lace and fellow collaborators of The Centre including dancer, theatre-maker and composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu with whom Kentridge collaborated on his opera project Waiting for the Sibyl, along with composer and pianist Kyle Shepherd.

Kentridge also participated in feedback sessions with The TalentLAB participants in the lead-up to the scratch performances, further sharing some of The Centre’s key ways of working – embracing play, risk and failure as essential parts of the process.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

CURATOR | Brownyn Lace
ADMINISTRATOR | Dimakatso Motholo

PHOTOGRAPHER | Bohumil Kostohryz