On 13 September 2023, co-founders of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Bronwyn Lace and William Kentridge, travelled to Rhode Island, USA, to deliver a lecture by Kentridge at Brown University’s Martinos, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts.

In the hour-long lecture, titled ‘Finding the Less Good Idea’, Kentridge begins by reflecting on his journey as an artist – a journey that gave rise to the pursuit of the less good idea – and speaks about the founding of The Centre for the Less Good Idea in 2016.

It is the making of The Great YES, the Great NO, Kentridge’s latest theatre project, that becomes the main focus of the lecture. Here, Kentridge gives insight into the background and development of the work, and how key ideas and associations in the work have been drawn from experiments and discoveries made at The Centre – the women’s chorus from the Season 7 work, Umthandazo and the loudhailer duet from Season 4’s Surplus Circus being two such examples.

Also outlined in the lecture is the Pepper’s Ghost mechanism, which both Kentridge and The Centre have been using as a device for the generation of new work since late 2019.

In February 2024, The Centre for the Less Good Idea will travel to Brown University’s Martinos, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts to incubate new works using the artistic strategies and ways of working that have been developed using the Pepper’s Ghost.

In July and August 2023, members of The Centre travelled to Benin for a workshop for Moving Pictures, Controversial Memories (CINEMAF), an ongoing collaborative project of which The Centre is part.

This workshop involves artistic, historical and anthropological research into still and moving images of Dahomey (now Benin) from the 1930s, made as part of a larger project, the Archives of the Planet, funded by French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn (1860 – 1940).

It extends the research developed as part of the CINEMAF project, the aim of which is to initiate multidisciplinary reflection (ethnology, film studies, history of representations, visual arts) by researchers, artists and those in charge of collections in French, South African and Beninese heritage institutions on the issues of analysis, remediation and reuse of filmic material produced in controversial historical contexts.

This new phase of research is rooted in the eponymous seminar (2021-2022 & 2022-2023), and the workshop held in August 2022 at the Centre For The Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, South Africa which offered the opportunity to carry out artistic research on the archival images from Dahomey.

The originality of this critical re-reading of the images was generated by the epistemic decentring of the artistic approach and by the privileged dialogue between players on the Beninese and South African cultural scenes. The aim is to build an artistic and scientific dialogue that crosses perspectives on controversial memories of the past: post-colonialism, post-apartheid and post-socialism. It seeks to renew the issues of analysis, remediation and reuse of photographic and filmic materials produced in controversial historical contexts, and has two complementary strands:

- Experimentation with new research protocols and dialogues built around Beninese photographic and filmic corpuses from the 1930s, studied jointly by researchers, museum professionals and artists.

- Comparing artistic and anthropological research on the image corpus, in order to reflect together on the question of the ethics of images produced in colonial contexts and the ways in which they are rewritten and transmitted to the societies in which they were made.

This workshop, in Porto-Novo, aims to renew this reflexive approach to anthropological bodies of work with the society that these images represent, in the places filmed almost a hundred years ago. This renewed knowledge of colonial archive images will be shared with heritage partners (musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac; musée départemental Albert-Kahn ; École du patrimoine africain [EPA] in Benin), artistic research centres (Centre for the Less Good Idea in South Africa and the Ouadada Centre in Benin) and universities (University of Abomey Calavi; University of Paris 8/Vincennes, Saint-Denis; University of Paris-X Nanterre; University of Central Europe).

Present in the Archives de la Planète, are the Zangbeto. The Zangbeto are traditional voodoo guardians of the night among the Ogu (or Egun) people of Benin, Togo and Nigeria. A traditional police and security institution, the Zangbeto cult is charged with the maintenance of law and order, and ensures safety and security within Ogu communities. They are highly revered and act as an unofficial police force patrolling the streets, watching over people and their properties, and tracking down criminals and presenting them to the community to punish.

On 1 August 2023, (Independence Day in Benin), after first encountering them in a 93-year-old image, we came across Zangbeto on the streets of Porto-Novo.

WORKSHOP ORGANISERS | Didier Marcel HOUENOUDE (Abomey-Calavi), Bronwyn LACE (Vienna/Johannesburg) & Anna SEIDERER (Paris).

PARTICIPANTS | Christine BARTHE (Paris); Gérard BASSALE, (Porto-Novo) ; Gaëlle BEAUJEAN (Paris); Magali DUFAU (Toulouse); Adewolé FALADE, (Cotonou/Vienne) ; Julien FAURE-CONORTON, (Boulogne) ; Pélagie GBAGUIDI (Brussels); Monica HEINTZ (Paris); Vusi MDOYI (Johannesburg); Angelo MOUSTAPHA (Brussels/Benin); Nthabiseng MALAKA (Johannesburg); Franck OGOU (Porto-Novo); Damiana OTOIU (Bucarest); Zain VALLY (Johannesburg); Khadija VON ZINNENBURG CARROLL (Vienna).

IMAGE CREDITS:

1930s archival image of Zangbeto (left): Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine. Still taken from film by Frédéric Gadmer.

2023 image of the Zangbeto (right) by Nthabiseng Malaka.

In May 2023 at the Forum des Images in Paris, The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s co-founder and director Bronwyn Lace was a featured speaker at the 2023 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) Education Forum.

ISEA, a major event on the global electronic art scene, aims to strengthen the dialogue between artists, researchers, engineers, designers and entrepreneurs from the cultural and creative industries who participate in the advances of research and creation.

The 28th edition of ISEA, co-organised by Le Cube Garges and the École des Arts Décoratifs, took place in Paris at the Forum des Images from 16 to 21 May 2023, as well as through an artistic programme spread over 80 partner cultural venues throughout France in spring-summer 2023.

Portrait of Bronwyn Lace by Adine Sagalyn.

“If we can’t find the bodies, or exhume the bodies, how do we fetch the spirits? If we don’t know where and when their deaths happened, where do we go to mourn? We compose songs from messages we received as fragments from our dreams and deep thoughts to bring their spirits hither through ingoma – song, vibration, dance and rhythm. We know they have left their footprints in the sand, in the water, in the air and in the ether.” – Sbusiso Shozi

On 24 and 25 February, African Exodus made its international debut at the SCHALL&RAUSCH – FESTIVAL FÜR BRANDNEUES MUSIKTHEATER in Berlin, Germany.

Each performance of African Exodus was accompanied by an iteration of the Surplus Circus, which saw the German opera world meeting up with South African musicians in an experimental and free-spirited dialogue of music and performance, using the strategies and methodologies of The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

Written and composed by Sbusiso Shozi, and directed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu, African Exodus is a musical odyssey about the history of African migration, where the music of the continent becomes a tool for retracing, or perhaps redrawing, the footsteps of the Bantu people that have long since been lost to history.

African Exodus emerges out of a long history of play, experimentation and collaboration at The Centre, beginning with an early iteration of the work in 2018, subsequently expanded through Uhambo, Imizwa Nomsindo! in 2021.

Ahead of the run in Berlin, SO | The Academy for the Less Good Idea invited Sbusiso Shozi, Nhlanhla Mahlangu and the cast of African Exodus to give insight into the creation of the work through HOW | Showing the Making: African Exodus.

Also on 25 February, The Centre’s co-founder & director, Bronwyn Lace, and director of African Exodus, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, were in conversation with researcher and philosopher Mirjam Schaub, as they discussed experimental opera in the public conversation POP&EXPERIMENT, held at the Pepsi Boston Bar at SchwuZ.

CREDITS:

WRITER, COMPOSER, MUSICAL DIRECTOR & PRODUCER | Sbusiso Shozi
DIRECTOR | Nhlanhla Mahlangu
PERFORMERS | Sbusiso Shozi, Thabo Gwadiso, Simphiwe Skhakhane, Thulani Zwane, Dikeledi Modubu, Lindokuhle Thabede & Isaac Kenny Mahlodi Rakotsoane
MUSICIANS | Yogin Sullaphen & Volley Nchabeleng
LIGHTING DESIGNER | Wesley France
SOUND ENGINEER | Zain Vally
STAGE MANAGER | Dimakatso Motholo

Photographs by Anna-Louise Rolland

In conjunction with The Broad’s special exhibition, William Kentridge: In Praise Of Shadows, on view from February to April 2023, What Beautiful Space Tomorrow featured a performance by curator, mentor, and frequent collaborator at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu and a screening of Kentridge's short film Second Hand Reading.

Taking place on Saturday 18 February, attendees had the opportunity to participate in a “mad chorus” using Kentrige’s rubrics on view in the exhibition and seen in Second Hand Reading and inspired by Lecoge-Zulu’s performance of Godot-logue in LA, a site-specific iteration of Godot-logue in Gauteng, created with Calvin Ratladi and first performed for The Centre’s 5th Season in 2019.

In addition to the performance, there were audience activations and discussions led by Founding Director of The Space for Creative Black Imagination Raél Jerro Salley with Black Lives Matter co-founder and Crenshaw Dairy Mart co-founder Patrisse Cullors, interdisciplinary theater scholar and practitioner Zachary Price, The Broad’s Curator and Publications Manager Ed Schad, and Lecoge-Zulu.

PHOTOGRAPHER | Nina Leiska