In November 2025, Miami Light Project and The Centre for the Less Good Idea deepened a five-year Miami–Johannesburg exchange with an intensive performance residency at The Light Box Studio at Miami Theater Center. 
Throughout the residency, artists from South Africa and Miami co-developed new methods and material.

This weeklong exchange culminated in The Open Moment, a work-in-progress sharing that opens the studio doors to experimentation, discovery, and the first spark of new performance.

The Centre’s two artists were Pertunia Msani and Xolisile Bongwana, who presented Amazwi and The Dreamers, respectively. 

Msani’s interest is in izwi, the voice, in community. Working with the voices in the room—audience members and fellow artists alike—Msani leads an exercise in vocalisation and breath, rooted in a guided call and response. What follows is Amazwi, a choral swell, a symphony of refrains generated by the voices in the room and woven together by Msani.

In The Dreamers, Bongwana merges dance and musicality to present a layered, narrative-based performance that draws on the histories and afterlives of migration—by boat, plane, train, and foot—that is at once intimate and universal. An effective two-hander, the work is equally impactful when staged with an ensemble of performers. 

FEATURED ARTISTS:

Johannesburg – Pertunia Msani, Xolisile Bongwana & Athena Mazarakis

Miami – Britney Tokumoto, Nicole Pedraza, Nina Osoria Ahmadi, Diego Melgar, Diago León Lang, Clinton Harris, Gaiya & Junior Domingos.

This is the second year of a unique five-year international cultural exchange project. This initiative centres on extended creative residencies between Miami and Johannesburg, fostering the creation of new, innovative works through cross-cultural collaboration.

The partnership between MLP and CFLGI is made possible by the generous support of Valerie Dillon and Dan Lewis.

Photos courtesy of Miami Light Project.

The Studio 66 project sees a collection of solo artists and collectives invited by Neuköllner Oper to workshop and present 11-minute miniature performances. The artists, who will appear in various productions during the 2025/26 season, developed these short-form performances under the artistic leadership of The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s co-founder and director, Bronwyn Lace.

These pieces offer insight into their artistic approaches – and a preview of what’s to come in the upcoming season.

The selected artists are: Scottish composer and performer Genevieve Murphy; the Dutch performance collective Club Gewalt; Berlin-based performer and singer Anthony Hüseyin; performer and musician Mara Snip; Stage director and Performer Cora Frost; theatre and jazz musician Paul‑Jakob Dinkelacker; jazz pianist and improvisational musician Niko Meinhold, and South African composer, choreographer, performer, and long-time collaborator of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Nhlanhla Mahlangu.

“Over the years, The Centre for the Less Good Idea has developed and embraced a way of working that honours both the short form and the act of collaborative making.

We believe that everyone in the room is a valid collaborator and shaper of the work. It is through this collective way of seeing and by opening up a safe space for failure that the first ideas, those good ideas with all of their complications and limitations, can emerge and be shaped into less good ideas.

The 11-minute epic, a performance that holds all of the activity, emotion, humour, triumph, and tragedy of the theatrical epic in the short form, has become a useful format through which to test new ideas. 

In the case of Studio 66, where artists are meeting for the first time, it will allow for a way of working that is spontaneous, collaborative, and uniquely generative.” – Bronwyn Lace, Co-founder & Director, The Centre for the Less Good Idea

Photographer | Peter van Heesen

In July, The Centre for the Less Good Idea participated in Folding the Sea into Dresses That Dissolve Like Salt, a group exhibition by Perasma on the Greek island of Leros. 

As part of the exhibition, The Centre’s Impresario, Neo Muyanga, along with Marcus Neustetter and Antonis Ntallaris, presented a conversation in music, projection, and drawing inspired by the phrase, “Des ti vazei to Katsouni” — look what makes its way through.

Loosely translated, it means "look what's making its way through the Katsouni," referring to the narrow natural cape that forms the only entrance into Lakki harbour, a passage both protective and revealing. Locals use the phrase when something unexpected or oddly perfect appears, as if the island itself has allowed something meaningful to slip through.

The saying offers a way to talk about arrivals, about what unfolds when we remain open, and about welcoming without needing to fully understand. From the traces of history embedded in stories, images, music, and architecture, to the contemporary presence of refugee camps and seasonal tourism, this expression feels more relevant than ever when engaging with Leros today.

This Leros saying became the guiding thread for Neustetter, returning with Muyanga for an improvised visual and musical exchange shaped by local voices and places. Joined by Ntallaris and local musicians, they pursued process over planning, inviting the unexpected to emerge in an evening of sound, drawing and projection.

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the TalentLAB, the Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg set up a network of associated partners, including The Centre for the Less Good Idea, committed to supporting creation. This network aims to offer artists greater international visibility and additional support, towards the development of projects selected at TalentLAB.

In June 2025, The Centre’s Momenteur, Athena Mazarakis, attended the 10th edition of TalentLAB in order to provide feedback, network opportunities, and towards providing space and potential collaborative opportunities for TalentLAB participants.

In 2021, The Centre for the Less Good Idea took part 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.

In June 2025, The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s Co-Founder and Director Bronwyn Lace formed part of the Colby College Summer Think Tank in Waterville, Maine. Curated by The Broad Museum’s Ed Patuto, the Think Tank brought together a group of cultural leaders and educators to examine new models for developing and presenting performance art across global institutions.

Photographer | Erica Wall

On Saturday 1 February 2025, The Centre for the Less Good Idea presented A Defence of the Less Good Idea, a series of short-form works – Mnquma, Commission Continua and Umthandazo – preceded by a performance-based lecture by William Kentridge.

The performances took place at The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA to a full house and were well-received by audiences and critics alike.

From 5 to 8 February 2025,William Kentridge and The Centre for the Less Good Idea took The Great Yes, The Great No, to The Wallis in Beverly Hills, California.

Kentridge’s experimental production is an intensively collaborative work. Born from a process of creative exchange with The Centre for the Less Good Idea, The Great Yes, the Great No sees Kentridge collaborating with theatre-maker Phala Ookeditse Phala, dramaturg Mwenya Kabwe, choral conductor and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu, costume designer Greta Goiris, set designer Sabine Theunissen, and the production’s chorus of seven women who, along with Mahlangu, contribute to the deep musical structure of the work.

The Great Yes, The Great No is part play, part Greek chorus, part chamber opera – all interwoven with Kentridge’s signature surrealist visuals. A project of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, produced by THE OFFICE performing arts + film

Photographer | Stella Olivier 

From 27 February to 2 March 2025, The Centre presented the renowned musical odyssey, African Exodus, at the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC) in New York City.

This was the North American debut of African Exodus and was incredibly well-received by audiences and critics alike.

Preceding African Exodus on the Lobby Stage each evening was Sounds of Limpopo, a free-to-the-public, two-man musical performance exploring the rhythmic patterns and sounds of the natural world using an array of instruments and bodily percussion. 

Also part of the programme at PAC was an In Conversation between Senegalese philosopher and scholar Souleymane Bachir Diagne, and Impresario for the Less Good Idea, Neo Muyanga, which followed the February 28th performance. Leveraging off the themes of identity, culture, and migration implicit in African Exodus, and its performance debut in North America, Muyanga and Diagne discussed, among other things, the shared musical traditions between Africa and the United States of America, and the history of migration between the two.

Photographer | Stephanie Berger