WHAT'S ON AT THE CENTRE | APRIL - MAY 2025
AT THE CENTRE
- COLLATION 1 | ON AIR: VISUAL RADIO PLAYS
- COLLATION 2 | SOUNDING PICTURES: LIVE SCORES TO SHORT SILENT FILMS
SO Academy
THE CENTRE OUTSIDE THE CENTRE
- ABOUT
- 2025
- CFLGI x FONDATION CARTIER (2024)
- 2024
- 2023
- 2022
- 2021
- 2020
- 2019
FOR ONCE
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THE TEAM
About

The Centre for the Less Good Idea is an interdisciplinary incubator space for the arts based in Maboneng, Johannesburg

WHAT'S ON AT THE CENTRE | APRIL - MAY 2025
AT THE CENTRE
- COLLATION 1 | ON AIR: VISUAL RADIO PLAYS
- COLLATION 2 | SOUNDING PICTURES: LIVE SCORES TO SHORT SILENT FILMS
SO Academy
THE CENTRE OUTSIDE THE CENTRE
- ABOUT
- 2025
- CFLGI x FONDATION CARTIER (2024)
- 2024
- 2023
- 2022
- 2021
- 2020
- 2019
FOR ONCE
Season Archive
Tickets
SO | ACADEMY BOOKINGS
THE TEAM
About

CONSIDERED 3 MINUTES

In February and March of 2020, The Centre for the Less Good Idea was in the final phases of development toward a live performance showing of Season 7. As the pandemic and its impacts became a reality, we decided to shift gears from staged performances to performance films. This move was hugely informative and demanded a different kind of thinking and framing. In addition to making elements of Season 7 available online, we launched The Long Minute, a series of short, online video fragments of text, performance, image, and dance from the studios and homes of artists. In Series 1 and 2 of The Long Minute, we have shared over 100 short mobile-phone films from artists across the world, as a collection these miniature pieces capture and express what it is to be a contemporary artist in this very particular moment.

For October, as a result of The Long Minute and in response to the challenge of making extremely short form work, The Centre decided to engage a number of Johannesburg based artists to collaboratively devise and extend the seeds of their ideas in to ‘Considered 3 Minute’ films. Members of The Centre’s core, collaborative team, Phala O. Phala (animateur), Shruthi Nair (production manager), Dimakatso Motholo (stage manager and administrator), Zain Vally (sound engineer), and Noah Cohen (director of photographer) have collaborated with the artists to produce this series. Bronwyn Lace has curated The Long Minute and continues to collaborate on the direction on the ‘Considered 3 Minute’ series.

ETINSIMBINI

Micca Manganye and Volley Nchabeleng are Johannesburg-based musicians and percussionists. Both artists are interested in the relationship between work and play.

This Considered 3 Minute is titled ‘eTinsimbini’, which is loosely translated as ‘the place of steel’.

Concept & Creation | Micca Manganye and Volley Nchabeleng
Video Editor & Director of Photography | Noah Cohen
Sound Recorder & Mixer | Zain Vally
Curator of The Considered 3 Minutes | Bronwyn Lace

SLEEP READING

Elma Motloenya, a dancer, performing artist, and pantsula. Elma’s broader body of work is interested in the complex and multi-faceted narratives of South African women, as well as the inherent language of the body in motion.

‘Sleep Reading’ is a Considered 3 Minutes by Motloenya in collaboration with The Centre for the Less Good Idea.

SONNET 25

Michael Mazibuko is an actor and theatre-maker who works across stage and television. With a keen interest in classical theatrical texts and a background in the works of Shakespeare, Mazibuko often experiments with theatrical monologue and the boundaries of text and language in the realms of performance.

In this Considered 3 Minutes, Mazibuko explores the universality of Shakespeare with Sonnet 25.

Phala O Phala, Animateur for The Centre for the Less Good Idea acted as Dramaturg to these three minutes and says: “Here, Michael mines for the deep contextual meaning in translations into isiZulu. It becomes a firsthand example of how language grants or denies access to material conditions; how language both privileges and oppresses. He draws analytic illumination from the power of story and language as he tackles the sonnet in the fashion of Sol Plaatje’s anecdote of 'translation is the looking glass of interpretation.’”

SPOONS

Thabo Rapoo is a dancer, choreographer, musician, and performing artist.

In this Considered 3 Minutes, Rapoo attempts to breathe life in to two spoons – to make them dance. He attempts to transfer his embodied energy into that of two inanimate objects and is surprised at the extent to which two wooden spoons can make him sweat. Rapoo cites the act of observation as a crucial factor to his creative process, as a result, much of his work is concerned with human nature – how we move, various forms of non-verbal communication, labour, exercise, fatigue, energy and play.

RE-MEMBERING

Slindile Mthembu is an award-winning playwright, director, dramaturg, and theatre-maker.

This Considered 3 Minutes is a collaboration between Mthembu and Thembinkosi Mavimbela. Prior to this work, as part of The Long Minute series, we shared a version of ‘Re-membering’ by Mthembu which was an act of editing existing staged performance into the confines of a minute. There, Mthembu explored the staging of memory through the lived experience of black women.

In Mthembu’s words: “Is it possible to erase memory from a black female body? ‘Re-membering’ is a conversation with an oppressor. As a response to retrieving past memories through the representation of the complex, racialised, sexualised dissection of the black female body. Here I stage the lived experiences of black womanhood that can dramatise issues of gender, race, and class discrimination that are experienced on multiple levels by black women living in post-colonial South Africa. My creative process seeks to collapse habitual, chronological, and often one-dimensional narratives depicting black women and their lives.”

THE PROCESS

Teresa Phuti Mojela is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, and Katlego Chale is a writer, actor, and lecturer.

This Considered 3 Minutes from the two artists asks: What happens when we meditate together?

Mojela and Chale enter the space and listen. To each other, to all that is around them, within them and beyond them. Guided by a range of limitless stimuli, each responds through action to inscribe on a canvas the fragments passing through the space-time continuum that emerges through their perceptive stillness. They attempt to reach the state which Zarilli describes as "standing still while not standing still". Mojela inscribes through and with the body as Chale uses the pen and whatever his hands may find. This meditation of communion is called ‘The Process’.

Between process and meditation, creation arises.
Meditation is listening.
Listening requires openness.
Openness allows connection.
Connection builds community.
Community takes communion.
Communion breeds spirit.
Spirit enables breath.
Breath unearths voice.
Voice shapes desire.
Desire births hope.
Hope breeds faith.
Faith demands discipline.
Discipline by meditation…
Meditation is listening.

YOU OR ME

LOLIWE | LABOUR DEVOURED BY THE RAILWAY

Vuyani Feni is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and researcher of iDadla (gumboot dancing).

In this Considered 3 Minutes we find Feni conjuring his ancestors, those who laboured on the railway lines of South Africa. Here he recreates the sounds and silhouettes of toiling by his bloodline. Simultaneously he embodies ‘Loliwe’ – the train, Feni’s haunting and vulnerable rendition of the song ‘Noyana’ calls to mind movement and migration, as well as the ceaseless cycle of young bodies arriving eager and full of energy and returning home tired, diseased and awaiting death.

UMTHUNGO

Vusi Mdoyi is a dancer, teacher, choreographer, artistic director, and pantsula.

Umthongo is a Considered 3 Minutes that grapples with abstract notions of identity and origin through performance.

In Mdoyi’s words: “Umthungo (Stitch) forms part of a chapter of my current research into performance. It is a grappling with questions such as: ‘Who am I?’ ‘What is of me?’ and ‘What is mine?’.

I was born aboard a train, entering a moving world naked and to a mother who was unprepared for this moment. I’ve been told the birth was messy but that the fellow passengers helped my mother, offering her what they had in the form of clothes to cover us up.

When we sew, the machine jams; materials pucker; the edges of seams catch – this is all what it means to mend and stitch. Only when we turn clothing inside out do we achieve a clean stitch.

This piece explores the threads connecting me to my birth story. The fabrics that kept me warm. The stitch as the needed fix. The metaphor of being inside-out. To fix is to stitch from within. The true mend is inside. The helping hands when you least expect them.

‘Sithunge kau’! impilo ngu’mthungo!’ (Stitch yourself brother, life is a seam).”

STITCHES

Jabulani Vilakazi is a dancer and teacher, and Thulani Chauke is a contemporary dancer, choreographer, and artist.

This Considered 3 Minutes is an exploration of touch and healing. In response to the greatest global health challenge in 100 years, the artists call to our attention the psychological impact in its wake.

Vilakazi began his career in Orange Farm with a community group and furthered his training with Moving Into Dance Mopathong. Chauke began his career at Jabavu Anti-Crime Youth Aids Awareness and has enjoyed a prolific career over the past 20 years. Most recently Chauke has performed in William Kentridge’s The Head and the Load and Waiting for Sybil.

FETCH

Julia Zenzie Burnham and Teresa Phuti Mojela fulfil a multitude of roles in the art world as performers, choreographers, teachers, mentors, and founders of their own projects and productions.

This Considered 3 Minutes is an ongoing investigation – a thinking through movement in an attempt to find alternative languages and deepen our awareness.

Fetch seeks to investigate and perhaps even embody abuse. Focusing on the relationship between the presence of abuse and the person facing abuse, the artists are interested in the manifestation of abuse within intimate relationships and the home. In this search so far, the artists have found the presence of intimacy, power, submission, repetition, and exhaustion.

Burnham began her career at a young age with various groups in the Alexandra Township, and has gone on to develop her career through working with Moving Into Dance Mophatong, Vuyani Dance Theatre, and the Dance Factory to name a few. More recently she has travelled the world performing with The Head and the Load by William Kentridge, and Giselle by Dada Masilo.

Mojela began her career with Township Mirror Theatre Group based in Tembisa. She went on to study drama and dance and has worked with Vuyani Dance Theatre and Moving Into Dance Mophatong. More recently, Mojela has been travelling as a key performer in William Kentridge’s Waiting for Sibyl.