FEBRUARY 2024 | BROWN UNIVERSITY RESIDENCY | RHODE ISLAND, USA

In February 2024, The Centre for the Less Good Idea began its international programming for the year with a semester-long invitation by Brown University to re-examine complex histories through image and performance. This included performances of Houseboy, and a Pepper’s Ghost collaborative residency at Brown University, Rhode Island, USA.

HOUSEBOY

PUBLIC PERFORMANCES | 9-10 FEBRUARY 2024
THE LINDEMANN PERFORMING ARTS CENTER

Developed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, South Africa, and directed by William Kentridge, Houseboy is based on the 1956 novel by Cameroonian diplomat Ferdinand Oyono. Told through the diary of the protagonist Toundi Ondoua, Houseboy makes use of an ensemble cast to explore themes of narrative history, archival memory, and post-colonial identity through the lens of the colonised. A large backdrop produced by Kentridge – palm trees and dense foliage in black – sets the scene, and each character remains present on stage throughout, facing the audience in a Brechtian delivery, while myriad live percussive sounds from just off stage punctuate and set the pace of the narrative. 

The performances of Houseboy inspired an experimental response from the Wilbury Theatre Group titled Who is the Houseboy?

CREDITS

TEXT | Ferdinand Oyono
DIRECTOR & SET DESIGNER | William Kentridge
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR | Phala Ookeditse Phala
CHORUS DIRECTOR | Nhlanhla Mahlangu
COSTUME DESIGNER | Greta Goiris
PERFORMERS | Alfred Motlhapi, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Sello Ramolahloane, Katlego Letsholonyane, William Harding, Neil McCarthy, Sue Pam-Grant, Buhle Mazibuko & Sibahle Mangena
MUSICIANS | Micca Manganye & Volley Nchabeleng
ADDITIONAL VOICES | Makudupanyane Senaoana, Anathi Conjwa & Bronwyn Lace
FABRICATOR | Emmanuelle Erhart
LIGHTING & PRODUCTION MANAGER | Brandon Boyd
SOUND ENGINEER | Zain Vally
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER | Dimakatso Motholo
STAGE MANAGER | Mego Williams
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT | Jessica Jones

“UNE VIE DE BOY” by Ferdinand OYONO-© Copyright Julliard 1956

Co-Produced By
The Centre for the Less Good Idea
THE OFFICE performing arts + film

Special thanks:

Linda Leibowitz, Natalie Dembo, Anne McIlleron, Anne Blom, Damon Garstang, Chris-Waldo de Wet, Jacques van Staden, Joey Netshiombo, Diego Sillands, Thandi Mzizi Nkabinde & Wesley France

THINKING IN PEPPER’S GHOST

RESIDENCY | 14–21 FEBRUARY 2024
PUBLIC SHOWINGS | 22–23 FEBRUARY 2024
FISHMAN STUDIO, PERRY AND MARTY GRANOFF CENTER FOR THE CREATIVE ARTS

Following two weeks of residency work on campus, in collaboration with Brown students, scholars, subject matter experts, and arts community members, The Centre for the Less Good Idea shared two public showings of their Pepper’s Ghost exploration on campus.

Named after John Henry Pepper, who popularised it in 1862, Pepper’s Ghost is a theatrical illusion technique that uses a half-silvered mirror to create a hologram-esque figure. At the Brown Art Institute, The Centre expanded on this image-based technique to create illusory performative and narrative presentations, as live physical and musical performance interact with video installation.

12 brand-new works were created at the Brown Art Institute — a space that became a home for experimentation without pressure, but with a great momentum and collective, collaborative spirit. Here, generative play, exploration, and a deep interrogation of archival materials with contemporary modes of engagement allowed for four programmes of short-form work to be performed and tested before live audiences.

“With this residency, we are interested in seeing if the way we work — a reliance on being open to what emerges in the process of rehearsal, among other things — resonates further than Johannesburg,” said The Centre’s founder, William Kentridge, ahead of the residency. “So connections with outside institutions such as Brown are important to us.”

What emerged was a collective ownership of the work in the room, driven in equal parts by The Centre’s unique methodologies, and the process of working within The Pepper’s Ghost, a device that pushes the boundaries of sharing and creating new work.

Further reflections from participants involved the ability of the device to allow people to look at themselves with wonder and amazement, or through a way if seeing that is at once personal and collective. It creates a space for one to engage with and consume oneself, without fear of judgement or failure.

CENTRE PRODUCTION:

FOUNDER | William Kentridge
CO-FOUNDER & DIRECTOR | Bronwyn Lace
IMPRESARIO | Neo Muyanga
MOMENTEUR | Athena Mazarakis
DIRECTOR OF CINEMATOGRAPHY & EDITING | Noah Cohen
VIDEO COMPOSITOR | Octavia Sonyane 
SCENOGRAPHER & COSTUME DESIGNER | Nthabiseng Malaka
WRITER & COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER | David Mann
LIGHTING & PRODUCTION MANAGER | Brandon Boyd
SOUND ENGINEER | Zain Vally
HOLDER & STAGE MANAGER | Dimakatso Motholo

Production Acknowledgements: Produced by THE CENTRE FOR THE LESS GOOD IDEA.
 
Special thanks:

Linda Leibowitz, Natalie Dembo, Anne McIlleron, Anne Blom, Damon Garstang, Jessica Jones, Chris-Waldo de Wet, Jacques van Staden, Joey Netshiombo, Diego Sillands, Thandi Mzizi Nkabinde & Wesley France

PEPPER’S GHOST PERFORMANCES | BROWN ART INSTITUTE

PROGRAMME 1

WHISPER GATHERER

A work that grew out of an organic response to engaging with archival footage, Whisper Gatherer is a simple and discerning solo work.

By situating herself in a silent, looped clip from the Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine, Anathi Conjwa enters the archive and begins her interpretation of what is being said, done, and communicated there.

It is an attempt that fails, productively. Full of deliberate false starts and misreadings, Conjwa’s inability to accurately translate and make sense of what she is encountering in the moving image becomes a moment of collective frustration and hilarity, and a profound performative statement on the complexities at play when one attempts to engage the archive.

Finally, it’s a work that employs humour and play to push back at the authority that these archives were locked in or made under.

CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Anathi Conjwa
FILM CREDIT | Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine

NDAA

Ndaa is a work that emerged through a process of engaging memory through storytelling, and what it means to inherit memory.

Conceptualised and performed by Kai Thomani Tshikosi, the text for Ndaa was initially developed as an MFA thesis.

Here, in the short form and hybrid analogue-digital realms of the Pepper’s Ghost, the text becomes a short-form letter to a father, using the potential of the Ghost as a means of bridging time and distance between them.

CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Kai Thomani Tshikosi

CORONATION

What are the ways in which we prepare ourselves to move through the world each day? In Coronation, Tony Miyambo puts forward a performative musing on the rituals of assimilation.

Situated to the side of the stage, Miyambo rests in a zinc bathtub full of oranges – an enduring refrain in Coronation. Slowly, he begins to wash himself with the fruit, rubbing, rolling, peeling, and squeezing. All the while, the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey sounds out through Miyambo’s small radio, with fragments of the event appearing on screen.

Playing out before us is an absurd and woeful coronation. It is the private, daily ritual of preparing oneself, rendering oneself palatable and perhaps even valuable for society.

Coronation is a performance that is equal parts compelling and discomfiting. Born from a fascination with the mass hysteria surrounding colonial events like the royal coronation, Miyambo’s work ultimately takes the form of the anti-coronation.

CONCEPTUALISERS | Tony Miyambo & Mwenya Kabwe
DIRECTOR | Mwenya Kabwe
PERFORMER | Tony Miyambo
VIDEO CREDIT | BBC TV Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II: Westminster Abbey, 1953

I AM A WELDER

Conceptualised by Rhode Island-based designer and scenographer Sara Ossana, I Am a Welder is a short, immersive performance that centres the process of world-building inside the mechanism of the Pepper’s Ghost.

Accompanied by fellow scenographer, Nthabiseng Malaka, Ossana steps into an open space and begins to craft a future that’s yet to exist. The two of them slowly introduce their tools and materials, laying them on the floor and watching them appear in the realm above them. In the mirror, a room – another world – emerges, inhabited by Athena Mazarakis who sits silently and moves slowly, observing the process and the world being built around her, like a quiet critic. Offstage, Bronwyn Lace reads a poem by Cherrie Moraga:

I am a welder.
Not an alchemist.
I am interested in the blend
of common elements to make
a common thing. 

No magic here.
Only the heat of my desire to fuse
what I already know
exists. Is possible.

Here, process is performance, and we witness the act of taking a finite tool or material to its limits. It is a process of analogue and digital techniques, conveyed with a speculative and dreamlike design.  

CONCEPTUALISER | Sara Ossana
PERFORMERS | Sara Ossana, Nthabiseng Malaka, Athena Mazarakis & Bronwyn Lace
TEXT | The Welder by Cherríe Moraga

VICE VERSA VICE

A short-form work by Sello Ramolahloane, Vice Versa Vice is a conceptual and performative engagement with history and revision.

History might not repeat, but it often echoes. Here, Ramolahloane makes use of a simple cardboard box – a receptacle for the past – and projects onto it extracts of Cry Freedom.

The past informs the present, notes are revisited and redrafted, old knowledge returns and updates. Similarly, returning to personal memory and to unfinished business becomes a way of reconciling one’s past, and righting the present.

CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Sello Ramolahloane
DIRECTOR | Tony Miyambo
FILM CREDIT | Extract from Cry Freedom (1987)

FEAST OR FAMINE

Feast or Famine, conceptualised by Bronwyn Lace as an exploration of a pre-existing work in Pepper’s Ghost, finds a new life through the Brown Art Institute residency, and finds profound expansion in the form of a performative catastrophe.

In Feast or Famine, live physical and musical performance interact with video installation in a piece that explores mortality, mourning, fragility, and transformation.

On the screen is manipulated footage taken in the basement of the Natural History Museum in Vienna in 2016. It is the carcass of an owl, slowly being picked clean by a community of beetles, its bones sighing and shifting as the insects work away. Then there is the human presence (Teresa Phuti Mojela & Brian Mertes) who, lying on the floor beneath the Pepper’s Ghost, and moving behind the glass, superimpose themselves on the footage.

In this way, she merges with the scene, writhes with the bones of the creature, bristles with the many beetles. It is a deeply affecting scene, and one made all the more compelling by the use of a pre-recorded vocal chorus – a kind of elegy for the scene we see taking place before us. But the vocals also serve as a salve for the scene.

They lend an enduring humanity to the performance, an ebb and flow of warm words and whispers spoken over bodies that are picked apart and pieced back together again.

CONCEPTUALISER & EDITOR | Bronwyn Lace
PERFORMERS | Teresa Phuti Mojela & Brian Mertes
MUSICAL COMPOSERS & PERFORMERS | Nhlanhla Mahlangu & Xolisile Bongwana
VIDEO FOOTAGE | Victor Neustetter
Thanks to The Natural History Museum,Vienna

PROGRAMME 1 CHORUS

Micca Manganye, Anathi Conjwa, Sello Ramolahloane, Katlego Letsholonyana, Dikeledi Modubu, Vusi Mdoyi & Teresa Phuti Mojela

PROGRAMME 2

GOGO

A single image becomes the backdrop and the conceptual point of departure for Dikeledi Modubu’s Gogo.  

A brief, but impactful performance, Gogo sees Modubu enter and kneel in front of the Pepper’s Ghost, evoking her ancestors. Slowly, an image develops – abstract and out of focus at first, before emerging in the frame as an image of an elder woman. Something of a spiritual exhumation, Modubu’s desire to bring her grandmother back to life momentarily, and to converse with her, to update her about her life, ultimately serves as the impulse for the work.   

Modubu converses with the image as she would her own grandmother, laughing, gossiping, questioning, tutting and doting. She leans in and kisses her on the head. It is a tender and rewarding moment in a work that is otherwise filled with the tension of yearning and separation.

CONCEPTUALISER | Dikeledi Modubu
PERFORMER | Dikeledi Modubu
PHOTO CREDIT | Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine

CARDBOARD MAN

Conceptualised and performed by Vusi Mdoyi and Micca Manganye, Cardboard Man is a deeply experimental and playful performance that makes use of the unique visual realms of the Pepper’s Ghost and the inherent musicality of the body in motion.

In Cardboard Man, Mdoyi and Manganye replicate and remix childhood games. Here, games and play become vehicles for dreaming and escaping reality, and rhythm becomes a language of its own.

In these games, they embed their childlike dreams, hopes, and ideas and in this way, the performance becomes a playful, but profound reflection on the realities of class and identity, and how this shapes one’s life from a young age.

CONCEPTUALISERS & PERFORMERS | Micca Manganye & Vusi Mdoyi

ROHAN, AIZA AND RIZWAN REUNITE

The border between India and Pakistan serves as the initial point of departure for  artist and performer, Aiza Ahmed.

Rohan, Aiza and Rizwan Reunite is the result of Ahmed’s interdisciplinary practice at work inside the Pepper’s Ghost. By bringing her paintings, puppets and drawings into the space, and embracing the incidental discoveries made in the process of  collaboration, Ahmed’s work is ultimately a multidisciplinary musing on borders, migration, and division, echoed in a simple paper headpiece she wears throughout.

The use of photographic and videographic archives lends a rich layer to the performance, as does the use of the artist’s puppets. Finally, Ahmed’s physical presence inside these images allows for a way of entering the image through performance.

PUPPET DESIGNER, SET DESIGNER, ANIMATOR, CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Aiza Ahmed
DIRECTOR | Kym Moore
DRAMATURGS | Bronwyn Lace & Athena Mazarakis
MUSIC | Hansta Hua Noorani Chehra from Parasmani (1963)
FILM CREDIT | Guards at India-Pakistan Border Perform Independence Day Ceremony via Voice of America
PHOTO CREDIT | Ed Grazda

INYONGO

Conceptualised and performed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Inyongo is an exploratory work that grapples with a branch of the same topic he’s been making sense of since childhood.

A largely analogue work that harnesses the otherworldly qualities of the Pepper’s Ghost mirror, along with the simple, but effective use of projection, Inyongo examines the effects of colonialism and apartheid on family structures.

Through the language of performance, Mahlangu puts forward a powerful reflection on how these extractive, historical forces, under the guise of civilisation and modernisation, ultimately trampled on essential parts of South African life and humanity.  

CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Nhlanhla Mahlangu
DIRECTOR | Tony Miyambo
PERFORMERS | Dikeledi Modubu, Anathi Conjwa & Katlego Letsholonyana
WRITER | Neil McCarthy

HYENA MAN

It’s said that spotted hyenas roam within the walled Ethiopian city of Harar. Tending to them are the “hyena men” who engage in the practice of hand-feeding the hyenas raw meat as a means of transferring and ridding themselves of negative spirits.

In Hyena Man, Tony Miyambo, Teresa Phuti Mojela, and Vusi Mdoyi take this practice as the starting point for a performance-based experiment.

Spirituality, physicality, and the shrill sound of hyena’s laughing in the distance converge to put forward a work that draws on the analogue potentials of live performance inside the Pepper’s Ghost mechanism.

For Miyambo, the performance is a letting – a means of releasing negative energy through the ritualistic mode of performance that’s unique to the Pepper’s Ghost.

CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Tony Miyambo
DIRECTORS | Athena Mazarakis & Tony Miyambo
PERFORMERS | Teresa Phuti Mojela & Vusi Mdoyi

TATA

“These guys thought they were going to be treated as heroes.”

So goes the refrain in Tata, Anathi Conjwa’s deeply personal performance about her father, and the countless other freedom fighters whom history has left behind.

Using voice clips from both her mother and her father, as well as her father’s military uniform, Conjwa embodies her late father, an uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) veteran. Here, Conjwa acknowledges the sacrifices made by MK operatives in the name of South Africa’s democracy, but she does not glorify this history. Surfaced through the performance are the realities of depression, anger and addiction that came to plague many veterans, her father among them.

On screen, military boots drop like bombs against the backdrop of Conjwa’s performance as she turns, sings, laments, memorialises and pays tribute to history, to her father, and to the many others who shared a similar fate.

CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Anathi Conjwa
DIRECTOR | Phala Ookeditse Phala

PROGRAMME 2 CHORUS

Micca Manganye, Anathi Conjwa, Sello Ramolahloane, Katlego Letsholonyana, Dikeledi Modubu, Vusi Mdoyi & Teresa Phuti Mojela

PROGRAMME 3

BURIAL

Burial is a performance emerging from an attempt at connecting with one’s ancestors, but with little to no information on where to begin.

Conceptualised by Katlego Letsholonyana, the performance sees a lone figure (Letsholonyana) searching, calling out, and evoking the spirits of those he has lost and can no longer connect with. On the floor, and on screen, an image of shallow graves is projected and it is these graves that he moves through and calls out to.

Behind the screen, illuminated only when his hunched shadow obscures the image, spectral figures appear – static, mute, but ever-present. To Letsholonyana, they are inaccessible. They remain behind the glass, beyond the graves, in the other world glimpsed through the Pepper’s Ghost, while he continues to search.

Ultimately, his search comes to a natural close. He stands up, exists the image, and joins them behind the glass, in the other realm.

CONCEPTUALISER | Katlego Letsholonyana
PERFORMERS | Katlego Letsholonyana, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Anathi Conjwa, Dikeledi Modubu & Vusi Mdoyi
PHOTO CREDIT | Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine

UNTITLED (OCTAVIA)

Born from a real moment of frustration in the making of the work, Untitled (Octavia) is a performance about play, process and embracing confusion.

Conceptualised and performed by Dikeledi Modubu, the work references the frustration and miscommunication of working within a hybrid analogue-digital and inherently collaborative mechanism like the Pepper’s Ghost.

Modubu enters and begins her lecture – an intentionally convoluted and nonsensical text. She signals for her visual references, but they fail to appear. When they eventually do, they’re incorrect or ill-timed. As Modubu’s performance goes awry, she attempts to explain to the video compositor (Octavia Sonyane) exactly what she needs. Frustration rises and Modubu’s patience grows short. She places full blame on Sonyane. All the while, Tony Miyambo translates her rant from off stage – a secondary performance that’s just as entertaining.

The performance is the sum of its broken parts: A comedy of errors that does well to illustrate the capacity for play and the necessity of collaboration within the Pepper’s Ghost.

CONCEPTUALISER | Dikeledi Modubu
PERFORMERS | Dikeledi Modubu & Tony Miyambo
DRAMATURG | Teresa Phuti Mojela
VISUAL ARTIST | Deanne Fernandes

MOZUTHO

Conceptualised and performed by Sello Ramalahloane, MoZutho – a title that merges “MoSotho and Zulu” – is a short performance centred on an individual caught between identities, cultures, and ways of being in the world, and their subsequent navigation of this.

Through a process of emerging, disappearing, undressing, redressing, and constant procession, MoZutho performs and plays with the idea of transitioning between linguistic, cultural, and traditional worlds.

Ultimately, MoZutho is a performance about being raised in a culture that you know is not your own, and what happens when you leave a lifelong culture in order to return to your roots.

CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Sello Ramolahloane
DIRECTOR | Katlego Letsholonyana

DR LENYORA

Conceptualised by interdisciplinary artist Deanne Fernandes, Dr Lenyora initially grew out of an attempt at activating a set of original cue cards she brought to the Pepper’s Ghost. They were soon activated by performer Katlego Letsholonyana and the character of Dr Lenyora was born.

Taking the form of a surreal and comedic game show, Dr Lenyora sees Letsholonyana – a miracle worker from Africa who’s come to America to heal its people – selecting three members of the audience and helping cure their various ailments, such as selfishness, lack of urgency/agency, and memory loss.

Predominantly improvisational, the work is a good example of the kind of playful, collaborative potential of the Pepper’s Ghost to bring together artists and strangers in the process of discovering a new work.

CONCEPTUALISER & VISUAL ARTIST | Deanne Fernandes
PERFORMERS | Katlego Letsholonyana & Brian Mertes

WOMB SOIL

Conceptualised by Teresa Phuti Mojela, Womb Soil emerges from a simple, but broad question – what does it mean to return to the womb?

The piece, which makes use of physical performance in the realms of the Pepper’s Ghost, grapples with this question through a short, engaging performance featuring Mojela as a central, mother-like character, and Athena Mazarakis and Vusi Mdoyi as embryonic figures, shifting around Mojela on the floor, and floating beside her on screen.

All the while, a poem sounds out from off-stage (ready by Brian Mertes), and on screen is the wax pelvis from Bronwyn Lace’s Metamorphosis, melting, reforming, disappearing and re-emerging like an ancient cycle.

CONCEPTUALISER | Teresa Phuti Mojela
PERFORMERS | Teresa Phuti Mojela, Vusi Mdoyi, Athena Mazarakis & Brian Mertes
FILM CREDIT | Metamorphosis by Bronwyn Lace
TEXT | Jars by Paul Celan

PROGRAMME 3 CHORUS

Micca Manganye, Anathi Conjwa, Sello Ramolahloane, Katlego Letsholonyana, Dikeledi Modubu, Vusi Mdoyi & Teresa Phuti Mojela

PROGRAMME 4

HANDS

How can the body become an instrument for percussion? For world-building? In the aptly titled Hands, musician and performer Micca Manganye places his body inside the Pepper’s Ghost mechanism to generate playful and profound worlds of sound and activity.

A blend of live performance and video compositing and projection, Hands sees Manganye interacting with the ghost image of his own hands as he mirrors their musicality. There is also the live percussion behind the screen, generated by Manganye using nothing but an empty jar.

Altogether, Hands is an example of the kind of engaging, short-form musical and performance-based work that can be achieved in the Pepper’s Ghost with a single performer and a simple premise.

CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Micca Manganye

KERATOCONUS

Many of the ideas for Tony Miyambo’s performances either come from his dreams, or are informed by his lived experience. Keratoconus is a work that combines both.

Featuring Miyambo and Kai Thomani Tshikosi, who plays the part of the optometrist, Keratoconus makes use of live performance and video projection to present a rich, layered, and unsettling performance.  

Keratoconus emerges from Miyambo’s experience of undergoing surgery for a corneal transplant, and a dream-like vision of a white, dishevelled cowboy sitting in his hospital room. Following his recovery, Miyambo’s body began rejecting the tissue, and he later discovered that the donor tissue was, in fact, from America.

So emerges a short, sharp and rich performance about the myriad interpretations and realities of foreign bodies, transplants, identity, resistance, ownership, ancestry and the body.

CONCEPTUALISER | Tony Miyambo
PERFORMERS | Tony Miyambo & Kai Thomani Tshikosi
WRITER | Tony Miyambo

MADE OUT OF MEAT

Terry Bisson’s absurdist text They’re Made Out of Meat is adapted by Bronwyn Lace and performed inside the Pepper’s Ghost in this two-hander by Katlego Letsholonyana and Sello Ramalahloane.

Drifting through the endless reaches of space and orbited by yawning, bellowing mouths, two extraterrestrial characters discuss their encounter with the strange, carbon-based life forms they’ve come to classify as sentient meat – humans.

Here, the short, sharp text is reimagined with some local, anecdotal flair, and comes alive inside the Pepper’s Ghost in new ways.

In the context of Activating the Archive, it becomes a performance that speaks to the remote and anthropologically centred ways in which archival footage and materials are often engaged.

CONCEPTUALISER | Bronwyn Lace
DRAMATURG | Phala Ookeditse Phala
PERFORMERS | Katlego Letsholonyana & Sello Ramolahloane
TEXT | They're Made Out of Meat by Terry Bisson

THROWN/THRONE

Thrown/Throne is the kind of work that emerges through a process of embracing play and organic collaboration while working in the Pepper’s Ghost.

Conceptualised by Neil McCarthy, the piece is short and surreal. For McCarthy, whose character is instructed to remove his shirt and take a seat on an ever shifting and revolving chair controlled by a faceless antagonist, the work is simple in its parts, playful in its delivery, and complex in its meaning.

While the footage of the revolving chair serves as a simple and generative provocation, the act of workshopping it with fellow artists in the room allowed for an absurdist and engaging narrative to emerge.

CONCEPTUALISER | Neil McCarthy
PERFORMERS | Neil McCarthy, JaMario Stills & Brian Mertes

GIT BLACK

Conceptualised and performed by multidisciplinary artist JaMario Stills, Git Black uses the archival ethnographic material and literature of Zora Neale Hurston as a way of grappling with cross-diasporic dialectics.

Having long engaged with Hurston’s work, Stills now explores it using The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s creative methodology as an impulse towards alternative anthropological, archival research. Viewing the Pepper’s Ghost as an anthropological tool itself, Stills, joined by Vusi Mdoyi, steps into Hurston’s footage, engages with her text, and embodies the research.

As Stills finishes reading, he claps out a rhythm and spreads dust throughout the space. Mdoyi moves to the front of the mechanism and kicks up dust, too, while in the chorus, Anathi Conjwa leads a rendition of the song from Hurston’s footage.

Altogether, it is a means of embodying and activating her work, her research, and the people represented in it. It is a way of giving collaborative, physical, material form to the archive.

CONCEPTUALISER | JaMario Stills
PERFORMERS | JaMario Stills & Vusi Mdoyi
FILM CREDIT | Fieldwork (1928) by Zora Neale Hurston
TEXT | Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston

PROGRAMME 4 CHORUS

Micca Manganye, Anathi Conjwa, Sello Ramolahloane, Katlego Letsholonyana, Dikeledi Modubu, Vusi Mdoyi & Teresa Phuti Mojela

— texts by David Mann