Using the potential of the boat as a metaphor for power, trade, migration and more, The Great YES, The Great NO draws on many of the processes and methodologies that have become central to both Kentridge and The Centre’s ways of working. Led by Bronwyn Lace, and with select members of the cast, this HOW | Showing the Making is presented in the form of an open rehearsal and demonstration of the process of making The Great YES, the Great NO.
Though this HOW doesn’t follow a linear chronology of the The Great YES, the Great NO, what it instead does is provide specific points of entry into the making of the work. Much of the creative strategies and discoveries made at The Centre have come to inform the key moments in The Great YES, the Great NO and it is these moments that are shown here.
For example, the women’s chorus made up of seven artists, functions as a Greek chorus in The Great YES, the Great NO, and it was in The Centre’s Umthandazo that this chorus first emerged. The Great YES, the Great NO they are a chorus of women at the bottom of the boat, representative of the seven Nardal sisters. It is this chorus that carries the emotional weight of the work through song, and through composition that is based on collective-making, relying on embodied memory, drawing on ancient pre-colonial knowledge and lived experience. Over the process of making the production, this chorus has led to other creative strategies, in the way of collective composition and libretto as collage.
Other moments, though essential to the making of the work, have not made it into the final iteration of the performance. The HOW allows audiences to both witness these moments and discover how they have influenced The Great YES, the Great NO. The enduring motif of the body falling asleep and collapsing at the piano, for instance, lent a particular momentum and way of working to the production. Much of the moment’s sentiment and impulse remains embedded in The Great YES, the Great NO.
Overall, the HOW provides a unique window into the making of The Great YES, the Great NO, through the collaborative and generative processes and methodologies that have become central to both Kentridge and The Centre’s ways of working.
CREDITS
PIANIST | Maya Muratoglu
CONCEPTUALISER | William Kentridge
PERFORMERS | Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Anathi Conjwa, Asanda Hanabe, Thulani Chauke, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Neo Muyanga, Micca Manganye, Luc de Wit & Tony Miyambo
FOOTNOTER | Bronwyn Lace
It begins with clapping, a sonic and compositional recreation of what we are seeing on screen – a scene depicting dancing, a semi-circle of people attending to a central dancer. Figures emerge from behind the screen, from inside of the image and form part of its composition.
In this HOW | Showing the Making | Pepper’s Ghost & the Mark, a conversation between the drawn line and the body in motion. Here, artists Marcus Neustetter and Pelagie Pélagie Gbaguidi enter into a conversation through mark and gesture, each responding intuitively to the other, and to the archival footage in the Pepper’s Ghost.
Performer Vusi Mdoyi enters and interacts with the drawn lines. Prompted by co-founder of The Centre, William Kentridge, they begin a new experiment – Mdoyi in slow procession behind the Pepper’s Ghost while Neustter traces his movement with individual marks.
Here, the audience is witness to the unique strategies and methodologies that emerge through working in the Pepper’s Ghost, collectively. It is the act of taking a line for a walk, together, and alongside archival imagery, in conversation with a live body, and an active archive, in order to see and to respond to this archive in new ways.
CREDITS
PERFORMERS | Angelo Moustapha, Vusi Mdoyi, Pélagie Gbaguidi & Marcus Neustetter
FOOTNOTER | Bronwyn Lace
FOOTAGE | Courtesy of Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine
It begins with a slow, elegant collapse. Maya Muratoglu on the piano, playing diligently, and Thulani Chauke collapsing the composition, the body, the performance, with his slow process of coming undone.
In this HOW | Showing the Making, a focus on the relationship between the piano and movement, or music and the body, reveals how we listen not only with our ears, but with our whole bodies and our full physicality.
Extending the experience to the audience, Chauke leads a seated warm-up with the audience. Following this is an exercise in naming by Angelo Moustapha, which brings in various artists and collaborators, each contributing their name, and by extension, their unique musicality and physicality. Vusi Mdoyi leads another exercise, focussing on movement and whistling.
These are all fragments – playful investigations of simple provocations and ideas.
Here, naming is simply an entry point, the good idea. The less good idea was where it took everyone, revealing that the stories around our names determine who we are, how we move through the world and how we engage with those around us.
CREDITS
PERFORMERS | Maya Muratoglu, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Thulani Chauke, Betty Tchomanga & Angelo Moustapha
FOOTNOTERS | Athena Mazarakis & Bronwyn Lace
This HOW | Showing the Making takes, as its initial provocation, the relationship between translating the voice into the instrument and vice versa, and asks the question: What is lost, what is generated, and what changes when these transitions and translations occur?
A brief warm-up by vocalists Anathi Conjwa, Dikeledi Modubu, and Asanda Hanabe activates the audience and invites them into the performance. Following this is a call and response between the three vocalists and the pianist Maya Muratoglu. With input from composer and choreographer, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, they begin a performance of call-and-response, between the piano and voice, centred around naming and greeting.
Here, the intention is to discover the intention and the meaning of one’s name – and by extension, one’s history – in the notes of the piano. Ultimately, this collaborative musicality grows into a choreographic moment, grows, and expands to fill the room.
CREDITS
PERFORMERS | Anathi Conjwa, Dikeledi Modubu & Asanda Hanabe
PIANIST | Maya Muratoglu
LIVE ARRANGERS | Nhlanhla Mahlangu & Sbusiso Shozi
FOOTNOTERS | Athena Mazarakis & Omid Hashemi
The inherent composition and musicality of the body is the focus of this HOW | Showing the Making. Led by Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Micca Manganye, Sbusiso Shozi and Vusi Mdoyi, the performance opens with an exercise in musical greetings, where ‘Sawubona’, ‘Bonjour’, ‘Dumela’ and more become the compositional elements of a song sung by performers and audience members alike.
Central to this HOW is the idea of listening to the sounds of the every day, and of history, and channelling them through the body as a compositional tool. In this way, the body surfaces memory, history, trauma and more through the act of corporeal composition. Similarly, the sounds and rhythms animating these memories and observations – gun fire, laughter, the cries of birds, the sound of protest – lends an enduring musicality to the performance, ultimately demonstrating the unique ability of the body in motion as a tool for deep listening, excavating, surfacing and more.
CREDITS
PERFORMERS | Micca Manganye, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Sbusiso Shozi & Vusi Mdoyi
FOOTNOTERS | Athena Mazarakis & Omid Hashemi
An open exploration inside the Pepper’s Ghost, this HOW | Showing the Making centred around what the eye takes in and what the ear absorbs when engaging with the medium of the silent film, collectively.
Something of a pre-cursor to The Centre’s COLLATION 2 | Sounding Images programme, the process here involves watching a film first in silence, and then together, responsively, in order to surface, challenge, or reinterpret the undertones of the film. It is the act of looking at an image collectively, and collaboratively.
“One of the things we are doing when we make an intervention into a film or an image as composers, as performers, is we try to imagine where the character is,” explains composer and musician Neo Muyanga. “From a single piece of footage that’s been looped, we have a room full of interdisciplinary artists who are presenting proposals to confront, accompany or go against what is seen in that footage. What’s important about this process is the repetition – to keep doing it again and again. And the repetition gives us more variation, more information.”
With a live chorus in the room, the footage is transformed, lifted from its initial context, abstracted and expanded upon, sonically, physically, and otherwise. In response to one short, looped film, artist Marcus Neustetter and scenographer Nthabiseng Malaka begin to dress the figures on screen – three young girls, twirling in black and white – and this does something to our reading of the image. There is the introduction of colour and texture, and suddenly the tone of the chorus shifts, and lightens.
Later, with different sets of footage, the intervention of live, responsive narration, as well as impulse-driven movement and live-drawing allows for a fuller, richer, and multi-dimensional reading of the images on screen.
CREDITS
PERFORMERS | Athena Mazarakis & Pélagie Gbaguidi
VISUAL ARTISTS | Marcus Neustetter & Nthabiseng Malaka
CHORUS | Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Sbusiso Shozi, Anathi Conjwa, Dikeledi Modubu, Asanda Hanabe & Katlego Letsholonyana, Micca Manganye, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Vusi Mdoyi & Tony Miyambo
MUSICIAN | Neo Muyanga
FOOTNOTERS | Bronwyn Lace, Julien Faure Conorton & Neo Muyanga
FOOTAGE | Courtesy of Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine
As a generator of new material, a prompt, a collaborative component to a performance in process, or as a standalone art form to be expanded upon and collapsed, live improvisational music is an essential part of The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s way of working.
Featuring some of The Centre’s frequent collaborators, namely Angelo Moustapha, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Micca Manganye and Vusi Mdoyi, this HOW | Showing the Making is a collaborative, improvisational, responsive performance with a focus on the many ways in which percussion can be located in, and emerge from, the body.
As much as it’s an original, live performance of its own, it also serves as a tribute to the musicians of The Centre, and the unique ability of percussion and the body to animate the room, and the process of making.
CREDITS
PERFORMERS | Angelo Moustapha, Micca Manganye, Vusi Mdoyi & Teresa Phuti Mojela
All text by David Mann