In July 2019, The Centre for the Less Good Idea participated in the Holland Festival, the largest international performing arts festival of the Netherlands and one of the oldest festivals of Europe.

For two weeks, the Frascati theatre became the home of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an intervention leveraged off an invitation to founder of The Centre, William Kentridge to participate in the Holland Festival’s programming. One larger theatre and two smaller theatres were effectively translated into the spaces of The Centre, housing works, installations and exhibitions of work from The Centre’s previous Seasons.

The performance programme was made up of, Enyangeni, Requiem Request, Ursonate, and Defence of the Less Good Idea, with the latter giving way to a performance of Blind Mass Orchestra, a work that allowed for moments of rich collaboration between South African and Dutch performers. Season 4’s performance installation Vehicle was reinstalled, with Dutch violinist Diamanda La Berge replacing Kyle Shepherd to perform alongside Shane Cooper, another cross-continental collaboration that ultimately added to the work, eliciting new sounds and ways of engaging with the vehicle as object and instrument.

Finally, the Invisible Exhibition occupied a room at the Frescati, with The Centre’s Augmented Reality works as well as its 360 Virtual Reality performances curated in a way that was able to provide a sense of place and atmosphere of downtown Johannesburg, and demonstrated The Centre’s unique approach to new media – the lack of reliance on digital editing and the dedicated use of performance inside of this technology.

It was a challenging programme that was very well received. Positive responses came in the form of reviews (notably The New York Times), feedback from audiences and festival directors, and through word-of-mouth at the festival. After performing to about 60% capacity on opening night, The Centre’s performance programme garnered 100% capacity on the second evening and continued to perform to capacity audiences throughout its run.

While the works staged as part of The Centre’s performance programme are distinct, often employing modes of performance and grappling with subject matters that are unique to South Africa, they nonetheless hold universal notions, subtly communicated through performance. The works performed at The Holland Festival were chosen in part for their ability to illustrate The Centre’s interests and ways of working, but the idea was not to simply replicate these performances. Rather, it was to expand upon them and to open them up to further development and collaboration.

Another marker of success, and one of The Centre’s core aims, is that the performances at the Holland Festival brought opportunities to the participating artists. Other global festivals in attendance reached out to artists, subsequently extending opportunities and invitations to perform further abroad.

Throughout the festival, there were also a number of public talks in which Kentridge was involved, many of them coinciding with a solo exhibition of his film work, exhibited at Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum. Also opening at the time was The Head & The Load, the talks for which allowed Kentridge to highlight and better contextualise the role of The Centre in its workshop and rehearsal phases.

– David Mann

CREDITS FOR HOLLAND FESTIVAL:

CURATOR | Brownyn Lace
ADMINISTRATOR | Dimakatso Motholo