THE OPEN MOMENT | OF GHOSTS GREAT & SMALL

On Friday 31 July, The Centre for the Less Good Idea presented The Open Moment | Of Ghosts Great and Small led by Neo Muyanga and Bronwyn Lace.

For the month of July, The Centre revisited the Pepper’s Ghost, in miniaturised and enlarged formats, exploring new performative possibilities in both. What is it to distil a performance and stage it inside a diorama? Similarly, what emerges when we fit an entire chorus inside the Pepper’s Ghost?

Operating across varying dimensions, from the extra-large to the ultra-small, this experiment sees a group of multidisciplinary artists engaging in live, spontaneous scoring and contemporary response to archival materials — including films, autochromes, and contemporary photography — to unsettle and surface the narratives they find there.

Led by Muyanga, and Lace, and a host of collaborating artists, The Open Moment emerges from this context and serves as a window into both the process of making these works, as well as the early thinking around Collation 5 | Between Ghosts & Shadows, a three-day performance programme at The Centre in October 2026.

This Open Moment also sees the culmination of various international projects and partnerships, including Miami Light Project with Beth Boone, Britney Tokumoto, and Diego Melgar; Turkiye/SAHA with Irem Nalca and Melih Kıraç; the Taiwan National Culture and Arts Foundation with Yu He Lin; Brussels/Paris 8 with Anna Seiderer, Amherst College and the Zora Neale Hurston Collection with JaMario Stills; documentarians Frank Scheffer and David Verbeek from Amsterdam; and visual artists Jo Ractliffe and Dada Khanyisa from Cape Town.

Opening the evening is a work that serves to demonstrate one way of populating the Ghost with a full ensemble. The First Supper crowds the stage and explores the idea of community – both practical and spiritual – through a bustling, musical, riotous dinner party, while troubling the notions of political apathy or neutrality.

Where does the image end and the body begin? In the short physical work, In a Jug, live performance merges with a drawing by William Kentridge, and we see how the layers of the digital, the physical, and the ethereal intersect through the Pepper’s Ghost mechanism. Paper Dancer follows — a moment of materiality and movement, merging projection and live performance.

Xolisile Bongwana then takes to the stage for his solo work — what ultimately becomes Iinxelimbela ZamaPhepha, a work of dreamlike elegance that plays with physical scale and musicality, to present a poetic, operatic search for meaning. An early version of the Surplus Circus is also show. The Surplus Circus is both a longstanding way of working and a playful motif at The Centre. In this iteration, poetry, play and precarity traipse along the same tightrope, presenting a work that merges physical performance, live music, and digital projection and manipulation.

In Spinning Instruments, sound and looped footage come together in a work that sees a collection of ghost instruments rise and turn, creating improvisatory compositions and sparking new associations, while Over a Landscape shows a figure emerging and crawling through an endless landscape.

After a short overview of the mechanism of The Pepper’s Ghost, and an introduction to some of the archival imagery and footage that The Centre has been working and thinking with, the audience is shown Ganges, a work that engages archival footage taken along the banks of the Ganges River in India and Bangladesh through the lens of colour and materiality. Mongolian Train Tracks is next, where archival footage is excerpted, looped, and used as the world into which live performers are deployed, presenting a work of great perseverance and futility, at once an act of searching, fleeing, and enduring.

Git Black expands on a 2024 work by JaMario Stills, created during The Centre’s residency at the Brown Art Institute. This new version retains much of the form of the original, still using Zora Neale Hurston’s work as a springboard, but allows for a fuller and more varied physical performance. Umthwalo is the last of the archival footage works and uses still and moving image to both honour and interrogate the legacies of government-mandated forced removals across South Africa during colonialism and apartheid.

Ending the Open Moment is a scroll of still images by photographer Jo Ractliffe, a fantastical carousel that allows performers to explore the generative intersections of the static image and the body in motion. Lastly, following a short introduction to the work-in-progress by Neo Muyanga, O, Thebes! Shrouded in Shame sees the classic tale of The Bacchae being reimagined in the hybrid digital and theatrical realms of The Pepper’s Ghost, making use of hand-drawn imagery, hand-crafted masks, live performers, and looming digital visages.

— David Mann

CREDITS

ARTISTS | Jaques De Silva, Aalliyah Matintela, Pertunia Msani, Khanyisile Ngwabe, Mapule Moloi, Thokozani Dubazane, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Bronwyn Lace, Muzi Shili, Thulisile Binda, Billy Langa, Irem Nalça, Yu He Lin, Daniel Stompie Selibe, Phumelelo Ndlovu, William Kentridge, Tiisetso Mashishi, Diego Melgar, Gregory Keke Mabusela, Nokuthula Magubane, Vhahangwele Moopo, Micca Manganye, Larissa Johnson, Luyanda Sidiya, Nthabiseng Malaka, Anathi Conjwa, Xolisile Bongwana, Vusi Mdoyi, Neo Muyanga, Noah Cohen, Melih Kıraç, Tony Miyambo, JaMario Stills, Bukhosibakhe Khoza, Stella Dlangalala, Britney Tokumoto, Jo Ractliffe & Dada Khanyisa

PRODUCTION FOR THE CENTRE

Special thanks:

Linda Leibowitz, Natalie Dembo, Damon Garstang, Anne McIlleron, Anne Blom, Taryn Buccellato, Jessica Jones, Chris-Waldo de Wet, Jacques van Staden, Joey Netshiombo, Diego Sillands, Thandi Nkabinde, Laurie Cearley, Rachel Chanoff & THE OFFICE performing arts + film

All photographs by Zivanai Matangi.