Live performance, narration, and projected puppetry and animation converge in this adaptation of Russian playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky’s self-titled verse drama, Mayakovsky: A Tragedy.
An experimental take on the original avant-garde tragedy, Mayakovsky makes use of the illusory optics of the Pepper’s Ghost to pair the adapted text of Mayakovsky with the drawings and animations of William Kentridge. The result sees the very act of storytelling being picked apart and rendered through various temporal and visual planes.
Led by a poet protagonist, the play is a meditation on the performativity of prose. Here, text prances, parades and performs. It is spoken, written and danced. It is a display of language as a salve (or a form of satire) for the times we live in, and how we go about the act of living, today. Crucially, it is also a reflection on the very nature of translation – in this case, English, French, and Setswana in a single performance – and how language always requires of us to participate in the construction of its meaning and intention.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER & ARTIST | William Kentridge
PERFORMER | Katlego Letsholonyana
DRAMATURG | Phala Ookeditse Phala
TEXT | Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy
TRANSLATORS | Phala Ookeditse Phala, Katlego Letsholonyana & Jessica Jones
CINEMATOGRAPHER | Duško Marović SASC
VIDEO EDITOR & COMPOSITOR | Janus Fouché
COSTUME DESIGNER | Emmanuelle Erhart
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.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Micca Manganye
Thrown/Throne | The Interview is the kind of work that emerges through a process of embracing play and organic collaboration while working in the Pepper’s Ghost.
The result of two separate explorations in the Pepper’s Ghost, this performance takes an impulse by Thulani Chauke to lend a voice and a point of entry into an otherwise muted and static archive, and merges it with the short and surreal motif of attempting to situate oneself inside of the moving image, the shifting historical archive.
As Chauke engages in the act of ‘interviewing’ subjects of the image, resulting in various readings, translations, and mistranslations, Marcus Neustetter intervenes with digital drawing and live mark-making. What ensues is a process of emergence and erasure, followed by the enduring presence of the human figure in the image, speaking out from the archive.
Ultimately, the performance becomes increasingly impossible and frenetic, and the archive becomes more and more opaque, transitioning, thematically, into the chair – the precarious balance of reverence and play, respect and provocation for the archive.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Thulani Chauke
DRAMATURG | Athena Mazarakis
VISUAL ARTIST | Marcus Neustetter
IMAGE CREDIT | Courtesy of Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine
Applause takes a simple premise and develops it over the course of a short, collaborative moment inside the Pepper’s Ghost.
Led by Angelo Moustapha, applause as percussion and vice-versa becomes the conceptual basis for this performance. In response to the archival film – a communal scene with sustained, rhythmic performance – a chorus of performers in the room begin to mirror what they see, slowly building on the key refrain of applause and percussion.
The figures in the footage become mirrored in the performers behind the Pepper’s Ghost, and inside the image. Live drawing from Marcus Neustetter both directs the eye, and highlights a process of emergence and erasure, a collaborative and improvisational act that, alongside the responsive performance of the chorus and the performers in the Pepper’s Ghost, provides us with a new way of reading and perhaps even conversing with the footage on screen.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Angelo Moustapha
PERFORMERS | Anna Seiderer, Julien Faure-Conorton, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Katlego Letsholonyana
, Vusi Mdoyi, Pélagie Gbaguidi & Paterne Dokou
VISUAL ARTIST | Marcus Neustetter
FILM | Courtesy of Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine
“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.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Anathi Conjwa
DIRECTOR | Phala Ookeditse Phala
TRANSLATOR | Jessica Jones
PEPPER’S GHOST CHORUS | Asanda Hanabe, Bronwyn Lace, Anathi Conjwa, Sbusiso Shozi, Tony Miyambo, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Micca Manganye, Dikeledi Modubu, Katlego Letsholonyana , Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Vusi Mdoyi, Omid Hashemi & Paterne Dokou.
INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERS
The Centre for the Less Good Idea
Université Paris 8/Vincennes
Musée départemental Albert Kahn
Projet CINEMAF/Labex les Passés dans le présent
Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
A performance 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.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER | Anathi Conjwa
PERFORMERS | Anathi Conjwa
FILM CREDIT | Courtesy of Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine
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, live vocals and narration, Inyongo examines the effects of colonialism and apartheid on family structures.
Drawing on the metaphor of inyongo – the gall bladder – 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, severing the connection between a people and the rituals and practices that connect them to the land, to each other.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER | Nhlanhla Mahlangu
PERFORMERS | Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Dikeledi Modubu, Anathi Conjwa & Katlego Letsholonyana
DRAMATURG | Tony Miyambo
TEXT | Neil McCarthy
TRANSLATOR | Jessica Jones
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.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER | Dikeledi Modubu
PERFORMER | Dikeledi Modubu
PHOTO CREDIT | Courtesy of Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine
The Ghosts of the Code Noir, conceptualised and performed by Pélagie Gbaguidi, is a brief, but profound piece that highlights the role that performance plays in unsettling and activating the archive.
The physical presence of the performer and the simple use of projection are the two main components of this work. Gbaguidi, joined by Anna Seiderer and Angelo Moustapha behind the half-silvered mirror of the Pepper’s Ghost, is a static, but enduring presence in the frame. Projected onto the trio are extracts from historical contracts detailing the necessary treatment of enslaved peoples by their owners. This is the same text they are reciting, softly, under their breaths.
As they read, slowly, rhythmically, they also sway and soothe one another. It is a simple gesture that is deeply affecting. Ultimately, they are representative of the human lives between the cold, prosaic lines, and the ones who continue to be impacted by the legacies of such a history.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Pélagie Gbaguidi
PERFORMERS | Anna Seiderer, Angelo Moustapha, Marcus Neustetter & Omid Hashemi
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.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER | Tony Miyambo
DIRECTORS | Athena Mazarakis & Tony Miyambo
PERFORMERS | Tony Miyambo, Teresa Phuti Mojela & Vusi Mdoyi
“I was born here, in the Alborz Mountains, not far from the Caspian Sea,” says Omid Hashemi, lying against a map of his own history. “The territory of poets and mystics. A land so distant yet so close.”
In From the Suez Canal to the Persian Gulf, Hashemi details a history of travel, migration, and mapping through the Middle East. He cites the journeys of people like Antoine Poidebard, the French landscape archaeologist and pilot who chartered a path down the Persian Gulf towards the Medeteranian Sea, and Sykes and Picot, the Englishman and the Frenchman who travelled to the Ottoman Territories and hatched a plan to divide the whole region between them.
The small gap that was left between these new territories, explains Hashemi, was the province of Palestine – a piece of land insincerely promised by Britain to many. On the same day that Britain left Palestine, Israel declared its existence. The neighbouring countries did not agree, and a war began that continues today.
All the while, Hashemi navigates a map of his own making, projected into the Pepper’s Ghost and manipulated by the roving, digital lines of Marcus Neustetter. Concluding his navigation of this recent and enduring history, Hashemi leaves the audience with a newspaper clipping detailing France’s declaration to “protect its interests” in the Indian Ocean, near the Persian Gulf. His parting words linger and settle, like new lines carved into the landscape, emerging on a map.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER, ARTIST & PERFORMER | Omid Hashemi
ARTWORK | La Fatalité Géographique? Omid Hashemi et Naimeh Ghabaie, 2024
VIDEO ARTIST | Marcus Neustetter
DRAMATURG | Athena Mazarakis
PEPPER’S GHOST CHORUS | Asanda Hanabe, Bronwyn Lace, Anathi Conjwa, Sbusiso Shozi, Tony Miyambo, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Micca Manganye, Dikeledi Modubu, Katlego Letsholonyana , Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Vusi Mdoyi, Marcus Neustetter & Omid Hashemi
INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERS
The Centre for the Less Good Idea
Université Paris 8/Vincennes
Musée départemental Albert Kahn
Projet CINEMAF/Labex les Passés dans le présent
Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
A key animator of the Pepper’s Ghost works for The Centre for the Less Good Idea is the Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine. It’s a photographic and videographic archive that The Centre has been working with since August 2022.
By situating herself both literally and figuratively in the archive, Bronwyn Lace provides audiences with a sense of the Pepper’s Ghost mechanism itself, and invites a collective reading of the archival footage and imagery held within it.
In Amazing Grapes, Lace merges personal memory with archival footage in an experimental performance lecture.
Through a narrative retelling of events from her childhood and her experiences as part of a research group working with the above-mentioned archives, Lace draws lines between 19th century Dahomey (now Benin), the rural Botswana of her childhood, and present-day Johannesburg. Woven throughout these narratives are anecdotal misreadings and incidental connections between the songs “Ave Maria” and “Amazing Grace.”
First performed as part of The Centre’s 10th Season in 2023, these misreadings and mistranslations take on new meaning and resonance at the Fondation Cartier, where language and translation becomes an essential tool for collective and collaborative meaning-making.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Bronwyn Lace
PERFORMERS | Anna Seiderer, Neo Muyanga, Omid Hashemi
TRANSLATORS | Jessica Jones & Anna Seiderer
FILM CREDIT | Courtesy of Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine
Special thanks to Julien Faure-Conorton
An experimental and generative work, Loop is conceptualised by Marcus Neustetter and Neo Muyanga and makes use of looped filmic elements, scenographic intervention, and physical performance in order to animate, agitate and lend voice to previously muted archival material.
Essentially a call and response between image and body, Loop sees performer Teresa Phuti Mojela as a conduit of the body, moving in and through the looped footage of three figures caught in a repetitive gesture.
Neustetter, alongside scenographer Nthabiseng Malaka, begins 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.
The context shifts, too – lifted suddenly out of time and the rigid two-dimensionality of the archive. What we are left with is a tactile, corporeal, and somewhat contemporary image with which to engage anew.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISERS | Neo Muyanga & Marcus Neustetter
PERFORMER | Teresa Phuti Mojela
VISUAL ARTISTS | Marcus Neustetter & Nthabiseng Malaka
MUSICIAN | Neo Muyanga
In Maestro, Sbusiso Shozi uses the Pepper’s Ghost to visualise the thoughts, frustrations, and solutions that arise in the process of making a piece of music.
Shozi enters with his back to the audience and begins. He snaps his fingers and conjures a version of himself, singing in baritone. He repeats this, conjuring versions of himself in tenor, alto and soprano. Each voice adds a musical layer to the greater chorus, but it also introduces problems – voices in the wrong key, too flat, too soft, or not using the head voice. He issues instructions to each of them in vain, loses his patience and, with balled fists, silences the lot.
Moving behind the glass to assume a position among the silenced versions of himself, Shozi begins to compose with the audience, and the chorus in the room. It is a grand, resounding composition and as it grows, the ghost versions of Shozi fade to black, informing invisibly from the margins of the mind.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Sbusiso Shozi
DRAMATURG | Athena Mazarakis
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.
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.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Tony Miyambo
VOICE OVER & TRANSLATOR | Jessica Jones
DRAMATURG | Phala Ookeditse Phala
In 2023, the artists Vusi Mdoyi and Marcus Neustetter travelled to Benin on a research trip for Moving Pictures, Controversial Memories (CINEMAF), an ongoing collaborative project of which The Centre for the Less Good Idea is part.
In Discordant, we are witness to an initial impulse found by Mdoyi and Neustetter in Benin, and realised at Fondation Cartier, in the Pepper’s Ghost.
A responsive performance between mark-making and the body in motion, Discordant is ultimately about the relationship between the sacred and the secret – performers witnessing each other’s practice and responding, subsequently going into a near trance-like state.
As Mdoyi moves, he is slowly joined by a symphony of live sound and drawing. Accompanying him behind the half-silvered mirror of the Pepper’s Ghost is Katlego Letsholonyana who adds a vocal musicality to the rich tapestry of live performance.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISERS | Marcus Neustetter & Vusi Mdoyi
VISUAL ARTIST | Marcus Neustetter
PERFORMERS | Vusi Mdoyi & Katlego Letsholonyana
MUSICIAN | Neo Muyanga
RESEARCHER | Christine Barthe
Conceptualised and performed by Asanda Hanabe, Amen? uses the Lord’s Prayer as the starting point for a performance-based inquiry into notions of loss, faith and memory.
An ill-fitting shoe becomes a powerful metaphor in Amen? Largely physical, Hanabe’s performance uses the gestures and rhythms of prayer to begin her performance, reciting the Lord’s Prayer all the while.
As she continues, the rhythm falters and the choreography goes awry. Damp matches refuse to light and candles snap in two as the prayer grows more desperate, more frenzied, and is ultimately abandoned. All the while, a chorus behind her provides powerful musical accompaniment, building to a compelling crescendo.
She exits with an awkward gait, leaving a single shoe behind.
CREDITS
CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Asanda Hanabe
DIRECTORS | Asanda Hanabe & Nhlanhla Mahlangu
TRANSLATORS | Phala Ookeditse Phala & Jessica Jones
PEPPER’S GHOST CHORUS | Asanda Hanabe, Bronwyn Lace, Anathi Conjwa, Sbusiso Shozi, Tony Miyambo, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Micca Manganye, Dikeledi Modubu, Katlego Letsholonyana , Nhlanhla Mahlangu & Vusi Mdoyi
INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERS
The Centre for the Less Good Idea
Université Paris 8/Vincennes
Musée départemental Albert Kahn
Projet CINEMAF/Labex les Passés dans le présent
Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac
All text by David Mann