First experimented with in Season 7, The Pepper’s Ghost has become a device that’s central to many of The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s key processes and methodologies for generating new collaborative and interdisciplinary work.
Curated by Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu and Bronwyn Lace, the Season 10 Pepper’s Ghost programmes feature the central theme of Activating the Archive, and use the hybrid analogue-digital mechanism to experiment with new ways of reading, speaking back to, and inhabiting archival material.
A key animator of the Pepper’s Ghost works in Season 10 is the Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine, a photographic and videographic archive that The Centre has been working with since August 2022.
In Pepper’s Goat, Bronwyn Lace draws on this archive to put forward a lecture performance that simultaneously introduces The Centre’s way of working with the Pepper’s Ghost, and contextualises how the archive has come to be received in various contexts and parts of the world.
The work culminates in the retelling of an event – a group of researchers in Paris, France, watching footage from these archives – and draws on the emotional, moral, and affectual responses of this event to speak more broadly to our ways of seeing, and the readings we bring to an image, or a film when we engage it.
CONCEPTUALISER | Bronwyn Lace
PERFORMERS | Bronwyn Lace & Chorus
FILM CREDIT | Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine
Conceptually speaking, identity can be as fixed or fluid as one wants it to be. But identity can also equate to certain notions of home and belonging. When linked to a certain culture, and therefore a certain way of being in the world, things become even more complex. What to do when one’s cultural identity isn’t as fixed as they once thought?
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.
CONCEPTUALISER | Sello Ramolahloane
DIRECTOR | Katlego Letsholonyana
PERFORMERS | Sello Ramalahloane & Chorus
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
Burial is a performance that emerged 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.
CONCEPTUALISER | Katlego Letsholonyana
PERFORMERS | Katlego Letsholonyana, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Anathi Conjwa, Dikeledi Modubu, Micca Manganye & Alfred Motlhapi
PHOTO CREDIT | Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine
There are whispers in the room and the slow, steady rhythm of an anonymous figure tapping on a wooden block, endlessly.
A group of people occupy the foreground, watching the figure. Every now and then, a child appears on the right-hand side before disappearing again. What is there to be said about the scene?
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 essentially 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.
CONCEPTUALISER | Anathi Conjwa
PERFORMERS | Anathi Conjwa & Chorus
FILM CREDIT | Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine
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 Letsholonyane 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 & Chorus
TEXT | They're Made Out of Meat by Terry Bisson
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 Alfred Motlhapi 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.
CONCEPTUALISER | Tony Miyambo
CO-DIRECTORS | Athena Mazarakis & Tony Miyambo
PERFORMERS | Tony Miyambo, Teresa Phuti Mojela & Alfred Motlhapi
PEPPER’S GHOST CHORUS FOR PROGRAMME 1 | Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu, Bronwyn Lace, Micca Manganye, Anathi Conjwa, Hlengiwe Lushaba Madlala, Sello Ramalahloane, Katlego Letsholonyana, Dikeledi Modubu & Teresa Phuti Mojela
A key animator of the Pepper’s Ghost works in Season 10 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 Dominus Dominoes, 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.”
CONCEPTUALISER | Bronwyn Lace
PERFORMERS | Bronwyn Lace & Chorus
FILM CREDIT | Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine
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. All the while, a figure (Hlengiwe Lushaba Madlala) is present behind the static image, though invisible to Modubu.
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
PERFORMERS | Dikeledi Modubu, Katlego Letsholonyana & Chorus
PHOTO CREDIT | Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine
What is the potential of the Pepper’s Ghost to house live, musical performance? In Church, Thulani Zwane, Teresa Phuti Mojela, and Thembinkosi Mavimbela are joined by a chorus to present a hybrid physical and musical performance.
A work that emerged from Zwane’s interest in the different languages, performances, and musical repertoires of South African churches, Church sees Zwane assume the role of both praise leader and disciple, performing behind the glass of the Pepper’s Ghost. On the floor, and subsequently on the mirror as a spectre, Mojela performs a compelling physical sequence. The interplay between the two figures is striking – though their images never cross, they are undeniably linked.
Offstage, and in the room, Mavimbela and the chorus generate a resounding musical swell, ultimately catalysing Zwane’s transition from one realm into the next as he joins Mojela, on the floor and in the image, for a final duet.
CONCEPTUALISER | Thulani Zwane
PERFORMERS | Thulani Zwane, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Thembinkosi Mavimbela & Chorus
Equal parts conceptual and technical, Post-Vitrine Revolution sees Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu using the possibilities of the Pepper’s Ghost to muse on the notions of pedistalisation, othering, resistance, joy and more.
It begins with play. A group of women engage in a childhood, playground game, evoking the first of many miniatures that come to populate the work. As the performance builds, each performer is joined by their own turning miniature, backed by a low, slow rendition of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”. They watch them, admire them, mourn them.
Ultimately, they resist them and one by one, the women remove their miniatures from the public gaze, performing for no one but themselves. At the heart of Post-Vitrine Revolution is the impulse to move towards a space of deliberate, agentic healing, and away from restriction, confinement, and objectification.
CONCEPTUALISER | Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu
PERFORMERS | Anathi Conjwa, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Dikeledi Modubu & Hlengiwe Lushaba Madlala
MUSICIAN | Thembinkosi Mavimbela
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.
CONCEPTUALISER | Sbusiso Shozi
PERFORMERS | Sbusiso Shozi & Chorus
What are the ways in which we prepare ourselves to move through the world each day? In Coronation, Tony Miyambo and Mwenya Kabwe put 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.
Other footage emerges: Miyambo with an orange sack on his head, its plastic scratching at his skin. He mimics its effects, rubbing himself raw. Then an orange is being played with and peeled in slow motion. Eventually, it is squeezed, slowly, deliberately, and with all of the grandeur and relentless ceremony of the Coronation as an accompanying score.
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. It is a performance that is equal parts compelling and discomfiting.
CONCEPTUALISERS | Tony Miyambo & Mwenya Kabwe
DIRECTOR | Mwenya Kabwe
PERFORMER | Tony Miyambo
VIDEO CREDIT | BBC TV Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II: Westminster Abbey, 1953
Zondo is a short and powerful work that speaks to grief, memory, and the body.
Situated on the floor for the duration of the performance, and therefore appearing on the screen of the Pepper’s Ghost mechanism, Hlengiwe Lushaba Madlala embodies the conditions outlined in Zondo’s accompanying text, Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis.
Overlapping with her projected self, she begins to float, flail, and collapse, again and again. It is a ghostly dance between the two figures.
Supplementing the performance is Thembinkosi Mavimbela’s evocative soundscape from offstage, and the deliberately dispassionate, clinical reading of the text by Dikeledi Modubu. The resulting work is a compelling examination of depression and mental illness.
CONCEPTUALISER | Hlengiwe Lushaba Madlala
PERFORMERS | Hlengiwe Lushaba Madlala, Dikeledi Modubu, Thembinkosi Mavimbela & Chorus
TEXT | Adromat Khosi Lushaba & 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane
“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
PEPPER’S GHOST CHORUS FOR PROGRAMME 2 | Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu, Bronwyn Lace, Thembinkosi Mavimbela, Micca Manganye, Anathi Conjwa, Hlengiwe Lushaba Madlala, Dikeledi Modubu, Simphiwe Skhakhane, Thulani Zwane, Sbusiso Shozi & Teresa Phuti Mojela
— David Mann
PHOTOGRAPHER | Zivanai Matangi