FOR ONCE

In addition to its consistent Seasons of work, The Centre for the Less Good Idea has a regular For Once programme in which new work is invited into the space to be incubated and shown for one-night only.

Works shown are by regular collaborators of The Centre as well as by visiting artists, researchers, and arts organisations from abroad. The For Once performances range from the experimental and the collaborative, to pre-existing works that have been invited to be played with, developed and staged in the space.

Works shown as part of the For Once programme have taken the form of debut musical performances and full-length theatre works, to short-form physical theatre pieces and site-specific public performances. Many of these performances are later further developed and take on lives on their own following their showing at The Centre.

More recently, The Centre's For Once programme has grown to house similar once-off projects and performative moments, including The Highway Notice Project, The Long Minute, A Kafka Moment and more.

AUGUST 2024 | NOTEBOOK OF A LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO A HILLBROW NIGHT

Notebook of a Long Day’s Journey into a Hillbrow Night is a production by the Windybrow Arts Centre, in collaboration with The Centre for the Less Good Idea, that emerges from a central question: What would Aimé Césaire's classic anticolonial long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land sound like if it were written today, by teenagers living in Hillbrow?

First performed by the Cesaire Youth at The Centre in April 2024 as part of Collation 1 | On Air: Visual Radio Plays, the performance returned to The Centre in August 2024 as an expanded and reworked version.

In this newer iteration of Notebook of a Long Day’s Journey into a Hillbrow Night the Cesaire Youth, under the direction of Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Sibahle Mangena, present an ensemble performance of their devised narrative poem. Backed by the layered Johannesburg cityscape, they move as a single organism, punctuated by short, sharp solo moments.

The return of Notebook of a Long Day’s Journey into a Hillbrow Night to The Centre also features an exhibition installed in The Centre’s Atrium space, tracing the process of putting the full performance together, and the textual and performative methodologies they made use of.

CREDITS:

Césaire Youth is the Windybrow Teenagers with Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Stacy Hardy, Lesego Rampolokeng, Tamara Guhrs, Sibahle Mangena, Khethukuthula Jele, Pule kaJanolintji et al.

Windybrow Teenagers are Khethiwe Mvelase, Zandile Dube, Reneilwe Leopeng, Thabang Matsaung, Caleb Nyanguila, Thandeka Masango, Jenoc Kalongo, Lubanzadio Mpova, Natasha Dube, Lesley Sibanda, Sonqoba Mbatha, Sandiso Mbatha, Lethu Ndlovu, Hlengiwe Dube, Shirley Vundla, Simphiwe Ximba, Michael Sithole, Unathi Ndlovu, Minenhle Masina, Lesedi Udeh, Inathi Mdyuba, Thandeka Mavhura, Mbalenhle Ncube, Lethabo Mkhize, Busisiwe Mbadiwe, Nqobile Mlambo, Mncedisi Pududu, Thobeka Nene, Amahle Sizani, Maletsema Selepe, Okhule Gwala & Malcom Moloi

Created by The Windybrow Arts Centre and Wits Creative Writing with support from The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, Institut Français d'Afrique du Sud, The Centre for the Less Good Idea, and Flame Studios

NOVEMBER 2023 | FOR ONCE | NOTES ON WHAT LIES AHEAD

On Sunday 26 November, The Centre for the Less Good Idea presented its closing event for 2023, Notes on What Lies Ahead, a collaboration between The Centre and NewMusicSA*.

Taking the form of an experimental concert, Notes on What Lies Ahead is a collection of collaborative performances featuring local and international musicians, as well as Centre artists.

Opening the programme is composer and designer of contemporary musical instruments, Victor Gama. Born in Angola, Gama’s multidisciplinary work has seen him performing in cities across the world. Here, he presents a multimedia performance featuring pieces for the Acrux and Toha instruments from his INSTRMNTS series, and visuals from his field recording project, tectonik: Tombwa.

Gama is alone on stage, and splits his performance between his two custom-built instruments. Activated by Gama beneath the stage lights, the instruments are like sonic sculptures, producing the accompanying soundtrack for the film component of tectonik: Tombwa. Initiated by Gama in the desert of Namibe, Angola, in 2006 with the aim of reconstructing and interpreting professor Augusto Zita's research thesis An anthropology of Utopia: formation of Utopian identities, the film is a striking reflection on research and archives pursued, developed and then lost, tragically.

The footage is of plants, reptiles, insects, endless stretches of highway and crumbling roadside structures. There is a rich narrative at work in the film and audiences oscillate between watching the film play out, and observing Gama at work on the strings of his instrument. Altogether, Gama’s performance is mesmeric and edifying, dreamlike and engaging.

A collaboration between German musician and composer Stefan Poetzsch and South African performer and percussionist Micca Manganye serves as the interlude.

Here, the two musicians engage in an open, exploratory, and improvisational exchange. While Poetzsch improvises on processed violin, Manganye animates and gives life to everyday objects through his unique percussive ability. Together, they perform a free-spirited and atmospheric performance, equal parts responsive and playful.

Concluding the programme is a collaboration between Poetzsch and Cameroonian/German choreographer Bettina Essaka. Forming part of this collaboration are dancers Lulu Mlangeni, Julia Burnham, and Muzi Shili, and musicians Aaron Bebe Sukura (Gyil), David Odoom (Drums), and Manganye (percussion).

A series of shorter, experimental sections, this 30-minute collaboration is full of sonic and choreographic swells, where musicians take their respective cues from the flow, rhythm, and choreography of the dancers, and vice versa. Above all else, it is a performance that speaks to the potential of collaboration across discipline, location, language, and more.

* Notes On What Lies Ahead emerged from NewMusicSA’s partnership with the 2023 OLUZAYO festival, which took place in Johannesburg as part of World Music Days.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

TECTONIK: TOMBWA

CONCEPTUALISER & PERFORMER | Victor Gama

INTERLUDE

CONCEPTUALISERS & PERFORMERS | Stefan Poetzsch & Micca Manganye

SPLASHES AND WAVES

CONCEPTUALISERS | Stefan Poetzsch & Bettina Essaka
MUSICIANS | Stefan Poetzsch (Violin), Micca Manganye (Percussion), Aaron Bebe Sukura (Gyil) and David Odoom (Drums) DANCERS | Lulu Mlangeni, Julia Burnham & Muzi Shili

Splashes and Waves Part 1

Music based on different recordings by New Global Ensemble and ‘Human and Machines’ by Poetzsch‘
Friday Night In Accra’ (Sukura/Boone/Poetzsch)

Splashes and Waves Part 2

Music based on different recordings by New Global Ensemble and Baffour Awuah Kyeremateng (Ghana, †2021)
Prempensua ‘Tiwana’ (by Sukura)

Splashes and Waves Part 3 (dedicated to Kyeremateng)

Music based on different recordings by New Global Ensemble, featuring Baffour Awuah Kyeremateng (Ghana, †2021) Shaker, vocals (song ‘Opono Hini Me’) and ‘Solo in Duet Nr.5’ by Poetzsch

Samples used in parts 1-3:
Compositions by Stefan Poetzsch: ‘Human and Machines’ (part 1) and ‘Solo im Duett Nr.5’ (part3) New Global Ensemble, various pieces from recordings in Accra 2018/Erlangen 2022: Benjamin Boone (USA), SaxophoneAaron Bebe Sukura (Ghana), GyilStefan Poetzsch (D), processed violin/violaBaffour Awuah Kyeremateng (Ghana, †2021) Prempensua (part 2), Shaker, Vocals (Part 3)

DECEMBER 2022 | FOR ONCE | VUKA KLEVA

Vuka Kleva was incubated and first performed in 2019 as part of Season 6 of The Centre for the Less Good idea. In December 2022, it returned to The Centre in the form of a For Once performance and continued its development towards a premiere in the Netherlands in 2023 with a partnership between VAP Dancer Academy, SA; and Untold Empowerment, Netherlands.

Vuka Kleva, uses isiPantsula to trace the everyday rhythms of systems of labour, capital, and human energy.

Dancer, choreographer, teacher and Pantsula practitioner Vusi Mdoyi and his ensemble of dancers use performance as a means of speaking to night shifts, nine-to-fives, commutes in and out of the city, the frenetic energy of the assembly line, the grinding nature of a city gridlocked by labour and bodies caught up in ritualistic toil.

Percussion and rhythm are generated off-stage and by the human body in equal measure, and become enduring languages of performance and instruction. In between it all, embodied notions of the human legacy of forced labour emerge, intersecting with the contemporary realities of labour along the lines of race, class and gender.

Vuka Kleva is a performance that speaks to the nature, syncopation, and complicated human mechanics of embodied labour. Work, posits Vuka Kleva, is ever-present in our lives, be it on the morning commute, in the office, on the streets, at home, or in our sites of leisure.

— David Mann

CONCEPTUALISER & DIRECTOR | Vusi Mdoyi
DRAMATURGE | Phala Ookeditse Phala
PERFORMERS | Elma Shilda Motloenya, Lungile Ngwenya, Bukhosibakhe Pantsulatographer Khoza, Vuyani Feni, Thobeka Lynnecoline Ndodana, Paballo Peter Phiri & Pule Ncaba
PERCUSSIONISTS | Michael Micca Manganye & Vuyani Feni
CREATIVE CONTRIBUTOR | Vusi Arts Projects (VAP)

JULY 2022 | FOR ONCE | YOU WILL FIND YOUR PEOPLE HERE

You will find your people here is a collaborative project and performance by author Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, composer Clare Loveday and pianist Mareli Stolp. It was first performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in July 2022 as part of The Centre’s For Once programme.

It begins in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with Fazila who is desperately trying to leave. The story moves quickly, the narrative pieced together from the memories of a woman on the move: Jail cells, trucks-rides, bartering and borders until, eventually, she is in Johannesburg, South Africa. Here, in Hillbrow, the smell of street-food and exhaust fumes, the press of bodies in the street, and the cacophony of sirens, hooters, music and chatter. In the absence of a country to call her own, she holds onto all of these sights, sounds and experiences. They make her feel a little less alone.

This is one of the stories told in You will find your people here. The 35-minute work combines piano, spoken word and other forms of vocal utterance to create a response to the texts and testimonies of migrant women currently living in Johannesburg. While these testimonies form the basis of the work, the live piano and utterances (both by Stolp) build an immersive soundscape that “gives voice and pays homage to the lived experiences of these women.”

In this way, the piano becomes a narrative device, drawing out the musicality of a name, the resonance of a memory. Sometimes, when words are not enough – like a violent police raid at an inner-city market – music fills the gaps.

Through the individual journeys of these women, You will find your people here animates and traces the relationships between trade, labour, gender and migration across the African continent. And while these journeys are difficult, there is room for respite in their convergence – like a quiet place in the city on a weekend morning where these women can meet and talk and “forget how difficult Johannesburg is.”

– David Mann

CREDITS:

PERFORMER | Mareli Stolp
WRITER | Caroline Wanjiku Kihato
COMPOSER | Clare Loveday

JUNE 2022 | FOR ONCE | UNYOKO

Unyoko is a collaborative musical work written and directed by Bonginkosi Madondo that seeks to provide a narrative, performative commentary on patriarchal systems in contemporary society. It was first performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in June 2022 as part of The Centre’s For Once programme.

She is a central presence on stage: a character, a symbol, a spirit swathed in flowers and standing statuesque in a large, flowing dress. A refrain sounds out – “A thought and a wish, congealing and snowballing inside me into a masterpiece.” – while masked dancers beat out a cyclical rhythm on stage, circling the low, persistent flame of a candle. A figure emerges from beneath the dress. She is tentative at first, then self-assured. Eventually, she begins a conversation with the world through dance and performance.

In Unyoko, the combination of poetry, dance and live music creates “a utopian world where the female energy guides both the spiritual and physical worlds to rid it of violent divisions, separations, deep darkness, gender warfare, fortifications, class hierarchies and patrilineal dominance.”

Amidst the broader production and its grand narrative, isolated instances of musicality, measured duets, solo choreographic moments, and their work within the ensemble communicate the presence of the individual performers and the thematic intricacies embedded in the work.

Though offstage, live music plays a crucial role in both the narrative and the world-building of Unyoko. The sound of the wind, the low rumbling of the earth, the whispering in the leaves is all organically generated through live instrumentation. The performance is also a highly visual one, with many of its singular moments staged as striking and depictive portraits on stage. Naturally, costuming plays a central role in the work, too. It is altogether modular, decorative and functional. The lighting, subtle and evocative throughout, later gives way to graceful moments of shadow play.

Ultimately, Unyoko is a narrative that carries at its core the themes and notions of motherhood, birth, life, nurture and care, positioned alongside the heavy socio-political and patriarchal systems of the contemporary world, but ultimately seeing past these systems. It is “a long prayer” for a unified world, guided and informed by “the systems of the womb”.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

MARCH 2022 | FOR ONCE | HOW A FALLING STAR LIT UP THE PURPLE SKY

How a Falling Star Lit Up the Purple Sky is an exploration by nine artists of Impilo Mapantsula and American-Swiss choreographer Jeremy Nedd. It was first performed as an experimental work in progress at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in March 2022 as part of the For Once programme.

For Nedd and members of Impilo Mapantsula, How a Falling Star Lit Up the Purple Sky is an attempt at investigating “the grammar of isiPantsula and creating a dynamic visual poem that proposes shifts to the paradigm, rearranges the idea of archetype and hopefully invites a re-evaluation of the psychic and terrestrial spaces which ‘The Western’, ‘The old West’, ‘The West’ and ‘The South’ occupy.”

Through the unique prism of isiPantsula’s dynamic form, Nedd and the members of Impilo Mapantsula test and tease out the varying interpretations of this central notion. What is there to consider when breaking down the genres, tropes and motifs of the Western? How has the collective imagination been influenced by these well-worn concepts of heroes, villains, frontiers and territories? And how can isiPantsula be a tool for experimentation, interrogation and exploration in this regard?

A series of solos open the performance. Here, we see the minutiae of isiPantsula – the poised strut, the energetic footwork, the form, fashion and language of the dance form – in key performative vignettes. Later, a touch of the carnivalesque as a towering dancer emerges on stilts and occupies the centre of the stage, arms ostentatiously folded. There is also a nod to the history of isiPantsula through a series of dances that take on an intergenerational tone – choreographic conversations between characters young and old.

A solo by Nedd introduces a stylistic counterpoint as he moves across the expanse of the stage in a series of languid, mercurial movements, before the dancers gather on stage and begin a ritual of instruction and repetition, working to polish a routine again and again. It is performance in process – a generous display of communal choreography and rehearsal.

Music, of course, is a key component. In How a Falling Star Lit Up the Purple Sky there are none of the traditional driving sounds of isiPantsula. Instead, Nedd borrows from the soundscapes of Westerns and of 70s cinema, working to identify the sounds of “the black cinematic era.” One song, Dionne Warwick’s “Walk on By” becomes a crucial refrain, with Nedd extracting and looping the piano from the chorus. In this looped, instrumental form the song takes on a rhythmic, mesmeric and poignant quality. All the while, the dancers of Impilo Mapantsula work through their routine, their relentless rehearsal process.

Following the performance, Nedd and Impilo Mapantsula remain on stage for a while, taking questions from the audience and sharing further insights into their process, their research methods and their ongoing collaboration. While How a Falling Star Lit Up the Purple Sky is likely to change and evolve, this early iteration of the performance is an opportunity to publicly trace the process of the work, and allow its collaborators to incorporate the feedback and insights of the audience into the work’s continued development.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

CONCEPTUALISER & CHOREOGRAPHER | Jeremy Nedd
PERFORMERS & CHOREOGRAPHERS | Sicelo Xaba, Vusi Mdoyi, Thomas Motsapi, Bonakele Masethi, Kgotsofalang Moshe, Vuyani Feni, Sibongile Mathebula & Elma Motloenya.
TECHNICAL MANAGER & LIGHTING DESIGNER | Thomas Giger
STAGE DESIGNER | Laura Knüsel
AUDIO DESIGNERS | Fabrizio Di Salvo & Rej Deproc
COSTUME DESIGNER | Rosa Birkedal
DRAMATURG | Anta Helena Recke
PRODUCTION MANAGER | Regula Schelling / ProduktionsDOCK
PHOTOGRAPHER | Bukhosibakhe Kelvin Khoza

FEBRUARY 2022 | FOR ONCE | TRANS-ARCHITECTURE

Trans-architecture is a conceptual performance piece by Roland Gunst aka John K Cobra. The performance took place at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in February 2022 as part of The Centre’s For Once programme.

Two figures draped in cloth are situated on one side of the stage. They are reminiscent of the wrapped buildings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude – motionless, statuesque, silent but softly disruptive structures.

A voice emerges from off stage, abstract spoken word, and the performers are activated. They begin slowly, their movements interspersed with an even percussion and sharp, shimmering synth. Together, they shift, melt, merge and coalesce. It is at once unsettling and affective, whole buildings and empires rising and falling in unison.

“Monumentality should not be sought in rigid stone, but in individuals and their unique capacity for self and social criticism,” posits the framing text for Trans-architecture. “How do we challenge systems of oppression such as (neo-)imperialism, (neo-)colonialism, capitalism and authoritarianism and the stone monuments that represent and reproduce them? Trans-architecture offers a solution; it installs a 'fluid architecture'.”

It is through this “fluid architecture”, charged and held by performers Muzi Shili and Smangaliso Ngwenya, that these nebulous, but predominant notions of power, identity and their various intersections can be drawn out and destabilised.

At its core, Trans-architecture uses the body – strikingly adorned and abstracted by Angelinah Maponya’s costume design – as a driving force for disruption, transformation and speculation. In the second half of the performance, Shili and Ngwenya abandon their measured actions and embrace a more spectral, mercurial movement.

The music changes to suit their tone, the scene takes on a different atmosphere, too. They are altering the space, refiguring its design. New structures emerge, hold, and fall away in perpetuity. Borders and boundaries slip away, falling into the soft folds of material and movement. The centre shifts and falls into a state of flux. Something new emerges, always.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

DIRECTOR & CONCEPTUALISER | Roland Gunst \ John K Cobra
CHOREOGRAPHERS | Roland Gunst \ John K Cobra, Smangaliso Ngwenya & Macaleni Muzi Shili
PERFORMERS | Smangaliso Ngwenya & Macaleni Muzi Shili
COSTUME DESIGNER | Angelinah Maponya
SOUNDSCAPE | Roland Gunst \ John K Cobra
SET CONSTRUCTION | Joey Netshiombo & Bongani Mpofu

JANUARY 2022 | FOR ONCE | BREATHE CONCERT

BREATHE CONCERT is a collaborative musical performance featuring a number of solo performers and acts from Johannesburg, South Africa. The performance took place at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in January 2022 as part of The Centre’s For Once programme.

The performers are backed by William Kentridge’s “Blue Rubric” artwork for The Centre’s Highway Notice Project (2020/21). “BREATHE,” reads the billboard-sized text. It is both an instruction and a reminder – inhale, pause, exhale. In the same vein, BREATHE CONCERT is something of a brief pause, and a moment to reflect on an acutely difficult period. It is also an opportunity to celebrate human resilience and strength despite the challenges.

Opening the programme is the Jeppestown-based Inselelo YeMbube Isicathamiya Choir who activate the stage with compelling choral work and shimmering, synchronised choreography, delivering a performance that’s rooted in voice and body alike. Micca Manganye and Volley Nchabeleng then bring their dynamic percussion and multi-instrumentalism to the stage, looping and building upon single notes to develop a metered and mesmeric soundscape.

Following a spirited reprise from Inselelo YeMbube, the Jazzmeloz Band take to the stage one by one, fronted by Siphiwe Sip Nkabinde. All through his set, Nkabinde maintains a compelling synergy with the band, his movements on the stage corresponding with the crashing cymbals and high, heady notes of the guitar behind him.

Anathi “Ithana” Conjwa’s set begins with a moment of silence – another opportunity to pause and reflect – and sees the artist kneeling as she performs her first song “River Run”. By the end of her set, she delivers a rallying, emphatic performance that sees her making full use of the stage and the band. Xolisile Bongwana maintains this energy through his compelling showmanship as well as a few compositions that allow for a good number of solos from the Jazzmeloz band members. Closing the concert is Zandile Hlatshwayo whose arresting and narrative-driven songs traverse the themes of loss, love and determination.

Initially intended as the closing performance of 2021, but ultimately waylaid as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, BREATHE CONCERT serves as a poignant and profound debut event for The Centre’s 2022 programme. It is both a tribute to breath and body, and a celebration of live performance.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

MUSICIANS & PERFORMERS | Xolisile Bongwana, Anathi Ithana Conjwa, Siphiwe Sip Nkabinde, Zandile Hlatswayo, Volley Nchabeleng & Micca Manganye
INSELELO YEMBUBE ISICATHAMIYA CHOIR | Lungelo Masango, Thobekani Masango, Skhulu Dladla, Lungisani Shange, Bhekani Lamula, Vusi Mthuli, Celumusa Ngobese & Jimmy Khanyile
JAZZMELOZ BAND | Thami Mahlangu (saxophone), Thabo Mofokeng (drums), Marvin Manyaka (keys), Xolani Skosana (guitar), Thabiso Modikoe (bass), Micca Manganye (percussion), Themby Khumalo, Sweetness Shongwe & Skhumbuzo Ndaba (backing vocals)

AUGUST 2021 | FOR ONCE | THUPA KOBONG – THE REPRESS OF ‘NOTHING’

Thupa Kobong – The Repress of ‘Nothing’ is a durational performance work by Pretoria-based dancer, choreographer, and performing artist Thabo Rapoo. The work was first performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in August 2021 as part of the For Once programme.

Motsamai (imbued by Rapoo) is a homeless man who, following the realisation that he will amount to nothing in his lifetime, enters a prolonged state of anguish and disillusionment. He pores over proverbs, religious scripture and legal texts in an effort to reckon with his existence, but finds nothing. It is this nothingness, explains Rapoo, that “echoes his every step.”

Thupa Kobong – The Repress of ‘Nothing’ is a work of distinct durational moments. Through these moments, Rapoo mines the condition of a man at odds with his own existence – one that is at once predestined and futile. As audiences filter into the theatre space, Motsamai is there with his jangling polystyrene cup, performing a well-known choreography that plays itself out at street corners and robots (traffic lights) across the city. He is largely ignored, someone to be looked at, but rarely engaged with. In this way, these first encounters with the character contribute to how he is ultimately perceived.

When his cup is upturned, spilling loose change onto the stage where it clatters and clinks around him, he begins to search for meaning. This search is multifaceted. It happens through the voice, the body, the use of choice texts projected onto the wall behind him. At the centre of the stage, a blanket hangs from a rope and becomes a site of great comfort, memory, violence and pain for Motsamai.

Throughout the performance, Rapoo employs repetitive gestures – whistling, the shaking of the head, mantra-like recitations. It is a means of locating himself in the world, of fighting for recognition and visibility, but it is also a refusal of his current condition, albeit a futile one. Throughout much of the performance, a simple, sonic refrain is heard – “Mm, mm”. It is a dismissive sound and, like Motsamai’s relentless performance, it is exhausting and ceaseless, working to wear him down, to refuse him. “You are nothing, you will never amount to anything” is another refrain, spoken, sobbed and howled by Motsamai. It is employed ad nauseum, to the point of exhaustion, hilarity, insanity and inhumanity. When he does break down and cry, it is equally unbearable.

Ultimately, Thupa Kobong – The Repress of ‘Nothing’ locates itself in the performance of exhaustion, and the brutality of the everyday. It is a powerful and painful work, and one that implores you to not look away.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

MAY 2021 | FOR ONCE | AN EVENING WITH ANN MASINA

An Evening with Ann Masina is a collaborative musical performance by the internationally acclaimed musician and performing artist, Ann Masina. The performance took place live at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in May 2021 as part of The Centre’s For Once programme, and was live-streamed to a global online audience.

A few opening words by friend and long-time collaborator of Masina, Gerard Bester opens the evening. Through a brief introduction, Bester contextualises the resounding character and 25 year career of Masina – an internationally renowned musician, stage performer, and frequent collaborator within the arts.

With Masina’s full band on stage, comprising drums, piano, guitar, violin, and a trio of backing vocalists, the music takes hold. Masina, who begins her performance off stage, gradually takes her position at the centre of the band, performing all the while. This opening song, a powerful demonstration of Masina’s vocal range and command of the stage, also serves to mark the beginning of her journey as a solo artist.

In the resultant performance, Masina and her band traverse numerous genres and moods, including heady jazz and gospel numbers, and stunning operatic moments, with two of the compositions being written by Masina during South Africa’s hard lockdown in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. While Masina’s vocals take centre stage, solo moments by guitarist Augustus Ogoro or pianist John Afolabi lend the performance further texture and provide Masina with the opportunity to switch up her vocal range, layering single songs with a rich and diverse musical quality.

Further collaborations come in the form of vocalist Phumla Nzolo who takes to the mic for a song of her own, as well as a live spoken word performance by poet Lebo Mashile, performing in another original song by Masina. A tribute performance also sees Masina’s own take on Brenda Fassie’s ‘Too Late for Mama’.

The performance marks a significant point of departure for the artist who, until this point, has largely been known for her vocal flair and prolific nature as a collaborating artist. An Evening with Ann Masina, then, showcases the artist’s striking command of the stage and her profound abilities as a solo artist.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

LEAD VOCALIST & PRODUCER | Ann Masina
VOCALISTS | Phumla Nzolo (Alto), Penuel Langa (Tenor) & Paulinah Ngubeni (Soprano)
BAND | John Afolabi (Piano), Augustus Ogoro (Guitar), Adam Mathye (Drums) & Leroy Mapholo (Violin)
POET | Lebo Mashile
MASTER OF CEREMONIES | Gerard Bester
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER | Rushau Productions: Rufus Thabana
CO-FUNDER | The Office: Rachel Chanoff, Laurie Cearley
STUDIO | Bootleggers Studios: Nonhlanhla Khumalo
COSTUME DESIGNER | Jeminah Makelene
HAIR STYLIST | Dr Dread
MAKE-UP ARTIST | Glitter Face: Phila Msimang

MARCH 2021 | FOR ONCE | MTWAN’OMNTU

Mtwan’oMntu is a musical and choreographic exploration of yearning and connectedness, conceptualised and performed by Xolisile Bongwana and Thulisile Binda, and directed by Smangaliso Ngwenya for The Centre for the Less Good Idea in March 2021.

Attempting to mine the complex, dynamic, and non-linear expressions that come with seeking a connectedness with, and belonging in, the world, Mtwan’oMntu is a story told primarily through the art of sound and the body in motion. For Binda and Bongwana, the act of connecting with ‘the other’ is a process that is not without contestation. There is a jostling for attention, space, and time, and there is a clashing of ideologies, approaches, ways of seeing, and methods of moving through the world. In their performance, through the use of the body, the voice, and choice instants of instrumentation, the two make visible these frictions in sharp, poetic vignettes.

Moments of hesitancy and the act of waiting – of making sense of approach and intimacy – are present throughout the performance. Instruments, gestures, and physical and ideological proximities are held, but not immediately acted upon. When they are actioned out, it is through a flurry of formality, intimacy, and uncertainty. There are moments of great vulnerability and tenderness, too. The offering of water, the washing of the feet, or the outstretched arm all serve to mark moments of growth, softness, and an embracing of difference along the two performers’ respective journeys.

Abstract choreographic moments are juxtaposed by more overt visual metaphors throughout – the use of the mask as disguise, deceit, guardedness, and conceit – while the introduction of musical performances serve to provide distance and harmony in equal measure, working to narrate and contextualise that which might not be possible through physical performance.

Mtwan’oMntu is a journey of two characters through moments of isolation and intimacy, yearning and growth. It is a journey that sees both characters recreating themselves through the act of meeting and learning, again and again.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

FEBRUARY 2021 | FOR ONCE | UHAMBO, IMIZWA NOMSINDO!

Uhambo, Imizwa Nomsindo! is a musical and physical exploration into spirituality through song.

Conceptualised and directed by Sibusiso Shozi for The Centre for the Less Good Idea in March 2021, and performed by Dikeledi Modubu, Musa Mboweni, Freedom Mswane, Volley Nchabeleng, Micca Manganye, and Shozi, the performance employs varying interpretations of music and song through embodied performance and physicality as lived experience and culture.

While Uhambo, Imiza Nomsindo! (loosely translated as Journey, Emotions, and Sound or Noise) is chiefly an attempt at tracing the journey of sound across cultures, genres, languages, and geographies, it also takes the shape of an experimental, metaphysical journey. Structurally, this is told through the slow layering of sound and music – the gradual introduction of music, vocals, and later, the chorus – while interludes come in the form of whispers, pauses, and more ponderous moments, allowing for a marked transition into the next genre, emotion, and site of performance. Thematically, the cast traverse the vast terrains of joy, madness, innocence, abstraction, logic and more through sound and movement alike.

Though much of the complex and far-reaching refrains in Uhambo, Imiza Nomsindo! are held and communicated through its cast, the use of minimal set design and choice props provides its performers with the space and tools required to bring the work’s journey to life. Brooms serve practical and musical functions in equal measure, while hats become baskets, bowls, masks and more, allowing for rich moments of play and interpretation.

For all of Uhambo, Imiza Nomsindo!’s free-spirited performance, play, and instrumentation, a sober conceptual underpinning reminds us that “this is not child’s play, it’s deeper than it looks.” It is this balance of performance and instrumentation, play and labour, and tangible and intangible forms of language that propels the performance through its immense and compelling journey.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

CONCEPTUALISER & DIRECTOR | Sbusiso Shozi
VOCALISTS | Sbusiso Shozi, Dikeledi Modubu, Musa Mboweni & Freedom Mswane
PERCUSSIONISTS | Volley Nchabeleng & Micca Manganye

FEBRUARY 2020 | FOR ONCE | WHY SHOULD I HESITATE

Why Should I Hesitate is a collaborative concert performed by artist William Kentridge and pianist Kyle Shepherd at The Centre for The Less Good Idea in February 2020 as part of the For Once programme.

Having first worked together through The Centre’s fourth Season (October 2018), Kentridge and Shepherd have gone on to collaborate on a number of projects, namely the chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl, which premiered in Rome (September 2019) and Kentridge's installations and performances under the dual exhibition Why Should I Hesitate which took place in Cape Town at the Zeitz MOCAA and the Norval Foundation from August 2019.

In this concert, they perform excerpts from a number of pre-existing works, as well as some new material. Among Kentridge and Shepherd’s primary interests across the performances is the translation of the written word into spoken language, what an image does to sound, how one sees something and how sound can change what one sees. In this way, Why Should I Hesitate is equal parts contemplative and playful. Some performances harness the movement of the body, the breath and the slow, moderate notes of the piano while others embrace a free-spirited meeting of voice and piano, or sound and gesture, in order to challenge, provoke and puzzle out the respective modes of performance.

A musical response by Shepherd to some of Kentridge’s films and snippets of his work in studio allows audiences to be led either by the music or the visuals presented to them, while short jousts between spoken word and improvisational keys open up room for reflection on the linguistic capacities of the piano, and the musical composition of the everyday conversation.

The performance includes a section of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, which Kentridge has performed with different musicians on several occasions in various cities, and sees responsive and intentionally disruptive tap dancing and trombone entering the performance by way of Vusi Mdoyi and Dan Selsick respectively. The concert also includes the libretto of Waiting for the Sibyl, charcoal films by Kentridge, and various other mixtures of projection, voice and piano.

Finally, an encore performance sees the merging of musical performance, projection, recitation, and pre-existing poetry in a short performance that reflects on, amongst other things, the nature of music, composition, the sonnet and the spoken word.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

PERFORMERS | William Kentridge, Kyle Shepherd, Vusi Mdoyi & Dan Selsick
CINEMATOGRAPHERS | Duško Marović SASC, Noah Cohen & Kutlwano Makgalemele
PROJECTION EDITOR | Žana Marović

NOVEMBER 2019 | FOR ONCE | MILK & HONEY REVISITED

Performed by Alfred Motlhapi and Billy Langa, with musical direction and additional choreography by Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Milk & Honey Revisited is an experimental expansion of the award-winning 2013 Market Theatre Laboratory play Milk & Honey. It was performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in November 2019 as part of the For Once programme.

By expanding on the closing solo of the original 2013 performance, the Khayelihle Dom Gumede-directed Milk & Honey Revisited merges physical and musical performance with spoken word in order to further explore the central question of land and identity in contemporary South Africa.

A play in recognition of the 100 years that had passed since the implementation of the 1913 Land Act, Milk & Honey told the story of a young and successful man who had lost his way, leaving ancestry and spirituality behind, and with no rootedness to the land in which he was born. In Milk & Honey Revisited, extracts of this original tale are unearthed and expanded upon, in particular the closing solo originally performed by Motlhapi, now reworked as a duet through the collaborative inputs of Langa.

Milk & Honey Revisited is a play that comes to life through its use of song and dance – Tswana traditional dance merges with contemporary interpretative dance as well as striking duets – but it also prizes language. The writing is rich and immersive, while the shifting narrative point of view held by Motlhapi and Langa lends the play a distinctly folktale-like quality.

Equal parts conceptual and experimental, Milk & Honey Revisited frequently moves away from the traditional structure of a play in order to analyse the various scenes and components that comprise it. In this way, the revisiting of Milk & Honey happens in real-time as Motlhapi and Langa regularly break character to analyse and unpack the scenes they’ve just performed.

Milk & Honey Revisited is a decidedly self-aware performance that embraces play and collaboration in order to both build upon and reconsider the original play. Crucially, it does this while remaining focussed on the vital matter of the work – considering land as a locus for identity in contemporary South African society.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

PERFORMERS | Alfred Mothlapi & Billy Langa
WRITER & DIRECTOR | Khayelihle Dominique Gumede
CHOREOGRAPHERS | Nhlanhla Mahlangu & Alfred Mothlapi in collaboration with Billy Edward Langa
MUSIC DIRECTOR | Nhlanhla Mahlangu

AUGUST 2019 | FOR ONCE | EKASI LAM'

Ekasi Lam’ is a ‘Kwaito Anti-Musical’ directed by Jefferson J.Bobs Tshabalala and was performed at The Centre for The Less Good Idea in August 2019 as part of the For Once programme.

Produced by Kiri Pink Nob and performed by Andisiwe Mpinda, Kopano Tshabalala, Gugu Dhlamini, Mathews Rantsoma, Lucky Ndlovu and Simpho Mathenjwa, Ekasi Lam’ – an ode to kwaito, un-owed to kwaito is, in a sentence, a play about kwaito music – it’s people, its memory, its fans and detractors – and its place in South Africa’s musical and socio-political history.

Set in a Soweto high school led by an idealistic and conflicted principal who dreams of placing the school on the country’s arts and culture map, Ekasi Lam’ follows the story of a group of students preparing for an upcoming school concert. They are led by Ms Feni, a former student and current teacher at the school who’s committed to establishing music, dance, iscamtho (or tsotsitaal) and, of course, kwaito, as legitimate forms of literature and storytelling in an academic setting. The refrain from TKZee’s ‘Izinja Zam’ sets the mood for much of Ekasi Lam’, courtesy of Musical Director and Composer Bernett Mulungo, who’s seated on stage and behind the keyboard for the entirety of the play. It’s a musical interlude that brings a slow and sobering edge to a performance filled with fast-talking, quick-footed characters.

As the students rattle through their ideas for the upcoming concert, riffing off of each other’s remarks and embarking on impassioned monologues about a specific track, moment, memory or composer in the communal history of kwaito, Ms Feni watches on, reflecting their conversations with the occasional frown, smile or shake of the head. When she does intervene it’s to remind her students that these musicians, these groups, and these moments need to be named, credited, cited and archived.

As such, Ekasi Lam’ is as much a play about the history of kwaito, its sub-genre’s, cross-pollinations and its people, as it is about the history of life in Johannesburg during apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Through its affinity for, and deft reading of kwaito, the play traverses the mines, the nightclubs, the daily commutes, the playgrounds and the history books. Ultimately, it is a tribute to the poets, lyricists, musicians and players of kwaito, delivered through a compelling narrative that is equal parts playful and critical.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

PERFORMERS | Andisiwe Mpinda, Kopano Tshabalala, Gugu Dhlamini, Mathews Rantsoma, Lucky Ndlovu & Simpho Mathenjwa
WRITER & DIRECTOR | Jefferson J.Bobs Tshabalala
MUSICAL DIRECTOR & COMPOSER | Bernett Mulungo
SET & COSTUME DESIGNER | Shruthi Nair

AUGUST 2019 | FOR ONCE | Umsebenzi Ka Bra Shakes

Umsebenzi ka bra Shakes is a process-driven and collaborative exploration of the use and relevance of William Shakespeare’s classic texts for South African performers, storytellers, students and audiences alike. It was performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in August 2019 as part of The Centre’s For Once programme.

Presented by POPArt Productions in collaboration with The Centre, The Shakespeare Society of South Africa, Johannesburg Awakening Minds, Market Theatre Lab and Kwasha Drama Company, Umsebenzi ka bra Shakes explores Shakespeare through the context of language and culture, highlighting and interrogating notions of violence, love, masculinity and representation amongst other things. With language being one of the primary points of entry for the play, English, Afrikaans, isiZulu and more are employed and experimented with to both translate and reimagine some of the bard’s most beloved texts.

Well-known lines are run through various dialects – a kind of theatrical broken telephone – ultimately generating new meaning, or novel ways of reading and making sense of the original prose. A blackboard behind the cast also reveals some of their early engagements with Shakespeare, and serves as a dictionary of contemporary Shakespearean slang. ‘Brethren’ turns to ‘Bra’ and ‘Shap Fede’ becomes the new ‘All’s well’. Similarly, ‘nca’ serves as the more economic way of saying ‘It’s utterly beautiful’.

Othello, The Tempest, and Hamlet are a few of the classics that get the ‘Bra Shakes’ treatment, with key scenes or entire acts being remixed and reimagined through this performing ensemble. Romeo and Juliet die over and over again, while Desdemona and Emelia become a chorus of women talking, laughing, and lamenting in a marriage of Shakespearean prose and South African slang.

Umsebenzi ka bra Shakes is not simply a translation or a South African adaptation of the classic Shakespearean play, but rather a devised take on seeking contemporary meaning and value in Shakespeare’s words and stories. It is a 40-minute experiment that traverses the full range of the Shakespearean classic, replete with soliloquies in the short-form, and dialogues carried out through song and dance. And all of this without losing any of the comedy, tragedy, conflict, or climax of the form it seeks to make sense of.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

PERFORMERS | Sibahle Mangena, Molatelo Maffa, Thulisile Nduvane, Aalliyah Matintela, Rachael Neary, Sinenhlanhla Mgeyi, Vusi Nkwenkwezi, Michael Mazibuko, Lwazi Mayeki & Bongani Dlamini
FACILITATOR | Hayleigh Evans
COLLABORATORS | POPArt Productions, The Shakespeare Society of South Africa, Johannesburg Awakening Minds, Market Theatre Lab & Kwasha Drama Company

JUNE 2019 | FOR ONCE | Ghost Dimensions

Ghost Dimensions is a performance by Project X (Mele Broomes and Ashanti Harris) in collaboration with Healer Oran and Tseliso Monaheng, and supported by Creative Scotland and The British Council. The piece was performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in June 2019 as part of The Centre’s For Once programme of events.

Merging live performance, electronic soundscapes, and abstract cinematography, Ghost Dimensions explores the idea of the body as a repository of incorporated histories, both internalised and externalised. The performance begins as audience members begin to file into the venue and find their place. Two dancers, Broomes and Harris, emerge and begin to move slowly, twisting in the light. They are separated by a thin sheet of fabric, a boundary that’s navigated by performers and audience members alike. Mirrored and manipulated visuals of sprawling cityscapes provide the setting for Broomes and Harris’ performance, the soundscape comprising abstract looped vocals, pitchy atmospheric samples and sound-bites.

Throughout the performance, the two dancers engage in a measured duet. They are turning, lilting, rising spectres moving through the space, basked in the acidic purples and greens, watery blues and electric pinks that play out in duotone. As Harris and Broomes engage in this ritual of memory and fragmented sound and visuals – a unique synergy of contemporary diasporic dance and performance techniques – the audience stirs throughout, standing up and walking around, constantly navigating the boundaries of the performance in order to gain a new perspective.

Across the 50-minute piece, sound, lighting, visuals, performance, as well as audience engage in the collaborative acts of moving and viewing, and Ghost Dimensions unpacks the form and function of the body, metaphorically and metaphysically. It is a dance through history, through practice, process and more.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

MAY 2019 | FOR ONCE | Converting Eviction

Converting Eviction is a collaborative project* concerned with the realities of land, identity, policy, place-making and more. The first stage of the project was supported by Pro Helvetia Johannesburg and incubated at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in May 2019 as part of the For Once programme with intentions to be further developed and shown again in South Africa and Switzerland.

A collaborative undertaking by Sello Pesa and Tim Zulauf, Converting Eviction features contributions by a variety of international artists and performers, namely MX Blouse (SA), Vivien Bullert (DE/CH), Hlengiwe Lushaba Madlala (SA), Humphrey Maleka (SA), Lindiwe Matshikiza (SA), Zamo Mkhwanazi (SA/CH), Christoph Rath (AU/CH) and Tracy September (SA/CH).

Reclamation, removal, separation and crowding. While Converting Eviction is an amalgamation of a number of modes of performance, these themes characterise the performance to varying extents, while also running through it and holding it with a distinctive resonance. The performance begins outside of the venue itself, with a cordoning off, or perhaps, a demarcation of space. Tape is drawn across throughways, while fixtures and items of furniture are piled up in the centre of these newly rezoned spaces.

Audiences are guided to their seats, surrounding the multifaceted spectacle of Converting Eviction – the white tent. Viewed from the outside this structure is a construction site, an events gazebo, a field tent, and a barrier to entry. From the inside – streamed to the audience in real time via a set of hand-held cameras operated by the cast – it is a series of passages and rooms inside of an abandoned building, a physical archive, a monument to eviction and reclamation. Throughout Converting Eviction, this fictional, speculative structure adopts a plethora of spatial realities.

Short documentary-style interviews lay further thematic foundations for the performance. Projected onto the white tarpaulin of the structure, they circle notions of land as a site of ancestry, sustenance, medicine, familiarity, exploitation, extraction, and more – a place of great respite, or irreversible damage. Both contrasting and mirroring this is a series of newsreader-style soundbites outlining the rise of Johannesburg, “The golden city”, and the decline of its inner-city, a notorious “no-go” zone.

Then there is a drilling, a tearing, a picking apart. It is suggestive of the Red Ants, a South African security company specialising in forced eviction and relocation. Pseudo-documentary interviews take place inside the tent-turned-building and touch on contemporary forms of extraction – research, foreign investment, cross-continental partnerships with artists, investors and more. As much as Converting Eviction is a performance-led work, shrewd attention to language serves to hold much of its thematic concerns, too. Choice lines from South Africa’s Constitution are read over a group of restless, sleeping (or perhaps dying) bodies.

Audiences are not insusceptible to the re-enacted realities of Converting Eviction. Corralled into the centre of the speculative building and separated by a series of increasingly absurd social markers, they are made to leave their chairs and their positions as passive viewers behind and enter the performance.

Closing the show is a live musical performance – the lyrics of which wrestle with a number of the performance’s points of inquiry – and a sketch-like performance of the cast rehearsing and testing their documentary script in a series of stop-start events. Finally, during a solo vocal performance, the set of Converting Eviction is slowly and methodically picked apart, down to the last chair, as the audience have no choice but to get up, gather their things and leave.

*The first iteration of Converting Eviction is supported by Pro Helvetia Johannesburg and co-produced with The Centre for the Less Good Idea (Johannesburg), Gessnerallee Zürich (CH), Kaserne Basel (CH), Dampfzentrale and Schlachthaus, Bern (CH) and supported by Stadt Zürich Kultur, Fachstelle Kultur Kanton Zürich, Fachausschuss Theater&Tanz BS/BL, Ernst Göhner Foundation, Migros-Kulturprozent. Additional research from Hennie van Vuuren and the team of Open Secrets (SA), KEESA/ADR – Apartheid Debt and Reparations Campaign, Basel (CH) and the Khulumani Support Group (SA).

– David Mann

CREDITS:

PERFORMERS | Sandi MX Blouse, Vivien Bullert, Hlengiwe Lushaba Madlala, Humphrey Maleka, Lindiwe Matshikiza, Zamo Mkhwanazi, Sello Pesa, Christoph Rath, Tracy September & Tim Zulauf
COLLABORATORS | Sello Pesa & Tim Zulauf
CINEMATOGRAPHER | Lukas Piccolin
PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair

APRIL 2019 | FOR ONCE | LOST IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR WAITING TO BE FOUND

Lost is Just Another Word for Waiting to be Found is an experimental and collaborative work in progress led by South African composer and sound artist Philip Miller, and Argentinian actor, director and curator, Maricel Alvarez. The work was incubated at The Centre for the Less Good Idea and performed at The Centre as part of the For Once programme in April 2019.

Together with an ensemble of performers including Waldo Alexander, Xolisile Bongwana, Grace Magubane and Xolani Sanele Dlamini, Alvarez and Miller merge music, dance and spoken word to establish and investigate the links between the complicated histories of South Africa and Argentina. Lost is Just Another Word for Waiting to be Found introduces cultural outputs such as poetry and land art into a performing arts space in order to seek out alternative avenues of thought.

The subsequent exploration takes the form of a series of in-process conversations between artists and performers, and histories and geographies. Single notes on a violin, looped and harmonised with one another, spoken word merged with live musical performance, sharp, synchronised physical theatre and meditative pattern-making are a few of the forms that these conversations take.

Ultimately, it is the theme of loss – in all of its simplicity, banality, and philosophical complexity – that runs through the disparate modes of engagement in the performance, and emerges in a constellation of form, function and material to be further played with, tested and put to work in Lost is Just Another Word for Waiting to be Found.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

MARCH 2019 | FOR ONCE | MONUMENTING MABONENG

Monumenting Maboneng is a public performative installation by Austrian artist Oliver Hangl and Johannesburg-based theatre company, Kwasha! that took place in March 2019 along Johannesburg’s Fox Street in Maboneng. The performance formed part of The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s For Once programme.

At its core, Monumenting Maboneng is a performance concerned with the incidental nature of interaction in the city. Hangl, who is a performance artist and urban activist, produces work that fosters a consistent confrontation between human and environment. He pushes at the boundaries between physical and psychological spaces which sees his work taking place in both real and fictional settings. For Hangl, public space becomes theatrical stage as he develops a set of site-responsive experiences and interactions for incidental audiences. Kwasha! is a theatre company that is rooted in contemporary South African performance. Seeking to produce a kind of theatre that provokes, engages and challenges conventional theatrical norms for performer and audience alike, their collaboration with Hangl is well-suited.

Monumenting Maboneng is a firmly collaborative public performance that, through a collection of short public interventions along the east end of Fox Street in the bustling Maboneng precinct, responds to the local, social, political, and personal features of this space and time in Johannesburg. Picket boards, assembly lines, synchronised greetings and more comprise the tactics employed in Monumenting Maboneng. “Play your life or your life will be played” becomes a sonorous refrain, sounding out from both sides of a makeshift tunnel that unsuspecting tourists, locals, students, and tuk-tuk drivers alike are made to pass through.

As with so much public performance, many of the richer moments elicited by Monumenting Maboneng can be found in the passing stares, the bemused looks, the dismissive chuckles and the hesitant approaches of those who populate the streets, cars, taxis, restaurants and pavement stalls of Maboneng’s Fox Street. Finally, there are the tributary players that add to the performance – the sounds, the sites and the everyday ebb and flow of Maboneng – anchoring this collaborative body of work in the social, political and architectural realities of an ever-changing city precinct.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

PERFORMERS | Sibahle Prosper Mangena, Thulisile Mduvane, Vusi Petros Nkwenkwezi, Molatelo Tracey Maffa, Sinenhlanhla Mgeyi & Aaliyah Zama Matintela
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR | Oliver Hangl
COLLABORATORS | Kwasha! Theatre Company
PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair
STAGE MANAGER | Hayleigh Evans & POPArt Productions
PHOTOGRAPHERS | Thusi Vukani & Sizakele Angel Khumalo

Special thanks to The Austrian Federal Chancellery and the Austrian Embassy Pretoria for their collaboration and support.

FEBRUARY 2019 | FOR ONCE | MCGUFFIN

McGuffin is an interdisciplinary performance piece created and directed by New York-based visual artist and director Deville Cohen. It was first performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in February 2019 as part of the For Once programme.

“Impulsive and unabating, our drive to escape and move forward is unrelenting. Starting with great conviction and intensity, the stimuli, motivation, and intention mutate in the journey,” reads a note towards the process of McGuffin.

Titled after the fictional and very often film-centred plot device of the MacGuffin – an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but ultimately insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself – McGuffin sets out to pursue and harness this aforementioned “drive”. The performance follows three performers through a bristling labyrinth of kinetic, architectural sculptures, both manipulated by the performers, and informing their movement through the space – a high-speed chase through an imagined cityscape. Elaborate video projection lends a further imaginative and theatrical presence to the performance, which weaves between PVC skyscrapers and cardboard alleyways.

The performers – Thulani Chauke, Tushrik Fredericks and Nonku Phiri – make use of sharp choreography throughout. At times they are frantic, scaling walls, veering around corners and diving for cover between rubbish bins. Then, they are decisive and deliberate, cracking safe codes and washing away their traces with forensic precision. The result is a heady mixture of frenzied, tactile theatre and abstract cinematography, an assemblage of fast-paced action and considered narrative that is both familiar and unpredictable. It is in the intricacies of this unremitting pursuit that McGuffin is located.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

NOVEMBER 2018 | FOR ONCE | PEDI

Pedi is a performance duet by Javier Velazquez Cabrero in collaboration with Teresa Phuti Mojela. The piece was performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in November 2018 as part of the For Once programme.

In Pedi, Madrid-born visual artist and dancer Cabrero pairs up with South African-based dancer and choreographer Mojela to put into place a collaborative methodology he’s been working with for the past three years, developed predominantly with the actor Pedro Mira. The performance is a measured one, prizing stillness and key moments for reflection on stage. It is in these moments that each performer identifies and pursues a single gesture, seemingly in isolation, but always in response to one another, building upon and incorporating these moments back into the greater performance.

We see the two dancers reflecting on an abstract premise – “the physical ability to relate to one another through varying states of distance”. It is a ritual of communication with those who have left the physical world, as well as with the characters who remain relevant to the collective imagination.

Adding to Mojela and Cabrero’s control of the performance through strict, responsive and empathetic choreography, is a low, atmospheric soundscape by Terry Riley. The result is a performance that holds, provokes and soothes, at times propelled and contained by a single gesture – the trembling hand, the poised strut. While both Cabrero and Mojela command the stage as individual performers, it is through the collaborative, responsive, and intuitive duet that they come alive.

As much as Pedi is a process-based performance on the psychological relationship one has with one’s own body – and in turn one’s physical relationship to other bodies – it is also a work that prizes memory, intangibility and the endless imaginaries.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

CONCEPTUALISERS & COLLABORATORS | Javier Velazquez Cabrero & Teresa Phuti Mojela
PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair
STAGE MANAGER | Hayleigh Evans & POPArt Productions
MUSIC | Persian Surgery Dervishes by Terry Riley

NOVEMBER 2018 | FOR ONCE | MNQUMA

Mnquma is a solo performance by dancer Xolisile Bongwana, performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in November 2018 as part of the For Once programme. While Mnquma has gone on to tour and develop further, this is the first iteration of the performance.

Conceptualised and choreographed by Bongwana and dancer, teacher and choreographer David April, Mnquma is a performance “in quest of our intersecting narratives to connect with our roots.” It is a play about identity, self-discovery, and the journey of reconnecting with one’s ancestors in order to achieve a sense of belonging. All of this being expertly held and communicated through the medium of dance.

Boyhood, rites of passage and the subsequent journey to becoming a man are also key components to the work. Bongwana grapples with these throughout, sometimes through music and the spoken word, but largely through dance – a tightly choreographed narrative communicated through a performance that’s both fluid and feverish, contemplative and compelling.

Minimal set design keeps the physicality of the performance in the spotlight, while original musical compositions by No-Finish Dywili, Elvis Sibeko, and Bongwana himself both supplement the physical performance and serve as fully realised works of their own.

Mnquma is a performance that is alive with movement, music and emotion. It is a brief but impactful work that communicates a personal story through a universal medium.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

AUGUST 2018 | FOR ONCE | Elegy

Elegy forms part of an ongoing series of commemorative performance art pieces by artist Gabrielle Goliath. Performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in August 2018 as part of the For Once programme, the work is in commemoration of the life of Eunice Ntombifuthi Ndube.

In Goliath’s Elegy, a durational work performed by a group of women vocalists, the enduring power of a single note becomes a profound tool for remembrance, mourning, ritualisation and engagement. A long-term commemorative performance project, Elegy began in 2015 and has been staged in various locations. The single, durational note – a physically and psychologically taxing mode of performance – is sung in order to evoke the presence of an “absent individual”, a specific woman or LGBTQIA+ individual who has been murdered as a result of gender-based violence in South Africa.

In Goliath’s words: “Responding to the physical, ontological and structural outworkings of rape-culture in South Africa, Elegy performances recall the identity of individuals whose subjectivities have been fundamentally violated – and who are, as such, all too easily consigned to a generic, all-encompassing victimhood. With each performance commemorating a specific woman or LGBTQI+ individual raped and killed in South Africa, significant to the work is how loss becomes a site for community, and for empathic, cross-cultural, and cross-national encounters. Seeking to work around the kinds of symbolic violence through which traumatised black bodies are routinely objectified, Elegy performances open a distinctly decolonial and intersectional space, wherein mourning is presented as a social and productive work – not in the sense of healing or ‘closure’, but as a necessary and sustained irresolution.”

The performers stand in single-file, each one taking their turn to step onto a small plinth and sound out the single note. Individually, the performers do not hold the note for very long – about the length of a bell or a tuning fork being struck – but collectively, the note is held for the entirety of the performance.

It is through this refusal of silence, this relentless resonance, that Goliath’s Elegy opens up a space for continued remembrance, often staying with audiences long after the performance has reached its close.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR | Gabrielle Goliath
PERFORMERS | Moloko Letsoalo, Khayakazi Madlala, Sibongile Mthiyane, Litho Nqai, Pretty Skhosana, Annemarie Steenkamp & Ernestine Stuurman
CINEMATOGRAPHER | Kutlwano Makgalemele
EDITOR | Noah Cohen
PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair

AUGUST 2018 | FOR ONCE | CITY DEEP

City Deep is a collaboration between musician and composer Clare Loveday and visual artist Nandipha Mntambo that explores sound, architecture, and movement in Johannesburg city. The performance debuted at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in August 2018 as part of the For Once programme.

How does the brick-and-mortar make-up of a city influence those who move through it? What do the far-flung mine dumps and the endless stretches of concrete contribute to the way we engage with the city, sonically and otherwise? Performed by saxophonist Naomi Sullivan and clarinettist Luke Newby, and with video by Mntambo, City Deep explores architecture as a metaphor for the people of Johannesburg, considering how buildings and soundscapes shape and are shaped by the movement of people in this fast-changing city.

The 15-minute performance is uncomplicated in its presentation. Sullivan and Newby are on stage with nothing but their instruments and sheet music. On the walls behind and beside them, projections of Mntambo’s video fragments appear. The two work together – live music and visuals – to sound out the activity of Johannesburg and its surrounds. The music is abstract and affecting, sometimes a playful call-and-response between the two musicians, other times a collaborative endeavour with the scrolling cityscape we see on the walls.

The visuals are rendered in black and white. They show the buildings, the people, the activity of the moving city. We move from mine dumps and rubble to endless stretches of tarmac and concrete. Sullivan and Newby’s soundscape swells and flows, the pitter-patter sounds of the breath, the metallic groans of buildings fortifying themselves against the wind.

City Deep is the result of a small, dedicated team of curious and artistic minds, and it is a sharp and experimental exercise in sounding a city that’s in a constant state of flux – from the restless streets of the inner city, to the dry, bristling landscapes of the veld.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

JULY 2018 | FOR ONCE | HISTORIES OF THE INVISIBLE

Histories of the Invisible is a poetic and musical performance by Dr Andile Khumalo in collaboration with Siphiwe Shiburi, Raimi Gbadamosi, Dean Salant, Andisiwe Mpinda and Velaphi Ramphele. It was performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in July 2018 as part of the For Once programme.

Using live, looped, and responsive music and sound, as well as spoken word, Histories of the Invisible grapples with notions of home, migration, access, displacement and the role that culture and tradition play in all of this.

The performance opens with spoken word by Mpinda – the first of many short-form monologues and textual fragments – giving way to an abstract soundscape that sets the tone of the work. Flags hang from the ceiling like compasses in a state of disarray. In the absence of language, there is a groaning, shrieking refrain, claustrophobic and clawing. The music becomes jarring and incongruous. It is a swelling soundscape of rolling drum patterns and digital flotsam that serves to disrupt and to translate the notions of existence and placelessness through sonic tactics.

“Please, don’t call me a refugee,” says Mpinda’s character. “Home is a language you grew in your mouth. I bring you something you do not want – news of the country I am trapped in.”

Through the simple, but enduring premise of sound and poetry, Histories of the Invisible journeys through the conditions of escape, citizenship, authenticity, outsiderness and historical and present-day migration. Rather than striving towards any certain resolutions, it is a performance that presents a reflection on unequal journeys, and a set of provocations towards the many ways in which we move through the world.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

JULY 2018 | FOR ONCE | ARTIST WITH NO TITLE

Artist With No Title is a musical, theatrical, and dance-centric performance that was incubated and performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in July 2018 as part of the For Once Programme.

Directed by Shanell Winlock Pailman, the playful and collaborative performance features Teresa Phuti Mojela, Khutjo Green Gregory K. Mabusela, Simphiwe Bonongo, Julia Burnham and Phindo Ngxanga – all artists who have performed and travelled widely throughout their careers. This becomes one of many points of parody and reflection in Artist With No Title: the notion of success and prestige, of having built up an enviable career in the arts.

The performance opens with a caricature of showmanship. Green is the performing artist, the dazzling medium delivering messages from beyond, and engaging in various “tricks and effects”. All the while, her team builds a sketchy edifice out of poles and plastic. Green’s performance collapses in on itself like the flimsy structure, and the artists are immediately at each other’s throats, wailing and placing blame.

Much of Artist With No Title carries this tone of playful lamentation, be it Burnham’s solo on the state of the performing arts – “short breaks, 9-5, salary cuts, small budget, no funding, get it right” – or Mojela’s closing performance that parodies the common refrain of the auditioning actor – “I rehearse very hard, with passion. Sharpening my skills, to get that part.”

With Billy Langa as musical director, song plays a crucial role in the work, and brings a momentum and further performativity to the sketches and individual performances. Plastic is also present throughout the work and lends an enduring materiality to the play. It doubles up as canvas, costume and more, sometimes excessive and smothering, other times lavish and vibrant.

As each performer parodies and pokes fun at themselves and their craft, they also point to the longstanding, systemic issues within the arts, and the trials and tribulations of making a sustainable career out of one’s art. In this way, Artist With No Title is a performance of wilfully flailing limbs and shaky falsettos, full of spirited jabs at audience, artist and industry alike.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

JULY 2018 | FOR ONCE | THE BORROW PIT

The Borrow Pit is a kamishibai play by Jemma Kahn and is the commissioned work for the artist’s 2018 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Theatre. In July 2018, following its premiere at the National Arts Festival, The Borrow Pit was staged at The Centre for the Less Good Idea as part of the For Once programme.

How do you begin to make sense of a world dominated and influenced by hideous men? In The Borrow Pit, Kahn zeroes in on the lives of influential painters, philosophers, philanthropists and psychoanalysts from a bygone, albeit endure influential, era to posit that the artist-muse trope is a little more sinister than one might think.

Performed using a combination of stage acting, narration, sock-puppetry and the Japanese street theatre techniques of kamishibai, the play draws on historical facts and events from the lives of these painters and high-society members and adds in a healthy dose of humour and fiction in order to better translate it all.

The story begins in Paris, in the dark, smokey recesses of a gentlemen’s club where a group of important men stand around talking about important things, and where we meet the likes of Nietzche, Freud, and Picasso (a striped black and white sock animated by Kahn). It is also here that we are introduced to the painters Francis Bacon (Tony Miyambo) and Lucian Freud (David Viviers), two of the play’s central figures.

There is a great deal of clandestine behaviour that the audience is not made privy to in this first act and the next time we see the two painters, their lives have improved immeasurably. Bacon has landed consignment deals with the MoMa, fallen into untold fortune and is selling more paintings than he can produce. Freud has similar good fortune, though to a lesser extent than his contemporary. Both artists have their muses – Freud’s wife Lady Caroline Blackwood (also played by Kahn), and Bacon’s bumbling thief-turned-lover George Dyer (played by Wilhelm van der Welt).

Through the secret events at the gentlemen’s club and the presence of the respective muses, Kahn puts forward a theory behind the long history of male-dominated arts and culture in the West, and the powerful and successful figures it produces. In this way, The Borrow Pit is something of an allegory for the monstrous and often banal presence of men in the arts, the academy, the world. It is also a play that details the key moments and influences of each painter – Freud’s near-death experience, Bacon’s abusive father – and this is a way of getting us closer to these characters, to follow their stories with genuine interest.

The Borrow Pit is a play that employs a great deal of humour and tragedy in equal measure. It is a work that uses fiction to better make sense of reality – following the lives of painters and philosophers and theorists, based in fact and reason, but extrapolating on the relationships, the power dynamics, the recurring themes of extraction and greed, and generating a play that articulates the absurd and pervasive abuse of power (and subsequently, people) in the world.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

MAY 2018 | FOR ONCE | African Exodus

African Exodus is a physical and musical performance that, as writer and producer Sbusiso Shozi explains, “seeks to unearth the history of Bantu speaking tribes around the African continent.” It was first performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in May 2018 as part of the For Once programme.

Where do you go when history and research fail you? What happens when the tenuous trail of a group of people peters out? For Shozi and the team behind African Exodus, music and movement provide a way forward.

In African Exodus, a team of performers seeks to interrogate the migratory history and rootedness to the land of the Bantu people. Through what Shozi refers to as “archaeological linguistics research”, the performance traces the roots or landmarks of where these groups came from. The resultant performance and soundscape speculates on this history, using the tools of the body and the voice as points of reference.

Throughout the performance, the cast are a uniform body of people, mirrored in their costume and in their setting – high, slim desks and chairs that serve as lecterns, altars, instruments and more. Set and costume multiply in meaning. Desks become drums, bowls become spotlights, and shirts become doeks. The work employs rich choral work, live recitation, harmonisation and rallying, proselytising prose. Satire becomes a useful tool, too – the biting performance of common, regressive tropes about the continent and its people.

Through the striking combination of music and the body in motion, African Exodus puts forward lucid and illuminating scenes of history and migration. It is through this sharp performative narrative that we can begin to better understand the lesser-known movements of the past.

– David Mann

In 2023, African Exodus will be travelling to Komische Oper Berlin. The performance will take place on 24 & 25 February 2023 at Kathedrale, SchwuZ Queer Club (Rollbergstrasse 26, 12053 Berlin) at 8pm.

CREDITS:

PRODUCER, MUSICAL DIRECTOR & WRITER | Sbusiso Shozi
PERFORMERS | Thabang Mkhwanazi, Xolisile Bongwana, Thabo Gwadiso, Thulani Zwane, Simphiwe Sikhakhane, Sizakele Nkosi & Sbusiso Shozi
MUSICIAN | Yogin Sullaphen
SHOW DIRECTOR | Nhlanhla Mahlangu
STAGE MANAGEMENT & ADMINISTRATOR | Sifiso Shozi
LIGHTING DESIGNERS | Wesley France & Guy Nelson
PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair
SUPPORTED BY | The National Arts Council of South Africa

MAY 2018 | FOR ONCE | Seventy Sounds Between You and Me

Seventy Sounds Between You and Me is a performance conceptualised by Kyla Smith and Hannah Loewenthal, in collaboration with the Hillbrow Theatre and elders of the Tswelopele Frail Care Centre, with Gcebile Dlamini and Arcade Music. The performance took place at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in May 2018 as part of the For Once programme.

A collaboration between performers young and old, Seventy Sounds Between You and Me harnesses sound, movement, and a collective choreography to put forward a performance that muses on forms of communication, care and exchange.

The performance opens with noise and the music of the city – bottles clinking, the hooting of cars, taxis, the hammering of an industrial drill, the sonic detritus of the urban centre. A scene emerges: a young girl and an elderly woman, facing one another, and illuminated by the harsh, singular light of a pair of torches. They reach out to each other, but do not touch.

This engages the activity of the performance – a row of elders and youngsters begin to move, gesture, all in a uniform line situated at the back of the stage. There are many languages and modes of communication taking place here: signing, facial expressions, small, repetitive gestures. They develop into disparate performances, physical refrains that are gently performed and resolutely held.

The youngsters break away into a chorus and move in time, while the elders watch on. Throughout it all, Smith is just off stage, collaborating with the dancers through live musical performance. While the stage remains undressed for the duration of the performance, lighting design by Alexia Webster makes for considered moments of shadow play and silhouette, adding a further layer of performance and perception to the work.

Seventy Sounds Between You and Me is a performance that puts forward the possibility of communication and care, as well as the nuances that underpin the two. When the various performers do “meet”, it is through the language and activity of dance – a singular and prevailing moment in the performance. It is through the individual and ultimately collaborative components of language, sound and movement that Seventy Sounds Between You and Me is so strongly rooted.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

ELDERS | Harry Card, Vicky Walker, Onica Mabane, Flora Nkwana, Adrina Xaba & Milton Sibiya
YOUTH | Charlotte Ndlovu, Mbalenhle Ncube, Nosipho Dlamini, Njabulo Dumakude, Olivia Jack & Amanda Ngwenya
ARTISTIC DIRECTORS | Hannah Loewenthal & Kyla-Rose Smith
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR | Gcebile Dlamini
SOUND DESIGNERS | Arcade Music: Vitu Maphenduka, Sabelo Sithole & Giyani Ngcamu
LIGHTING DESIGNER | Alexia Webster
PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair
STAGE MANAGER | Hayleigh Evans & POPArt Productions

MARCH 2018 | FOR ONCE | Clone

CLONE is a dance work choreographed by Louise Coetzer, and performed by Darkroom Contemporary and musician Brydon Bolton. It was first performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in March 2018 as part of the For Once programme.

The scene is all white. Clinical. Sanitised. Alien. Three figures occupy the stage, accompanied by a disquieting soundscape from the double bass, situated just off stage. White boards occupy the walls. At times, they resemble the observation windows in medical theatres, other times they might be blank canvasses mounted in a white cube. The figures don equally white uniforms, each with a soft, knotted spine snaking its way down their backs. Their movements are slick and sharp, each motion informing the other’s. Together, they lift, push, pull, fall and hold one another. The soundscape, like their twisting spines, is eerily present throughout.

It is in this simple, yet sharply executed relationship between music and movement that CLONE is located. They guide and shape the piece – it is light and ethereal; it is heavy and burdensome. The audience moves through these moments in the work like chapters in a book, or scenes from a film, each one distinct and expertly held, but always with the greater performance in mind – working to feed back into it, to assemble a full and accomplished body of work.

As a result, CLONE is a performance full of rich, distinct moments that allow for whole narratives to be held in a single gesture, or for the absence of music to speak volumes. It is a complex and intricate performance of the body and the instrument alike that both invites and requires the full presence of the viewer.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

DANCERS | Darkroom Contemporary: Lee Kotze, Llewellyn Afrika, Joy Millar & Kayla Schulttze
CHOREOGRAPHER | Louise Coetzer
DOUBLE BASSIST | Brydon Bolton

MARCH 2018 | FOR ONCE | Music for your Eyes

Music for your Eyes is a collaborative audio-visual performance by guest Italian duo Luca Ciarla (violin, electronics, and toy instruments) and Keziat (video art and installations). It was first performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in March 2018 as part of the For Once programme.

Sound emerges slowly and experimentally in Music for your Eyes. Generated through a small sonic receptor being scraped, tapped and brushed up against the walls and the body, it is looped and manipulated in real-time until a recognisable pattern, a song, emerges. Images appear, projected onto the walls. Curiously abstract, they feature crumpled tissue paper and pre-recorded drawings. Chairs grow into ladders and snails crawl across the screen.

Ciarla produces a violin and plays in time with the unfolding drawings, guiding audiences through cityscapes, out of birdcages, and alongside frenetic linework. Later, a pair of dancers emerge and perform a sequence alongside the activity of sound and image.

All of this serves to pursue the central provocation of the performance – the act of seeing music; of illustrating sound. It is through this singular, but playfully experimental pursuit that Music for your Eyes builds up a brief and immersive performance. It is a work that showcases the musician, the dancer, the visual artist and the innumerable ideas and possibilities that emerge when one begins to challenge and play with conventional media in novel ways.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

DANCERS | Darkroom Contemporary: Lee Kotze, Llewellyn Afrika, Joy Millar & Kayla Schulttze
VIOLINIST | Luca Ciarla
VISUALS & INSTALLATION | Keziat Terracciano

FEBRUARY 2018 | FOR ONCE | VIA KANANA

Via Kanana is a collaborative dance work between Via Katlehong Dance group and choreographer Gregory Maqoma that returns to the fundamentals of the pantsula dance form and culture. It was first performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in February 2018 as part of the For Once programme.

From the onset, Via Kanana grapples with the notion of an African society at odds with itself, of a continent in the throes of widespread and historic corruption, greed and increasing disillusionment. The performance opens with a sweeping moment – a single figure drenched in digital, fragmented light. A robotic voice sounds out – “corrupt” – and the dancers take their places. Here, and throughout the performance, music becomes highly instructional, as do the striking images of the late South African photographer David Goldblatt, projected in full on the walls behind the ensemble.

Through sharp, imaginative choreography that draws on the foundations of pantsula, the performers journey through vast open landscapes, down rattling train lines and into the dynamic inner-city. Figureheads leer out from the front covers of newspapers, while the sound of trains chugging along adds to the movement on stage. Through music, movement and visuals, we are transported out of the city and into the country.

Performers jolt this way and that, oscillating between slow, mesmeric duets and frenetic ensemble work. Rallying spoken word adds another texture to the performance, speaking to loose, but resonant notions of freedom, thief-dom, corruption, hope and betterment.

Via Kanana is a performance that posits disillusionment and disenchantment as a means of caring for one’s continent, one’s home. As Maqoma explains: "We are all victims, we are all darkened by fear...this piece is a break amongst the clouds, bringing us light and hope".

– David Mann

CREDITS:

DANCERS | Tshepo Nchabeleng, Tshepo Mohlabane, Abel Vilakazi, Andile Nhlapo, Thato Qofela, Teboho Molelekeng, Julia Burnham & Lenela Leballo
TECHNICAL MANAGER, SET & LIGHTING DESIGNER | Oliver Hauser
CHOREOGRAPHERS | Gregory Maqoma & Via Katlehong Dance: Buru Mohlabane, Vusi Mdoyi & Steven Faleni
AUDIO-VISUAL DESIGNER | Jurgen Meekel
PHOTOGRAPHER | David Goldblatt
COMPOSER | Samuel Khabane
PROJECT DIRECTOR | Buru Mohlabane
CINEMATOGRAPHER | Kutlwano Makgalemele
JUNIOR CINEMATOGRAPHER | Chris Soal
EDITOR | Noah Cohen
PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair

JANUARY 2018 | FOR ONCE | Permanent Creation: On the Other Side of the Atlantic

Permanent Creation: On the Other Side of the Atlantic is a collaborative and durational performance by artists Snyder Moreno Martín (Bogotá, Colombia) and Eduardo Cachucho (Johannesburg, South Africa). It was performed over a period of seven hours – the time difference between the respective countries – at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in January 2018 as part of the For Once programme.

What happens to a performance, a body, an idea, or a gesture when explored over the course of seven straight hours? Back in June of 2017, Cachucho and Martin began their collaboration on a residency in São Paulo. In the months that followed, they continued to explore this collaboration, physically separated by a distance of 12 000 kms. Permanent Creation: On the Other Side of the Atlantic is the result of the two artists meeting in the same physical space and building up a free-spirited and durational performance.

The artists restrict their performance to the space of The Centre, although their explorations traverse the media of text, voice, dance, sound and more. At times, they action this out in a tentative duet – taking their lead from one another, batting an idea or a gesture back and forth between them and seeing what form it takes, which way it goes. Other times, they explore in isolation, working away on their individual pursuits, but always folding these explorations back into the greater performance.

A sign posted outside the entrance invites audiences to “move freely” and “spend the time you like”. Throughout the performance, audience members drift in and out, some walking around the space, others simply sitting and watching Cachucho and Martin as they work. In this way, the audience member becomes an active observer and participant in the performance, be it through direct interaction, or through the subtle presence of an external eye, another player in the room. This is perhaps most strongly felt when children enter the space, more actively engaging with the props and the activity of the room.

It is through the mining of multiple activities and actions over such an extended period that Permanent Creation: On the Other Side of the Atlantic finds its stride and generates its material – both physical and figurative – be it through the endless exchange of words, or the quietly affecting act of balancing precariously on a set of bricks, holding one another, working with another and riffing on the shared presence.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

CONCEPTUALISERS & PERFORMERS | Snyder Moreno Martín & Eduardo Cachucho
PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair
STAGE MANAGER | Hayleigh Evans & POPArt Productions

NOVEMBER 2017 | FOR ONCE | AGNES OF GOD

Agnes of God is a 30-minute adaptation of the John Pielmeier play by the same name. Adapted and directed by Phala Ookeditse Phala and performed by Faith Busika and Mohau Cele, it was first performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in November 2017 as part of the For Once programme.

Where do traumatic events go when they are not adequately processed or given room to be dealt with? How does trauma manifest in the mind, the body? Agnes of God follows the plight of three women who, as a result of past and unresolved trauma, are at odds with their minds and bodies. Over the course of the short performance, the audience gains increasing insight into their psyches.

A bed, a carpet, a chair, and crucifixes above the bed and on the floor set the scene inside the convent. Agnes, the nun who has given birth and maintains that her child is the result of immaculate conception, is scattered, erratic and evasive. The mother superior, by contrast, is calm and evenly toned. The presence of the psychiatrist, who appears only as a disembodied voice, serves as a pertinent and unnerving antagonist, activating much of the central themes of the performance – abuse, loss, personhood and religious belief.

A brief, impactful and enduring performance, Agnes of God puts forward an interpretation of a woman's spirit, her soul and her humanity above the perceived narrative of a fallen woman. In this way, Agnes becomes a metaphor for all women seeking the basic rights of safety, agency, refuge and respect.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

SEPTEMBER 2017 | FOR ONCE | Bang Bang Wo

Bang Bang Wo is a performance lecture about the politics and performativity of help by dancer and choreographer Nelisiwe Xaba. It was first performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in September 2017 as part of the For Once programme.

In Bang Bang Wo (‘help’ or ‘helping’ in Mandarin), Xaba employs a simple refrain – the moving and stacking of clear plastic bags filled with various seeds – to deliver her sharp and incisive performance lecture on the loaded nature of giving and receiving help. As such, Xaba’s performance harnesses parody, satire and tongue-in-cheek critique to muse on the notion of aid or support as it takes place in contemporary South Africa. NGOs, ‘domestic work’, arts organisations and outreach foundations all come under fire, narrated in a cool and effective tone by Xaba. “By the time they’re finished helping,” she says, stacking bag upon bag, “you can’t even do anything for yourself anymore.”

A number of enduring topics run through the performance. Xaba mentions performative allyship, online activism, local corruption, foreign aid and more. First performed in 2017, the performance perhaps finds new resonance in the age of the global Covid-19 pandemic, when forms of help, and the communities who seek and provide it, have become all the more pervasive.

The performance is shrewd and effective. As you listen to the lecture, the structure of bean-filled bags continues to grow. It is a mesmeric and didactic tool by Xaba that doubles up as a sharp metaphor. As the performance unfolds, Xaba is increasingly preoccupied with her own fortification or enclosure. She is ensconced in the illusion of prosperity, of progress. Ultimately, she becomes buried and obscured by these bags of seeds that will never grow.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

JUNE 2017 | FOR ONCE | HISTORY OF THE MAIN COMPLAINT (as interpreted by Thulani Chauke)

History of the Main Complaint (as interpreted by Thulani Chauke) is a performance by dancer Thulani Chauke in response to the film by William Kentridge. It was first performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in June 2017 as part of the For Once programme.

The month of June, commonly referred to as “Youth Month” in South Africa, commemorates the Soweto Uprising, a series of demonstrations and protests led by black school children in South Africa that began on the morning of 16 June 1976. Students from numerous Soweto schools began to protest in the streets in response to the implementation of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in schools. They were met with police brutality, and the day ended in bloodshed. Today, the event continues to stand out as one of the country’s most violent and divisive moments.

Performed in June 2017, more than four decades after the Soweto Uprising, Chauke’s short and effective performance muses on the legacy of violence in contemporary South Africa, and the often desperate act of bearing witness to it all.

With Kentridge’s History of the Main Complaint as the projected backdrop, Chauke takes his place between a set of ropes strung across the length of the stage. Looped and manipulated soundbites fill the room – key snippets from court hearings and commissions of inquiry that parade and parody the country’s party politics, and the chilling refrain of laughter in the face of great violence.

Throughout the performance, Chauke remains largely ensnared by the ropes. He is caught between the lines, hung out to dry, attempting unsuccessfully to inform from the margins. In this way, he is something of a flailing trapeze artist caught in a balancing act between past and present, the enduring power of history and the heavy weight of time.

Above all else, History of the Main Complaint (as interpreted by Thulani Chauke) is a performance that explores the notions of helplessness, rage and uncertainty, and serves as a disquieting reminder to never ignore the interminable reverberations of the past.

– David Mann

CREDITS: