From 19 to 22 July, SO | The Academy for the Less Good Idea continued its process of experimenting with the possibilities of the Pepper’s Ghost through a workshop with seven participants at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, held in the 2nd Space. Led by performer, musician, writer, educator and frequent collaborator of The Centre, Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu, the workshop made use of the Pepper’s Ghost mechanism as a device for thinking through, among other things, performance, storytelling and physicality in the short-form.
Over the course of the four-day workshop, Lecoge-Zulu led participants – some who had worked with the device before and others who hadn’t – through introductory and improvisatory exercises in order to gain a familiarity with the mechanism, learn the range of performative possibilities enabled by the device, and generate new ideas and material for performance inside the Pepper’s Ghost. Following this, certain elements or ideas were filmed for compositing and projection, allowing for further explorations of the hybrid live and digital possibilities of the mechanism.
Experiments with props, found footage, filmed elements, responsive sound, lighting, and live performance and projection allowed for a series of explorations that resulted in mime-work, tabletop theatre, dance films and epic allegory. Departing from The Centre’s traditional method of employing a central set of themes of provocations towards the generation of new ideas, this workshop only required that its participants bring an idea, image or text to work with as a starting point, and to engage with the Pepper’s Ghost, exploring whatever ideas and impulses emerged over the course of a few days.
Thematically, experiments with the Pepper’s Ghost surfaced ideas around the gaze and ways of seeing, family histories, superstitions and shifting identities. Similarly, established performance genres such as the physical or the comedic were also tested against the Pepper’s Ghost, with the inclusion of moving imagery and the intervention of manipulated footage and projection, to further explore these modes of performance.
The frustration of limitation also led to productive moments. In addition to the limitation of a one-minute window for filming, certain provocations emerged in the ways in which one performed, or didn’t perform, inside the mechanism. The desire to dance inside the Pepper’s Ghost was not always possible, for example, although it led to a different kind of dance, or a quality of dance that emerged in the less good ideas – the dancing of the hands, or a proliferation of smaller, digital dancers made possible through projection.
While the primary objective of the workshop was to familiarise participants with the Pepper’s Ghost and to experiment with the technology, close to 10 new performances were ultimately devised, performed and filmed over the four days. These works range from the story of the universe told in miniature, to works that explore ways of seeing – the gaze, the self – and the simple yet generative act of exploring the body in motion inside of the Pepper’s Ghost.
– David Mann
PHOTOGRAPHER | Zivanai Matangi
