South African artist William Kentridge currently has an acclaimed exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. Here’s another project he’s behind, The Centre for the Less Good Idea (the name comes from a Tswana proverb: “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor”). It is a studio in Johannesburg: an experimental performance lab, Kentridge tells us before this show, and a place for artists to follow their impulses rather than create with an audience in mind. So as the first people to see this staged work outside South Africa, what can we take away?
On offer are six short pieces drawing on dance, theatre and music, and there are certainly some good ideas. Thulisile Binda’s The Weep of the Whips uses a leather sjambok, associated with violent apartheid-era policing. At first the whip seems to have its own voice, a startlingly sharp swoosh as it slices the air. But Binda takes control, standing with solid power, circling the whip in wide arcs like a superhero, then letting the momentum of it lift her feet off the ground. There’s an elemental power, and lots of thematic potential.
