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.
Themes arise across the evening, one of them being admin: a symphony of typewriters, and a stage debut for a large photocopier. A legacy of colonialism, it seems, is bloated bureaucratic systems not fit for the purpose at hand. In one of the more complete pieces, the monologue Commission Continua, Tony Bonani Miyambo makes for an increasingly harried office lackey, the weight and mundanity of paperwork – commissions, inquiries – drowning out the gravity of its contents and the voices of the murdered and oppressed.
What is less good about this showcase is the development of said ideas. Binda, for example, is a compelling performer, and when in another piece she stands in an (imaginary) pot of boiling water, it’s almost painful to watch. But the actions surrounding that don’t resonate. The same goes for a lament for the victims of the Marikana massacre, which has beautiful singing but leaves the imagery, characters and emotional depth barely explored.
These are starting points, interesting perspectives and a valuable platform, but not what you would (yet) call potent performance.
At the Pit, Barbican, London, until 9 October
