My first encounter with The Centre brings me back to London, when visiting William Kentridge’s show at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2022. There was an  installation entitled Waiting for the Sybil, described as made “with artists from The Centre for the Less Good Idea”—a name that immediately caught my attention… 
Bronwyn Lace : Sybil was one of the first major opera commissions William worked on, with the majority of the cast drawn from The Centre. These were artists he had met through workshops and processes linked to their own work and to the life of the Centre at that point. 

The title is indeed appealing! It takes that impulse from the Tswana proverb “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor”. It’s both humorous and so accurate to how we – creatives – often feel. The making process in the studio is often clumsy and can be quite stupid and repetitive. But you stay in it long enough for something unexpected to emerge. When this title came up, it sounded like a ridiculous title that nobody would remember. But in fact, it’s because people don’t remember it and get it wrong that it has had the life and momentum it has. When people say “I love your space for artists who can’t make art so good”, I think that’s wonderful. 

Neo Muyanga: It sounds like a place for experimentation. I also love the fact that it sounds so clumsy that clearly it came from a non-English speaker originally. It says so much about who we are as South Africans. We can articulate ourselves in English, but our outlook is not Western. We work and live inside Western constructs and we understand them, but we’re not Western in how we perceive the world —and therefore in how we respond to it. It feels like there’s a smile in the name, like it can welcome anybody. It opens up the questions: what do you mean? What are less good ideas? Is my idea good enough if it’s not less good? 

Indeed, this title stands out in a world that champions self-improvement and competition, both at an individual and collective level. Does it then provide specific guidance on The Centre’s spirit, artistic practices, or methodology? 
Lace: Our focus is on the doing, through gestural, physical, embodied actions. It doesn’t mean we are anti-intellectual. We are interested in expanding the idea of the intellectual by incorporating things that are very hard to articulate or translate into text. That is often where we locate our humanity: in our ability to think and work collectively, in deep interdisciplinary ways. Neo often talks about a kind of telepathy between artists who have been in a space long enough, in a state of deep listening and questioning rather than broadcasting and answering. But at first, it is okay to be uncertain, and it is certainly better to listen to each other rather than try to convince one another of what best practice is right now. 

Muyanga: It is also for me a reflection on the history of South African music theatre making, which is about code devising. We don’t come to the floor with a fixed script. We come to explore and find the text together. So whichever idea can be sustained on the floor in this collaborative process between differently abled artists becomes the one that ultimately represents all of us. So only because it doesn’t represent one individual, but all of us collectively, does it become the less good idea? It seems less good because it is not perfect and it wasn’t a one-take wonder. But in fact, it is more rigorous, more profound, more flexible, because it allows for multiple voices to enter and exist, and so it is more robust. 

You both came on board The Centre at different times. How did you find your way to this project, and what background did you bring with you? 
Lace: I identify as a visual artist, but I have always worked within visual art environments where a kind of performative action often takes place. When William called me in 2016, I thought it was a brilliant idea to give focus and resources to an actual centre for multidisciplinary practice in Johannesburg—a space that was lacking for experimental practices at that time. 

When I stood in the first workshop, surrounded by about 40 artists, I honestly felt outside of my body, watching percussionists reacting to boxes, dancers, visual artists drawing simultaneously… It didn’t need to be invented, it just needed space. It already had its own momentum, as if we were running alongside it rather than pushing it. 

Muyanga: I am a composer and musician. My practice has developed within multidisciplinary presentation, mainly music theatre-driven. But essentially, I am a storyteller using music and theatricality to understand where we are in the world, how we relate to the present, and what that might create in terms of possible futures. 

I come from Soweto, where the collective voice—the choral voice—was always the prism through which I understood the world. I grew up where everybody sings together: to make politics, joy, family, to welcome strangers, to communicate need, loss, sorrow, anger, even boredom. 

Soweto became a lens for reading the sonic in every place I have travelled. I became a traveller very young because apartheid forced us to move early. I got used to crossing borders, crossing boundaries. 

Whenever I found myself in a new space, the choral became my refuge. It was my way of translating myself, especially where I didn’t speak the language. Through singing, I carried my story and translated who I am and where I come from. It became a way of understanding myself and my practice. 

And this does influence The Centre today… 
Muyanga: At The Centre, we want to listen to individual artists articulating what they are dreaming about, but also create a framework where multiple voices can articulate a dream together. 

We find a shared structure where each individual dream is mirrored in a collective space. 

There is a growing awareness that the precarity long associated with parts of Africa is now becoming global. As thinkers like Achille Mbembe suggest, the world is becoming black, or as Duke Ellington already hinted in 1972 with Chinoiserie, the world is turning brown. 

Uncertainty is widespread: whether you have a job, a family, a business, a future. So you have to improvise. You have to listen deeply, stay attentive to your context, and offer what comes next. These are spaces where the future is being choreographed. 

This resonates strongly with the subtitle we’ve given to this new season at Bozar, which includes the word “reassembling”… 
Lace: The “re” is really where the focus is, because it is about an action and a repeated action. We also talk about reassembly, reaction, as well as unhappening, undoing. These are ways of shifting the physical perspective through which we look at a problem. In reassembling, what is conjured is the logic of collage: fragments from other spaces placed together, sometimes randomly, in contrast with one another. And suddenly there is a storytelling happening between the elements rather than only from them. What we are celebrating is the benefit of the peripheral vision. Being on the periphery gives you more perspective than being in the centre, because you are looking at yourself. Small fragments, short forms, seeds of ideas, when combined, allow us to understand context in a richer, more dynamic and complex way. It is a leaning into complexity rather than reducing it. 

In November, Bozar will be your new Centre space for almost a week… 
Muyanga: What is important is that we are not bringing a product, but a way of being, a way of knowing, a way of exploring. Sounding Pictures is an invitation for a live ensemble to watch a silent film together, which becomes a call and response between film and ensemble. The film is not a closed entity. It remains a living document. The ensemble listens, anticipates, sometimes gets it wrong, sometimes gets it right, and sometimes finds unexpected responses in real time. The audience sees that this uncertainty is part of the performance. 

Lace: Inside a grand marble building that has known itself for so long, we aim to bring a fluid, soft, living, breathing, singing entity that can enter it and leave a trace. Our time at Bozar includes Sounding Pictures, but also A Defence of the Less Good Idea, a collective lecture that changes with each iteration. Where William puts forward an academic defence style, the philosophy of The Centre introduces a musical cadenza and catastrophe into it. The “Bozar all over the P(a)lace” evening extends this spirit through encounters across rooms, showing that form—when based on deep listening—is enough in itself as a demonstration of what art making is to us. It is a humorous way of letting logic, marble and monumentality make fun of itself.