A focus on collective making in Season 11 of The Centre for the Less Good Idea

Season 11 is coming to The Centre for the Less Good Idea. The five-day festival of visual art, dance, theatre, site-specific installation, pop-up performances, and talks runs from Wednesday 26 to Sunday 30 November 2025.

Curated by The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s impresario, Neo Muyanga, and supported by The Centre’s core team, Season 11 focuses on work made by and in collaboration with Johannesburg’s many artists, theatremakers, musicians, writers, filmmakers, and thinkers, as well as a host of invited artists.

Many of The Centre’s key methodologies feature in the Season – public performances and processions, the intersection of visual art and performance, short-form theatre, and curated conversations – but these ways of working have also evolved and deepened over the years. Specifically, it’s the act of collective seeing and shaping that runs through all of the works in this Season.

“The Centre for the Less Good Idea is invested in giving the idea the benefit of the doubt,” says Muyanga. “We are all in the room when the idea is explored, and we give input from our own vantage point as practitioners and audience members alike. We pull on those threads and ways of seeing together to make the idea come to life. It’s a core practice at The Centre.

Bronwyn Lace, co-founder and director of The Centre echoes this, explaining that Season 11 is, in part, a culmination of two years of provocations and experimental forms put forth by Muyanga.

“The deeply integrated and interconnected results of these forms are evidence both of Muyanga’s extraordinary capacity for deep listening and play as well as The Centre’s capacity as a collective to develop context-specific, collaborative and cross-disciplinary new work,” says Lace.

Opening Season 11 is Moving the Mark, a new programme pairing prominent visual artists and dancers towards a series of responsive, interdisciplinary experiments in movement and mark-making.

Here, the interest is in what might emerge as a result of pairing movers and mark-makers, but also what’s revealed in the act of collaboration – what new methodologies or creative decisions emerge when a dance is in duet with an ink stain, or a painter must choreograph their brushstrokes?

Artists and dancers include William Kentridge, Vincent Mantsoe, Penny Sopis, Shannel Winlock-Paiman, Mary Sibande, Nandipha Mntambo, Kitty Phetla and more.

Season 11 features a multifaceted programme of newly incubated, interdisciplinary work, as well as continued explorations of compelling works from the first three Collations series, namely – Visual Radio Plays, Sounding Pictures, and The Unexpected City. Collectively interrogating a dramaturgy of sound, moving image, and the stories of the city, these programmes are spread across the Season and will each feature for one night only.

Downtown Johannesburg remains a vital site and source of inspiration, informing how we situate works both inside and outside The Centre. An ongoing component of the Season is Site, Light, Action l Fox Street Activations, a series of performances and public light installations in and around Fox Street and Arts on Main, curated by Marcus Neustetter.

Much of Neustetter’s thinking revolves around what lies inside and outside the buildings and surround us in Downtown Joburg, as well as the personal narratives and questions carried by those who move through and inhabit these environments. Site, Light, Actions emerge from these explorations.

“These small experimental moments embrace the unknown, seeking connections and stories that might reveal themselves through artistic languages. Framed by temporary sets and focused by mobile light, these moments function as small public studios of attempted sense-making,” says Neustetter.

The Season will also feature SO l From Script to Stage, three newly incubated works of theatre from our interrelated series of mentorship programmes – Thinking In Writing, Thinking In Directing, Thinking In Lighting, and Thinking In Staging – curated by Athena Mazarakis and SO I Academy for the Less Good Idea. These first iterations take the form of 20-minute performances, shown back-to-back in a single programme.

The three featured plays are The Braai Republic, written by Mongezi Mtukwana and directed by Jupiter Sibisi; Chosi Three Times, written by Uvile Ximba and directed by Chris Djuma; and Exodus with No Last Name, written by Nolwazi Mahlangu and directed by Aalliyah Matintela. Lighting design for the plays will be by Joël Leonard. “In these plays, we see writers dealing with key concerns in South Africa today, telling stories about migration, capitalism, and disconnection in the digital age,” says Mazarakis.

A number of invited works will form part of Season 11, by local and international artists alike, including Indian artist and activist Mallika Taneja (India) and Nigerian journalist and author Dele Olojede (Nigeria), who will both feature in separate In Conversation programmes.

Olojede will enter into a sonic a sonic call-and-response with vinyl selector, Nombuso Mathibela, around the theme of Money Miss Road, a Nigerian phrase that means money is wasted, thrown away, or spent on frivolous things, while Taneja will be in dialogue with Nomsa Mazwai about the act of challenging fear, patriarchy, and the limitations imposed on women’s freedom of movement in public spaces.

The Centre continues its collaboration with Beninese drummer, percussionist, composer and arranger Angelo Moustapha, who will bring his new composition Ibilé, made in response to a film from the Albert Kahn Museum (Paris), to the Sounding Pictures programme.

As a solo work, Taneja brings Be Careful to Season 11, a satirical piece that challenges the notion of safety as it’s prescribed and practiced in women’s lives. While she is visiting Johannesburg, Taneja and the women members of the Maboneng Community Policing Forum will present Women Walk at Midnight, an initiative that invites women volunteers to join a nighttime walk along a predetermined route in Johannesburg, as a gesture of reclaiming their right to inhabit the city. For more information on this intervention, please contact Mallika/Maboneng CPF directly.

Internationally renowned dancers and choreographers Vincent Mantsoe and Shanell Winlock-Pailman will each present a newly conceptualised work as part of a special double bill. Mantsoe’s Desert Poem encapsulates the allure and tranquillity of an environment characterised by extremes, while Winlock-Pailman’s Oh, death! Where is your sting? is a work about death, grief, and the moments in between.

Regular Centre collaborators will present short-form performances as part of the Fox Street Activations. Phala Ookeditse Phala and Sello Pesa will present Ngoana oa Noka ea Kubetu, a work exploring belonging and the question of water as both a resource and a necessity, and pianist Jill Richards will present a pop-up, coffee shop performance.

Season 11 will also see The Centre continue its collaboration with cultural collective, NarowBi, who will activate the Arts on Main courtyard with Party + Market, a curated experience featuring stalls and artists showcasing music, art, style and more.

All of this makes for a Season that asks its artists and audiences to reflect on the idea of collectivity, how we navigate the city and, by extension, the world, together. As Muyanga says:

“It’s about how we become a performance ensemble, whether we are performers, audience members, or neighbours. It’s how the city performs itself through us, and also how we choose to perform the city. Johannesburg is a city that requires a collective navigation, a mutual reliance, a particular call and response.”