William Kentridge and Wole Soyinka in conversation

The Centre for the Less Good Idea, William Kentridge’s arts incubator at his studio complex at Arts on Main in downtown Jozi, recently celebrated its tenth season and its maturation as an innovative arts centre with an increasingly international reach.

Under the direction of recently appointed impresario Neo Muyanga, the centre staged the first iteration of a new series of events called Collations, earlier in April. The series combines creative work, in this case “visual radio plays” commissioned by various writers and staged as live radio performances, along with high-level creative conversations and other interventions, such as the “showing the making” events that the centre has become known for.

In a show-stopping opening gambit, the first Collations conversation was between Kentridge and legendary Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. At almost 90 years old, Soyinka was not only physically robust, but mentally acute, ranging with Kentridge over the nature of failure — a regularly revisited theme for the centre — the forms of tragedy and their African manifestations in culture and literature, and the collaborative forthcoming illustrated book combining Kentridge’s drawings with Soyinka’s epic tragic poem regarding the mass abduction of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram. Convivial and authoritative, the conversational meeting of great creative minds was admirably moderated by Muyanga.

The fascinating conversation was preceded by an ensemble piece in process, a “radio play”-style live performance of one of Soyinka’s adaptations of Greek tragedy The Bacchae of Euripides. The lack of a visual focus for the performance, replacing it with the imagination of the ear, was compensated for somewhat by a rousing participative ethos, where the audience became the chorus of the work, reciting lines flashed up on an LED screen.

The evening concluded with an ensemble performance of complexity by a group of young performers from the Windybrow Arts Centre in Hillbrow. “Notebook of a long day’s journey into a Hillbrow night” saw a group of writers including Stacy Hardy from the creative writing department at Wits, and renowned SA poet Lesego Rampolokeng, act as mentors to the young creatives from the Windybrow Arts Centre, who adapted and reworked Aime Cesaire’s epic poem Notebook of a return to the native land. While brilliantly staged and executed, the long work tended towards the lurid, its endless iterations of the darkness and decay of the city eventually turning in on themselves. As a performance reflecting on where Johannesburg is, and emerging from this centre, it was both damning and compelling.

The weekend’s visual radio play performances were rounded out by two further productions, including “World class African Citizens”, commissioned from another Wits alum, anthropologist and writer Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon.

The centre, now taking up most of the original Arts on Main space in Maboneng, is an international oasis of creativity in what can sometimes feel like a city that is indeed headed on a long day’s journey into night. It is proving to be a key part of William Kentridge’s already considerable artistic legacy to Johannesburg.

A second iteration of Collations is planned to take place in October 2024, inviting new filmmakers to extend the exploration of silent films.