As part of this year's International Online Theatre Festival, organised by The Theatre Times, one was able to watch for a very short itme only, three short performances of new writing and devised theatre from Johannesburg's Centre For The Less Good Idea.
The Centre is there to develop, encourage and promote contemporary performance practices, and in these three short pieces they all were tasked with devising a piece utilising a device known as The Pepper's Ghost. This is a half-silvered mirror which you can light from either the front or the back to create different projections and enabels you to interact more fully with inainamte creations and play with perspective.
1. Odradek.
Performed by Amerra Patel and Frances Slabolepsky, with live music by Clare Loveday and Bongile Lecoge- Zulu.
This was a short tale based on Kafka's 'The Cares Of A Family Man'. The focus of this piece was Kafka's idea of a strange creature that lives at the bottom of the stairs, and here the performers played with animation, size, scale, language and physicality in a wholly original way.
A spoken word piece which used cello and flute to accentuate and punctuate the narrative, whilst the stick insect-like creature (a human but reduced to miniature size) moves around the narrator's workspace. Creepy but excellently affected.
2. Mayakobsky: A Tragedy.
Written and performed by Katlego Letsholonyana.
This was an experimental take on an original avant-garde tagedy using drawings and animations by William Kettridge.
Again a small creature (this time with a bucket on its head) is used to great effect, whilst the accompanying and underlaying music sometimes working in juxtaposition with the text and sometimes fitting nicely, seemed an important choice for the creator. The Military Brass sounds or Oompah music mixing with the bizarre animations. It was a highly political piece which was railing against the world's governments to end poverty. Letsholonyana was a powerful and impassioned speaker who coped well with the animation and music distractions. But the Epilogue, which was just spoken without any sound or set was by far the most poignant.
3. Spactral.
Devised and performed by Thami Majela, Kaldi Makutike, and Michael Mazibuko.
Taking their inspiration from Shakespeare's MacBeth, they merged live dance and movement with projections and manipulated video footage. It's urgent and direct and since the first two thirds of the performance were performed in a South African indigenous language, it was interesting to try and guess which part of MacBeth they were referencing.... I think I was wrong! However, when they got to 'Is this a dagger I see before me', they reverted to English and the performance became much clearer all of a sudden. Highly original and perhaps unique.
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 30/5/20
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