The Centre of Somewhere: Johannesburg / Glasgow

Take Me Somewhere and The Centre For The Less Good Idea (Johannesburg, South Africa) are excited to share a new collaborative project: The Centre of Somewhere: Johannesburg / Glasgow, an embedded, connective residency project designed to explore new ways of doing, making, connecting, befriending and building international networks.

From Sept 2022- March 2023, this major international exchange will support four performance makers, two from Glasgow and two from Johannesburg, to create and innovate across cities. With the support of The Centre and TMS they will explore new ways to build relationships for their practice, connecting with artists, audiences and communities in an embedded approach. Our Digital Cohort will bring the group together online to connect, reflect and share approaches. 

The Centre Of Somewhere involves spending time in both locations, the artists will develop their creative projects, meet local artists, experience the cities and their surroundings, share their practice and create new and exciting long-term connections, laying fertile ground for their projects future life.

Following the residency exchange, Take Me Somewhere will present a programme of works by South African in their international performance Festival; including that of Mamela Nyamza, Goldendean, Desire Marera & Kieron Jina.

The Centre of Somewhere: Johannesburg / Glasgow is Funded by the British Council’s International Collaboration Grants, which are designed to support UK and overseas organisations to collaborate on international arts projects.

ARTISTS:

Thulisile Binda is a South African interdisciplinary dancer, performer and choreographer.

Through dance, Binda grapples with complex and enduring themes of the physical and the psychological. She is known for her striking blend of physicality and musicality, charged with a responsive fluidity and driven by the inherent narrative of the body. Using her innovative and collaborative approach to performance, she interrogates the placement of a womxn’s body in society, questioning how the body is located and perceived more broadly. 

Binda has trained in drama and dance through Flatfoot Dance Company, Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre and Vuyani Dance Theatre and has worked as a Senior Company member and an assistant Rehearsal Director for Luthando Dance Academy.

Her multi-award-winning choreographic work iThemba has been performed at festivals and platforms including Jomba festival (2018), Dance Factory (2018), My Body My Space (2019), University of KwaZulu-Natal (2019), Vavasati Women’s Festival (2019) and Market Theatre’s Ditsomo (2020).

—Image credit: Zivanai Matangi.

Christian Noelle Charles is that Black contemplative visual practitioner based between New York and Glasgow, Scotland. A Syracuse, New Yorker, Christian's work is an exploration of female representation and self-love in a contemporary world. Christian takes inspiration from today's pop culture, modern performance techniques, and personal experiences. She also derives inspiration as a performance artist from the relationship between performer and audience member. By using the mediums of photography, printmaking, video, and performance her work demonstrates a celebration of self-love and individuality. Her work has been shown at various galleries and institutions like CCA (2021) and Tramway (2018) in Glasgow, Scotland, South London Gallery (2018)  in London, and the Officine Grandi Riparazioni di Torino in Turin, Italy (2020). She was a shortlisted candidate for the Margaret Tait Award in 2021. And in 2022, is the current recipient of the John Florent Stone Award with Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh Printmakers. 

Christian is elated to be traveling to Johannesburg as she feels this would be a new chapter for evolving performance practice. She looks forward to investing her time learning, exploring the South African art scene. She is especially interested in the music and dance scene and hopes to meet and eventually collaborate with artists for her next project. 

Kaldi Makutike is a South African-born Congolese dance practitioner.

Makutike is interested in the notion of the body as an institution of skills. He employs interdisciplinary improvisation as his primary methodology, extracting and building upon the embedded narratives of the body through intuitive and site-specific approaches to performance. His work is concerned with themes of cross culture identity, the body as the other, Black Psychology and the possibilties of translating painting and sculpture into staged performances.  

A graduate of Moving into Dance, Makutike is the recipient of the Sibikwa Art Centre’s Most Promising Dancer Award (2016). His solo work Skulls of My People was performed at the 2018 Dance Umbrella Festival and later extended into an ensemble work – Skulls of My People Nostalgia, performed at Dance Umbrella 2019. His interdisciplinary dance film Therapy Session received laurels at the Mobile Dance Film Festival, New York (2020).

—Image credit: Stella Olivier.

NXSA is the artistic practice of claricia parinussa; a body-based artist working across movement, physical and digital performance, writing and facilitation. Their current interests rest in nothingness, un-knowings and bodily knowings as sites of potentiality. 

Recent works include:

ember (5.5) with Samantha Maria, Purina Alpha, Fiona Menzies, Saigon Revlon, Jupiter Rising 2022 curated by Alloysious Massaquoi, August 2022.
echo-co-location with Corin Sworn, Common Guild, November 2021.
hologram (10.7) with nymity & Paradax Period, October 2021.

—Image from hologram (10.7), credit Paradax Period

The Centre for the Less Good Idea: 

The Centre for the Less Good Idea is based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Founded by William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace in 2016, it is a physical and immaterial space to pursue incidental discoveries made in the process of producing new work. The Centre is a space to follow impulses, connections and revelations. It is a physical performance space for artists to come together and for curators to bring together combinations of text, movement, sound and image. The Centre nurtures the act of playing with an idea to allow for recognising those things you didn’t know in advance: the secondary ideas, those less good ideas coined to address the first idea’s cracks. 

lessgoodidea.com

CREDITS