To imagine differently is not simply to invent; it is to listen closely to the moment of uncertainty between idea and articulation. The Centre for the Less Good Idea has, since its inception, made a practice of listening to this in-between, to what refuses resolution, to what trembles at the edge of form. Conceived as a space for experimental collaboration, the Centre exists in deliberate resistance to singularity. It privileges the fragment, the process, and the multiplicity of voices that animate Johannesburg’s creative ecology.
Season 11, curated by Neo Muyanga and supported by the Centre’s core team, continues this inquiry into collaborative experiment. Across five days, from Wednesday 26 to Sunday 30 November 2025, the festival unfolds as a constellation of performances, installations, and conversations that explore the generative friction between disciplines. Visual art meets movement, sound becomes narrative, theatre becomes music, and the street itself becomes a stage. It is a city reimagined through the pulse of experimentation.
At the Centre’s heart is the notion that failure is fertile. The “less good idea” gestures to the intuition that follows the spark, the quiet improvisation that happens when the “best idea” collapses under its own logic. This ethos is not a rejection of excellence but a reorientation toward process. It acknowledges that meaning often emerges through error, through collaboration, through the act of making together. The Centre thus becomes a rehearsal space for artistic thought, a living laboratory for the social imagination.
Season 11’s Moving the Mark exemplifies this. Pairing some of the country’s leading visual artists with choreographers, including William Kentridge, Mary Sibande, Penny Siopis, Vincent Mantsoe, Kitty Phetla, Nandipha Mntambo, and others, the programme invites artists to explore the tension between movement and mark-making. What does it mean to draw through the body? To think through gesture, rhythm, and repetition? These collaborations remind us that every mark contains movement, every movement a trace, and that between the two lies the terrain of performance as thought.
Beyond the walls of the Centre, SITE, LIGHT, ACTION | Fox Street Activations, curated by Marcus Neustetter, extends this logic into the city itself. Along Fox Street and throughout Arts on Main, light, sound, and performance transform the urban landscape into a porous theatre. This gesture, to work within and against the architecture of Johannesburg, is integral to the Centre’s philosophy. Here, the city is not backdrop but collaborator. The Fox Street Activation insists that art is not apart from daily life but deeply entangled with its rhythms, frictions, and energies.
Across the season, the programme’s range underscores the Centre’s commitment to interdisciplinarity and dialogue. Visual Radio Plays and Sounding Pictures revisit the relationship between sound and image, reanimating silent film and radio drama through collective improvisation. Be Careful, a guest performance by Indian artist Mallika Taneja, and her ensuing conversation with Nomsa Mazwai, place questions of gender, fear, and public space in sharp relief, connecting the local to the global, the personal to the political. In So | From Script to Stage, the Centre’s Academy foregrounds process once more, tracing how ideas evolve from text to embodied performance. Through the In Conversation: Money Miss Road dialogue between journalist Dele Olojede and writer Nombuso Mathibela, the Centre turns its gaze toward the economies of art and value, the ways in which money, meaning, and making intersect in contemporary African contexts.
Season 11’s closing programme, The Unexpected City, is both a culmination and a provocation. Drawing on the voices and movements of Johannesburg itself, it reminds us that the city, with its ruptures, migrations, and reinventions, has always been the Centre’s most enduring collaborator. This year, the addition of NarowBi Party + Market, a courtyard activation of music, style, and conversation, reinforces the idea that the Centre is not only a place of art-making but also of community-building. It is a space for encounter where artists, audiences, and passersby can think, feel, and imagine otherwise together.
In an art world increasingly defined by metrics and outcomes, The Centre for the Less Good Idea insists on process, play, and the unfinished. It reminds us that not all value lies in completion and that sometimes the most radical gesture is to hold open the space for uncertainty. Through Season 11, the Centre once again offers Johannesburg a mirror, not to reflect what is already known, but to illuminate what is still forming.
In doing so, it reaffirms its role as one of the continent’s most vital artistic laboratories, a space where the less good idea, the tender, risky, unresolved thought, becomes a site of collective transformation.