Lost in Joburg, found in sound

You pull into the sanctuary of a petrol station to recalibrate the GPS. Its turns don’t match up to the reality of the dark streets; its haughty instructions charting a course further away from where you need to go. Your friend’s voice in the passenger seat climbs an octave, reverberating off the window to draw an answering quiver from your own.

In the back seat, a friend quietly abandons her Duolingo streak to take in the surroundings. It’s late to be lost in Johannesburg CBD and for a moment, silence cracks the night open. You hover, reverent, before the city swells in from all sides.

You find yourself at this station after a night at the Centre for the Less Good Idea’s second iteration of their expansive experimentation with intention, deep listening and meaning-making:Sounding Pictures. In it, the films of William Kentridge, Frank Scheffer, Hallie Haller, Noah Cohen and Penny Siopis, as well as archival footage from the Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn and Département des Hauts-de-Seine edited by Simon Moirot are staged without their original scores. Instead, an ensemble of musicians including Jill Richards, Angelo Moustapha, Pertunia Msani, Micca Manganye, Daniel Stompie Selibe, Reggie Teys and Shane Cooper, alongside orators Billy Langa and Namatshego Khutsoane respond live, often as they see these films for the first time.

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This response requires near-devotional listening to the soundless narrative unfolding on-screen. How an actor arches a wrist, hugs knees to chest or glances at a lover, the composition of a concrete skyline and the breath of the human next to them spontaneously crafting dialogue all become vital signals for meaning that no single person in the room is tasked with piecing together on their own. “Part of the wonder inSounding Picturesis discovering how we, as a viewing collective, can spontaneously become complicit in the act of meaning-making.

The act of each of us making our own unique meaning, simultaneously, somehow transmits a charge that is shared across the room. Isn’t that at once strange and inspiring?” says Impresario at the Centre and progenitor of the concept, Neo Muyanga.

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