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. 

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 in Sounding Pictures is 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.

The sense of awe he imparts feels apt. Witnessing the ensemble slip in and out of shadow as films move behind them and a soundscape is spontaneously shaped and reshaped, the atmosphere is reverential, rapt.

It demands something of you, to witness humans make meaning in real time, to see the pauses, the inhale before they begin. Even more so to acquiesce to your part in it. 

Without the security of received meanings to pin sense-making to, you feel at first adrift, suspended in the infinity of potential interpretations. 

What is the reality of what we witness if it is up to us to glean rather than passively swallow it? And crucially, what worlds will we choose, collectively, collaboratively, to create from what we observe? 

In the audience, you glimpse one of the directors’ faces as their film rolls. It’s not the first time you’re seeing Hallie Haller’s Ecstatic Exit and yet, divorced from its original score, it is the first time you’re seeing this film. 

You see the interior gasp in their eyes as the film morphs suddenly somewhere other than it had gone before. Then, you witness them embrace what the room has made of it together.

That is to say, you’re trying to navigate your way home after a night of practicing paying attention long enough to submit to radical and collective forms of meaning-making. In Johannesburg, this “emergent and unpredictable space, always seemingly on the precipice of collapse or great change” that the Centre describes, you have been offered a way to envision a future on our own terms. 

A way of charting forwards by learning to hold what is received up to the light before remaking it in our collective image. This city is full of the friction that comes from the answer changing each time you ask a question and it is possible that this is its greatest gift. 

The lone traffic light still working at the intersection reflected in your rear view mirror blinks a peripheral staccato. You inhale, abandon useless AI summaries that were never built with an African city’s ingenuity in mind and turn, at last, back to one another. 

The car kicks into gear and slowly, you retrace your steps. On Fox Street, a concrete slab blocks part of the road. Your friend in the back gestures and as if on a string, your arms swerve the wheel in response. 

Next to you, the names of streets are called out, landmarks pointed out and contextualised relative to the night we danced until close, the seamstress studio where you stitched together your first dreams in this city, the street we remember from that protest that has a pothole big enough to swallow this car. 

A way forward unfurls as we make sense of this city and its signals through our own eyes.

Your friend calls out a left turn and finally, we exhale as we see the Centre’s signage float again into view. 

We’re back where we started. Together, we will try again to chart our way home.