Although it has still not been seen in South Africa, Brett Bailey’s The House of the Holy Afro has had successful runs in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Zimbabwe, Belgium and even Reunion Island. I finally catch it at the Edinburgh Festival. Quite unlike his other work, though carrying his signature stylistically, Afro is a quality ensemble funky camp club entertainment with house DJ Dino Moran (Ibiza, Ministry of Sound).
Bailey tells me how people have attempted to discuss the deeper symbolic meaning of the piece, such as the holy cross backdrop. “There isn’t any,” he insists. “I’m just having a bit of fun.”
The show balances cheap township tat, designer chic and pricey Vegas kitsch. As a theatre man, the acts that work best are those lead by the disguise of a charismatic character. Bailey sources a range of star iconography, from Adam Ant to Brenda Fassie. The entertainment runs the gamut of clubby reworkings of jive, gumboot dancing, Gospel and Afro-pop. Easily accessible, it’s uniquely popular in theatreland with young, late night audiences. And in Edinburgh, I saw a seventy-year-old dowager and her mousey husband tapping away with their feet to the Ugandan Yalimunyenye (“Ancestors, come down from the stars”).
At a seminar hosted by the Africa Consortium UK and The Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium (USA), Bailey is pointedly asked whether he isn’t pandering to European prejudice and exploiting African exoticism.
Bailey replies that he no longer carries his youthful arrogance. “I was naïve,” he says bluntly. This is not to deny the integrity and power of his early works. Artists must be allowed to experiment and find their way, and not be dictated to by academicians and ideologues. But he has learned lessons. Never, he says, will he bring works like iMumbo Jumbo to Europe again. Or Safari, his play about CG Jung’s central African travels. “I made the unforgivable mistake of dressing the Ugandan cast in red clay and raffia skirts. The standing ovations every night were patronising. They were not appreciating the quality of the performance.”
Yet even our official tourism marketers still promote our country with a luxuriously maned male lion and a Zulu with shield and an assegai. Looking at some of the brochures, you wouldn’t think we’d built a standing structure. “But,” counters Bailey, “when black cultural makers bring the same work it comes from the pride of a nation.”
I recall the opening night of Umoja at Artscape. There were German coach tourists with binoculars unabashedly ogling the topless African singers, while several of Cape Town’s recognisable black politicians were beaming and cheering that ‘our people’ had taken the hallowed main stage.
Bailey says he now makes works with either Europe or local audiences in mind. He does not translate works into another culture. Without the cultural literacy, Europeans cannot be blamed for seeing a work about witchcraft as whacky and absurd. “You can’t in theatre give the audience a cultural primer beforehand or some ethnographic display.” This was once seriously considered by his producing hosts.
Bailey has moved away from his initial trilogy – the plays of miracle and wonder. Recently, he has been accessing Greek mythological figures, such as Medea and Orpheus and making site-specific works.
He describes sitting in a tiny shack in Gugulethu where a goat was killed and as the red blood gushed on to the blue linoleum from China, on the television facing him Ridge and Brooke kissed in The Bold and the Beautiful.
“There is an extraordinary flavour of life in South Africa. So much that was previously dominated and destroyed is now bursting through.” The European structures and formats of theatre are no longer the be all and end all. Bailey achieves the apex of theatre – he transports his audience so thoroughly that we once again believe in the experience and ritual of theatre at the very core of what makes us to be human.
The world is taking note. Next year Bailey’s remade opera of Macbeth will tour to Austria, Switzerland, Greece and Germany and The House of the Holy Afro will tour Sydney, London and Zurich. Norrlands Opera, Sweden, have commissioned him to direct a new work. His production of Orfeus has been bought by Linz, Switzerland, which will be the European Cultural capital in 2009. Brett Bailey is co-curator with Jay Pather of the next Spier Arts Festival.
