Brett Bailey

Brett Bailey (born 1967) is a playwright, artist, designer, play director, festival curator and the artistic director of the group Third World Bun Fight.

Brett Bailey was born in 1967 and completed a postgraduate diploma in performance studies at the DasArts Master of Theatre in Amsterdam.

He has worked throughout South Africa, and in Zimbabwe, Uganda, Haiti, the UK and across Europe.

His acclaimed iconoclastic dramas, which interrogate the dynamics of the post-colonial world, include Big Dada, Ipi Zombi, iMumbo Jumbo and Orfeus.

His performance installations include Blood Diamonds: Terminal and Exhibit A: Deutsch Sudwestafrika.

In Ipi Zombi, Bailiey evoked a 1996 witch-hunt in which several women were blamed and killed for the death of twelve boys in a minivan accident.

It combined Xhosa and Christian ritual.

Author Zakes Mda claimed Ipi Zombi to be a "A work of genius that maps out a path to a new South African theatre ..."

In other works, such as Orfeus, Bailey takes a softer approach, and looks to highlight the blind, forgotten, the broken and the voiceless.

In Orfeus, specifically, the audience is drawn down into an African underworld that is governed by a seedy businessman.

Orfeus, and other works, look at a post-colonial, showing a "decaying globalised world in which not only shamanic rituals but also moving music create an entirely unique African atmosphere".

First staged in 2004 in Bern, Switzerland, House of The Holy Afro has been repeatedly staged in Europe and Australia with its last iteration at the Market Theatre Laboratory, Johannesburg, in June 2010.

Performer and drag diva Odidi Mfenyana played the high priest of the holy house, and lead the performance through an urban funk cabaret that bordered on spiritual ritual.

In the site-specific work medEia, the audience walked in silence for at least ten-minutes before the production.

The audience's emotional and intellectual journey through works were physically manifest in the installations Blood Diamonds: Terminal and Exhibit A: Deutsch Sudwestafrika.

Exhibit A: Deutsch-Südwestafrika, staged in the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna's Hofburg Palace, is a "meditation on the dark history of European Racism in relation to Africa".

For the 4th World Summit on Arts and Culture, Bailey presented 3 Colours – a one-off mixed media performance piece.

Bailey collaborated with award-winning choreographer Gregory Maqoma and Congolese musician Mapumba Cilombo.

The piece represented the complexities of inter-culturalism, in which Bailey "chose to portray different societies or cultures symbolically as shrines. Indefinable as they are, our cultures are sacred to us. At the heart of each glows a unique cluster of precious jewels; our myths and histories, our heritage, our values and social structure, our cosmology, and relationship to the ultimate."

His works have played across Europe, Australia and Africa, and have won several awards, including a gold medal for design at the Prague Quadrennial (2007).

He was the curator of South Africa's only public arts festival, Infecting the City, in Cape Town, South Africa, from 2008 until 2011.

He has been the curator of Africa Centre's Infecting the City since 2008.

The work of Bailey investigates the many layers and intricacies of colonial and post-colonial Africa.

Bailey's earlier works – Ipi Zombi, iMumbo Jumbo and The Prophet – are grouped together under the title Plays of Miracle and Wonder (which is the title of a book on Bailey's plays) and incorporate ceremony and sacrament.

These works are aggressive with Bailey using drums, screams, knives and broken glass to break down the audiences' defences.

Bailey's curated the Infecting the City Festival from 2008 until 2011.

It is currently Africa's biggest public arts festival that takes place in the public spaces of Cape Town during February or March of every year.

During Bailey's tenure, the Festival chose a theme that had social relevance: "In a society that has as many complex issues as ours, if one is commandeering the communal spaces of the city, it is not enough merely to provide entertainment for the public. There is a moral imperative to tackle the pressing issues of our day, and to ask artists to apply themselves to these."

He directed the opening show at the 4th World Summit on Arts and Culture (2009), and from 2006 until 2011 directed the opening shows for the Harare International Festival of the Arts.

"Exhibit B" was a highly controversial traveling exhibit that began in 2010.

Inspired by 19th century human zoos, it was seen by more than 25,000 people in 14 countries before the end of 2014.

Museum and theater directors joined to decry attempts at censorship after the work sparked protests around the world for its use of black actors in cages and chains, often in theatres well known for featuring almost no Black people in their repertoire.

Exhibit A: made with Namibian Performers and Musicians, writer/director/designer

Orfeus: writer/director/designer

macbEth: the opera: director/designer (written by Verdi)

House of the Holy Afro: director/designer

Talking Heads: developed concept

medEia: director/designer (written by Oscar van Woensel)

Big Dada: the rise and fall of Idi Amin: director/designer/writer

Vodou Nation: made in Haiti, director/designer/writer