Interview SANGE MPAMBANI
The South African playwright, theatre-maker, and installation artist Brett Bailey, whose career in theatre started in the early 1990s as an unexpected and irresistible calling, returned to the Theatre Arts with a play based on the Greek myth of Orpheus. He first wrote the play 20 years ago; however, Bailey says this myth of Orpheus is a story that refuses to leave him.
Reflecting on his other works that draw from Greek and African mythologies, Bailey speaks about Orpheus as a myth that sits inside him, always, “it is like a haunting thing. Trying to make itself out”, he explains the myth’s refusal to rest and its constant return in his theatre career that spans more than thirty years.
Myths are a disturbance to a world that is quickly centering anthropocentric views. Myths are about slowing down. Myths are about people that live underwater, “abantu bomlambo” as Bailey calls them. Myths are about humans who can journey to the world of the dead. To Bailey, his artistic practice on myths in a western contemporary world that worships logic and rationality, is to move towards what an artist’s job is fundamentally - “to create a disturbance, to upset people…to create new grounds. To make the earth tremor”
chosi, ntsomi uzungaphumi amaphondo emini: In the cosmology of the Xhosa people, myths are ancient stories that are passed down to the younger generations to remind them of their ancestors’ ways of being and life.
“Yes, definitely, my work is an extension of my spirituality”
Bailey enthusiastically answers and mentions his grandmother as a spiritual medium influencing his interests and engagements with the African spiritual traditions of Amagqirha, Izangoma, Hoodoo and the Voodoo of West Africa.
In 1994, as South Africa was transitioning from the apartheid regime, Bailey lived among Xhosa traditional healers (Amagqirha) eMthatha. What led him to live with amagqirha and learn their ways was his interest in ceremony and ritual. He was submerged in the livelihood of Mthatha, reading and researching dissertations at the University of Mthatha (currently Walter Sisulu University) on amagqirha, their ritual ceremonies, and their beliefs regarding the supernatural and witchcraft.
It is here that Bailey says he encountered the 1995 incident that happened in eBhongweni (Kokstad), where a group of children died in a taxi crash. Bailey continues to point out; a woman was killed because of accusations that she sacrificed the children and turned them into izithunzela (walking zombies). This incident ultimately became the theatre play, Ipi iZombi? (1996). A play about izithunzela and the clash of Black Christians and African spiritual beliefs.
Now, Bailey is thinking a lot about mortality and death, as he speaks about nearing the age of 60 and working a lot with mysticism. Perhaps, this is the important wisdom that is central to the witnessing and (mis)understanding of Bailey’s artistic works; the freedom of play, to explore that comes with age, and in that arena; to fabulate alternative worlds that take seriously the ancient-ness of myths and African and indigenous spiritual traditions.
Camagu