Academic literature on the topic 'Brett bailey'

This essay examines Exhibit B, a controversial art installation by South African artist Brett Bailey in which actors portray historical scenes of colonialism and slavery. Exhibit B is meant to spread awareness of the widely popular human zoos of the past. Brown’s essay investigates whether or not recreating scenes of slavery does more harm than good.

The performance installationExhibit AandBby South African theatre artist Brett Bailey has been touring Europe since 2010. Its twelvetableaux vivantsprovide a selective survey of European racial histories interspersed with displays of contemporary African refugees. It has increasingly provoked opposition by antiracist activists who compare the show to a ‘human zoo’ that objectifies black performers, facilitates emotional release for white European audiences, and benefits only the white director. In London, protests led to the cancellation of the show. This article examines these charges and sets them in the context of Afro-German theatre and activism. It advances an alternative reading ofExhibit Bas a two-pronged intervention in European discourses of security on the one side, and in the restructuring of European museums on the other.

The central argument of this thesis asserts that in the process of challenging dominant subject positions, such as whiteness, performance creates the possibilities for new or alternative arrangements of desire. It examines how the creative process of desire is forestalled (reified) by habitual representations of whiteness as a privileged position, and proposes that performance can be a valid form of resistance to static conceptions of race and subjectivity. The discussion takes into account how the privilege of whiteness finds representation through forms of neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism in the post apartheid context. The analysis focuses on the work of white South African artists whose work offers a critique from within the privileged “centre” of whiteness. The research is situated within the inter-disciplinary field of performance studies entailing a reading and application of critical texts to the analysis. Alongside this qualitative methodology surfaces a subjective dialogue with the information presented on whiteness. Part Two includes an analysis of Steven Cohen’s The Cradle of Humankind (2011), Brett Bailey’s Exhibit A (2011) and Michael MacGarry’s LHR-JNB (2010). Each section examines the way in which the respective works engage in a questioning of whiteness through performance. Part Three investigates South African rap-rave duo, Die Antwoord and how their appropriation of Zef interrogates desires for an essential authenticity. Part Four focuses on my own performance practice and the proposed value of engaging with a form of practice-led research. This is particularly relevant in relation to critical race studies that require a level of self-reflexivity from the researcher. It presents an analysis of the work entitled Villain (2012) as a disturbance of theatrical desire through a process of ‘becoming’. This notion of meaning and identity as ‘becoming’ is argued as a strategy to challenge prevailing modes of perception which can possibly restore the production of desire to the viewer. The thesis concludes with the notion that performance can offer a mode of immanent ethics which is significant in creating both vulnerable and critical forms of whiteness.

This dissertation explores the use of the Black performing body in the works Cards (2002) and Relativity: Township Stories (2006) by Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom and, iMumbo Jumbo (1997) and Big Dada: The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin (2001) by Brett Bailey. With specific reference to the colonial gaze, this dissertation attempts to locate the disruptions (if any) of the colonial gaze in these playwright-director's theatre. The first chapter provides an overview of South African Theatre history. This chapter examines postcolonial performance theory with regards to the past and the present situation in South African theatre. Locating postcolonial performance theory with postcolonial theory discourses and looking specifically at South African theatre history. It looks specifically at the effects of colonialism, not only in terms of economic and political disempowerment but also in terms of the psychological internalisation of subject position and identity. It provides a theoretical basis, through which critical analyses of both Bailey and Grootboom's work will occur. The second chapter examines the colonial gaze and the Black performing body. Jonathan Schroeder (1998: 58) believes that the gaze signifies “a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze.” In postcolonial theatre, through the transient nature of the performance language, one of the foci of this chapter of the dissertation is on how or whether colonial subjectivity can be re-envisioned: the disruption of the colonial gaze. In order to disrupt the colonial gaze, it becomes vital that the performing body on stage (should) become a key site of resistance. Postcolonial performance (and theory) aims to challenge the colonial imposition of identity through the human body in order for there to be a fragmentation of subjectivity. Postcolonial performance theory desires an important and effective meaning, particularly in the notions of representations and identities. The third chapter examines the work of Brett Bailey using the following two particular texts/ case studies and analysing them: iMumbo Jumbo (1997) and Big Dada (2001), in an attempt to locate disruptions of the colonial gaze with regards to the Black performing body or to expose the exoticism within the use of such notions as savage, primitive, strange, violent that are attached to the Black performing body in his works. In iMumbo Jumbo (1997), with an emphasis on the exotic, the sangomas, the ritual (real and performative), Bailey does incorporate indigenous performance forms into his postcolonial and intercultural theatre – however does the integration of these indigenous performance forms into a new theatre aesthetic subvert the colonial gaze? Or, rather, does it feed into a colonial fascination with African exoticism. Big Dada (2001) is a play about the rise and fall of Idi Amin – a ruthless dictator in Uganda who, according to Peter Stearns and William Langer (2001: 1064), caused a genocide which left over 300 000 Ugandans dead . This play has both violence and the exotic as signifiers attached to the black bodies performing. The fourth chapter examines the works of Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom, focusing particularly on Cards (2002) and Relativity: Township Stories (2006). The analyses attempt to locate disruptions of the colonial gaze with regards to the Black performing body; or to expose the extreme violence and carnality that is attached to the Black performing body in his works. With regards to Cards (2002), the question asked is: does the use of the carnal, the raw, the sex, perpetuate a vicious cycle of colonial prejudices within South African audiences within what should be a postcolonial South African theatre arena? The colonised subject's body (in this case, the Black performer's body) has always been an “object of the coloniser's fascination and repulsion (and, in effect, possession) in sexual, pseudo-scientific and political terms” (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996: 203) (my italics). This chapter examines whether or not what is occurring in Grootboom's work/ theatre specifically is that the roles into which he has placed his Black performers are within racist discourses, “with perhaps even more emphasis on their supposed violence and sexuality” (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996: 208). This chapter seeks to interrogate whether or not Grootboom in casting the Other, the Black performing bodies, as corporeal, carnal, instinctual, raw... with his use of full nudity, simulated sex, simulated rapes, violence, explicit language, misogyny, obscenities, murder, drug use and religious rhetoric – has reintroduced colonial ideologies and stereotypes? Is his theatre 'black Black humour'? Reinforcing colonial ideologies of the savage? Or does Grootboom's theatre (unconsciously) aid the location of the (sometimes) nude, sexual, black performing body in the arena/ site of resistance in order to fracture the colonial gaze to further the aims of postcolonial theatre. Relativity: Township Stories (2006) is a brutal exposure of township life and the story revolves around a serial killer, the “G-String Strangler,” who is hunting down young women at night. The play traverses the bleaker and more desperate sides of human nature. As described by Robert Greig in The Sunday Independent (2005), Relativity is a panorama of extreme emotions and violence. However, does this perpetuation of the image of the Black as violent or attaching these signifiers of extreme violence challenge the colonial imposition of identity through the human body? Seeing the Black performing body being attached to notions of extreme violence begs to ask the question: Does this subvert the colonial gaze or does it feed into a stereotype of the violent, savage Black? This dissertation is to be read as an examination of both Brett Bailey and Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom's theatre and the motives for the use of the Back performing body on postcolonial South African theatre stages/ sites.
Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.

This thesis examines ways in which identities have been represented in new South African play texts. It begins by exploring various ways in which identity has been described from various philosophical, psychological and anthropological perspectives. In particular, the thesis describes its methodology in terms of Gilles Deleuze's definition of "rhizomatic" structures. The introduction also elaborates ways in which drama is uniquely suited to represent ¨C as well as to effect ¨C transformations of identity. The thesis then moves on to an examination of specific texts in terms of four broad areas of investigation ¨C gender, political affiliation, ethnicity and syncretism. In these chapters a number of play texts are investigated from different points of view. Firstly, in a chapter on gender, the thesis focuses specifically on issues of masculinity and exile in plays by Athol Fugard, Anthony Akerman and Zakes Mda. This chapter explores orientations of the masculine which have become embedded within notions of nationalism and patriotism. In terms of political affiliations, the thesis looks at what Loren Kruger has called "post-anti-apartheid theatre" (2002: 233) and considers the trend away from protest theatre. With reference to the plays of Mike van Graan it also examines new forms of protest theatre. This chapter also explores plays which were inspired by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and looks in more detail at Ubu and the Truth Commission by Jane Taylor. When considering ethnicities, the thesis reflects on how identity in terms of an ethnic collective is most often premised on laws of exclusion, and on the construction of what Benedict Anderson refers to as an "imagined community" (1991: 15). Representations of ethnic identities are then analysed in Happy Natives by Greig Coetzee. Syncretism seems to present a preferable description of how South African identities can be constructed and the thesis then elaborates attempts to forge a new identity in terms of amalgamation and a creative fusion of cultural resources, with particular reference to the plays of Brett Bailey and Reza de Wet. In the conclusion of this thesis, the thorny issue of racial identities is considered, and in particular the trope of the "rainbow nation", which many writers regard as a problematic blanketing description which cancels out difference. Instead, Ashraf Jamal's "radical syncretism", which does not seek to subsume heterogeneous identities, is suggested as a viable means of approaching definitions of identity. The final chapter also briefly touches on the development of physical theatre in South Africa and describes how the body can be used as a tool for transformation, relying principally on the writings of Mark Fleishman and Eugenio Barba in this regard. Finally, again resorting to a Deleuzian vocabulary which describes identity as constructed in terms of lines operating on particular planes, the thesis considers whether it may not be more beneficial in the post-apartheid context to favour paradoxical processes which relinquish identities, instead of those which attempt to consolidate them. @ 2008 Author Please cite as follows: Krueger, AR 2008, Experiments in freedom : representations of identity in new South African drama : an investigation into identity formations in some post-apartheid play-texts published in English by South African writers, from 1994 - 2007, DLitt thesis, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, viewed yymmdd < http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-10282008-141823/ > D497/gm
Thesis (DLitt)--University of Pretoria, 2008.
English
unrestricted

This dissertation combines African philosophical discourses with perspectives on cultural performativity to explore the theme of ‘deconstructing the native’ and ‘imagining the postnative’ through theatre. The dissertation consists of two main parts, a theoretical and a ‘practical’ section. The latter consists of ideas on how to translate the insights gained from the theory section into a strategy for making theatre. The theory section focuses on the aesthetically groundbreaking early works of South African theatre director Brett Bailey (Chapter 1), and their relevance to themes of African philosophy (Chapter 2). Using the concept of ‘engendering space’ as a point of contact between African discourse and theatre praxis, I show how Bailey’s theatre engendered a physical and metaphysical space in which to deconstruct the native and imagine the post-native. I consequently argue that Bailey’s aesthetic revolution has immense political and ethical consequences for contemporary African society. I imagine what these consequences are by deconstructing the cultural and moral discourse generated through critical and public responses to Bailey’s often controversial work. The practical section comprises an academically extended version of the professional theatre project proposal for my play, Hondo Love Story, which will be staged subsequent to this dissertation. The contents of the section include my strategy for engendering an aesthetic space similar, but not identical, to that of Bailey’s plays (Chapter 3). The similarities include aspects of form, theme and content, which I imagine may result in Hondo Love Story having a similar relevance to the theme of deconstructing the native and imagining the post-native through theatre. While I do not systematically deconstruct the play to fully elucidate this, I explain (Chapter 4) the more ‘intellectual’ aspects of content such as historical subtext and psycho-mythical narratives underlying story structure and characterisation. The complete script for the play is appended.
Thesis (M.A.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.