KFDA012: Brett Bailey takes to the courtroom

True to tradition, fifteen theatres and arts centres will open their doors in May for the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, wich focuses on original works by (inter)national artists. Like a white South African who displays black Africans, including a number of asylum-seekers, in tableaux vivants... Just like our Western colonial forebears used to do when those objectionable human zoos were in fashion: Exhibit B is heavy stuff.

Brett Bailey is a playwright, director, and the artistic director of Third World Bunfight, which has become a brand name for his iconoclastic works dealing with postcolonial subjects. Exhibit B, which will be premiered at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, is the second performance in a trilogy of haunting location projects that deals with Western colonists’ habit of literally exhibiting Africans as if they were animals in a zoo.
Brett Bailey: “Exhibit A had quite a strong focus on the German colonisation of South-West Africa, now Namibia. Exhibit B still includes that story, but it also looks at the French Congo and the Congo under the Belgian King Leopold II. Exhibit C will take in the British colonies of Rhodesia and Kenya. Those ethnographic displays were not only meant to offer leisure and entertainment, but were in fact a code of imperialism. Europeans and Americans felt that they could take people from their colonised world and exhibit them in displays, exhibitions, and zoos, in order to support and perpetuate their belief systems about colonisation and racial stereotypes. Stereotypes that still exist today. For instance, in the Paris exhibition of 1899 and the one in Crystal Palace in 1851, guests first walked into the jungle with tropical plants and birds. From there they went into the native villages where they saw Africans or Samoans or Aboriginals. And from there they went to the Far East, with Chinese or Indian people, and then proceeded to the “great” kingdoms of industrial Europe. The dramaturgy reinforced the idea that these colonised people were not quite people and that colonisation was justified.”

Exhibit B is also a location project.
Brett Bailey: When I was looking for a location in Brussels I first considered the magnificent Palais de Justice, because it was built under Leopold II and represents justice in a disputable way. I also thought of the public Galeries Saint-Hubert, but I soon realised that unless you frame a performance like this very carefully, informed looking and reflection becomes very difficult. The Gesù church is interesting because it was squatted for many years by undocumented people who today are still living in the adjacent monastery. Indeed, another thing I look at is the present policy of the European Union towards African immigrants: the deportation centres, the racial classification based on DNA profiling, people without documents, etc.
Is the performance a sort of re-enactment of those human zoos?
Bailey: I’m bringing five performers with me. The others are Africans living in Brussels. Some of them are asylum-seekers. And yes, I do put them in glass displays and cabinets and things like that. One by one, the spectators go in and do a tour.
That personal confrontation must be extremely uneasy and emotional.
Bailey: It is very emotional, but it opens doors. In a group it would be easier for the spectators to hide, but I like to work with the intimacy between the spectator and the performer. What is important to me is the strong dynamics of who is doing the looking, because the performer is looking back so that a human dialogue or interaction without words can develop.
Some people sit in front of one tableau for half an hour, others move through the whole exhibition in fifteen minutes. In general people come out very silent, some come out weeping. And for the performers it is difficult as well. For a white man it is difficult to understand what racism really is, but it often goes very deep. A lot of the performers cry during the performance, because so much comes up from being looked at. Some performers experience sadness from a spectator who can’t look him in the eyes or from a spectator who is crying, or doesn’t look at all. At the end of every performance we sit down and we talk, because I don’t want my performers to go out on the streets in anger.

> Brett Bailey/Third World Bunfight: Exhibit B, 4, 5, 7 > 9/5, 19.00, 19.45, 21.15, 22.00, 6/5, 16.30, 17.15, 18.45, 19.30, NL/FR/EN, €12/16, Gesù church

Kunstenfestivaldesarts
4 > 26/5 • Verschillende locaties/Divers lieux/Various venues
Centredufestivalcentrum: Schildknaapsstraat 50 rue de l’Écuyer, Brussel/Bruxelles,
070-22.21.99, tickets@kfda.be, www.kunstenfestivaldesarts.be