Why Did the Chicken Cross the Cultural Divide?: Brett Bailey and Third World Bunfight's iMumbo Jumbo

More than just a stand against materialistic rationality, this iMumbo Jumbo must be a celebration of dream, ritual, Spirit, the unconscious and the irrational; must actively empower these...it is about a world pervaded by Spirit. The Spirit cannot be quelled, though scientists and kings may thwart it for a while, though people may side with Big Science. The victory is the Spirit. The ritual of Life. The play must always remember this.

—Brett Bailey, iMumbo Jumbo workbook, April 1997 (2003a:108)

The Context

Saturday, 9 August 2003. Cape Town. I'm jetlagged from two overnight flights in a row, and not quite grounded. Travel this fast and this far in a seemingly timeless cyclical void of eating, sleeping, and watching movies at 40,000 feet removes any sense of the distance covered. I'm two continents away from home, Canada, and I'm at the theatre.

It's closing night of Brett Bailey and Third World Bunfight's production iMumbo Jumbo: The Days of Miracle and Wonder (1997) at the Baxter Theatre, co-produced by BITE 03 Barbican London in association with UK Arts International. Written, directed, and designed by Bailey, the show promises to be spectacular. Bailey, a white South African who grew up in a middle-class environment, is the bad boy of the theatre scene. Earlier productions, such as The Prophet (1999) and ipiZombi? (1998), not only secured his reputation for large-scale, visually spectacular extravaganzas, but also established him as an artist committed to researching, exploring, and dramatizing the histories, myths, and legends—ancient as well as contemporary—of black Africa, especially those of the amaXhosa people. This hasn't always endeared him to all audiences, particularly in a theatre climate where the issue of voice appropriation continues to grow in importance.

1.

Noxolo Donyeli as Mrs. Magudu in Brett Bailey's ipiZombi?, which premiered in 1998 at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa. The venue was an old deserted power station. It received a fringe production at the same festival in 1996 and has toured South Africa and Zimbabwe in English and Xhosa versions. (Photo by Nick Aldridge)

Despite, or, perhaps, because of his controversial productions, Bailey's company, Third World Bunfight, has begun to garner much attention and acclaim, nationally and internationally. In the elaborate program for iMumbo Jumbo, Bailey characterizes the company:

Third World Bunfight is a South African theatre troupe strongly committed to the stories, performance forms and Spirit of Africa. Our works dig deep beneath the surface of post-colonial Africa: we explore sensitive and contentious issues, and dramatise them in ways that valorise and celebrate the extraordinary wealth of cultural modes available here.

(2003b)

Third World Bunfight also prides itself on having created, since it was founded in 1996, an all-black performing company comprised of untrained actors from disadvantaged areas such as the Grahamstown Township of Rini, Port St. Johns, and Cape Town. In the relatively few years since its inception, the company has developed and sustained sponsor relationships and funding partnerships with a significant amount of national and international corporations, foundations, and businesses.¹

In his recently published book The Plays of Miracle and Wonder (2003a), Bailey and others comment eloquently and articulately about his philosophy on the process of play creation and about his engagement with the rituals, ceremonies, and daily lives of the people and nations whose history and beliefs he has chosen to theatricalize. Theatre critic John Matshikiza writes:

[T]he worlds of [...] ancestral spirits that inhabit our rivers and trees and the few other unviolated spaces that are left to us, are our last refuge against a vengeful and unpredictable god who has been bestowed on us by those who defeated our ancestors on the field of battle. And that vengeful god has always been portrayed as a white man. Why should Brett Bailey, another white man, be allowed to violate that final sacred space? There is never going to be an answer to questions like...