Brett Bailey and Beezy Bailey (not related) have combined to create some (black) magic. Alex Sudheim falls under the spell
`They have had to focus on their bodies being made of wood or clay or porcelain or plastic,” says Brett Bailey of the “statues” that comprise the cast of his black magic performance piece Ju-ju.
“Then the breath comes and they have to deal with their lungs opening up and making space, then the voice comes: the lips come alive, the cheeks come alive … then the resonance comes and the words come out.”
Arranged on a devotional altar like necromantic icons, when the words emerge from the fleshly statues they form a sinister, spellbinding fugue which sucks in the audience with irresistible magnetic force. The slow cycle of the voodoo incantation chanted by the totemic figures hypnotises with fear and wonder.
Ju-ju is inspired by an occult shrine where Jesus, Krishna and various African fetishes are all mediums through which spirits speak. In ritual fashion, spirits are called into the statuees where they give messages of “truth, light, pots of gold and happy little bluebirds singing,” says Bailey in trademark warp-speed speech.
“It’s usually in a whistling or moaning or jabbering, never voices that normal people can understand. But for the purposes of the play I’ve made the statues sing in English,” he adds.
Indeed it is this aspect of the performance – the deliberate dehumanisation and objectification of the actors/singers – that is its most disturbing and compelling.
Raised on a stage, their immobile bodies swabbed in lurid colour and their covered, painted eyes fixed in a focusless stare, they are somehow crucially removed from what DH Lawrence called “the physical mesh”.
Even though our intellects tell us they are human beings, the actors’ static, stylised postures and the expressionless, monotonous mantra they intone make them appear more like inanimate objects possessed by some strange other-worldly entity.
This profound evocation of a haunted, invisible dimension that invades our familiar one is where Bailey’s genius lies, and one that unsettles and enthrals the dense throng of Red Eye patrons tonight. More accustomed to slightly less mind- altering distractions at the monthly soire in the Durban Art Gallery, the audience is moved to an awed hush before the life-size voodoo ritual. The statues’ voices rise and fall in spooky detachment while, before the altar, sangomas whoop and ululate, hitting the floor with sticks, burning incense and striking a slow heartbeat on a gong.
The hidden world of spirits, ghosts, demons and angels is one which has intensely fascinated Bailey – whose grandmother is a spirit medium in Zimbabwe – all his life, and one he has relentlessly explored in works such as ipiZombie and iMumbo Jumbo.
On a shoestring budget he has started a drama school in Port St Johns in the Transkei, where he exhaustively trains and rehearses his actors with the ceaseless passion of a man, well, possessed.
Suddenly the intense mood in the gallery lightens as a semi-naked man painted sky- blue and wearing a propellor on his head prances before the shrine and proceeds to do a live painting of a flying body. Lightness being momentarily restored, the crowd clap and cheer as Beezy Bailey – South Africa’s most merry postmodern prankster – performs a quixotic dance to a tune that is the digital collision of the Soul Brothers and Hindu temple music.
Flaring like a meteorite in a deep black sky, Bailey (Beezy, no relation to Brett) completes his quirky, incongruous fillip (another chapter in his ever-evolving Learning To Fly Again concept) and Ju-ju re-asserts its disquieting power.
The collaboration – though not the first between the two artists – is a spontaneous one and dealt with by the pair in similar fashion to the surrealists’ approach to their “exquisite corpses”, where ad-hoc ensemble-artworks were created by a chain of artists spontaneously improvising upon one anothers’ work. In fact, Beezy and Brett only rehearsed the collaboration for the first time several hours before the performance.
“Brett sent me a video cassette from Port St Johns of what he was doing,” explains Beezy. “When I played it I fast-forwarded the long middle section, and suddenly it seemed as if my music (the Soul Brothers/Hindu music hybrid) was written for it.”
And, even though there appeared to be little concrete cohesion between the Baileys’ artistic intentions, the devil- may-care spirit with which the collaboration was undertaken was enough to make the merging of the pieces a tantalising conundrum.
Earlier in the day, Beezy had opined that part of the significance of Brett’s work lay in its power to expose Western society’s loss of connection to spiritualism and ritual: “We lose all that and then go fuck our children. That’s also pretty scary and strange,” he said in response to my enquiry as to whether audiences didn’t find Brett’s theatre “scary and strange”.
During the performance at the Red Eye, Beezy is amazed at how deeply and palpably the audience is moved by Ju-ju. “It was just a spur-of-the-moment remark earlier,” he said, “but now I’ve seen how deep peoples’ unconscious awareness of having lost a sense of ritual in modern-day life really is.”
Afterwards, the audience is kind of stunned, obviously not quite prepared for the depth to which they were touched. Asking a young woman drifting trance-like about the gallery what she thought special about Ju-ju, she considers a moment, then serenely replies. “He throws the unknown into such beautiful light,” she smiles, then wanders off into the night.