[Bailey] … creates theatrical experiences that, rather than offer easy answers, challenge audiences by opening up complex discourses. He invites audiences to participate in ideas rather than have them passively consume theatre entertainment.
—Keith Bain, The Daily Maverick, November 2021
An immigrant arrives in the city. He brings a gift that has a profound impact on people, transforming their realities, opening minds and hearts and doors of perception. Until he is silenced.
This ritual theatre work brings an ancient myth into a fractured contemporary world.
South African-born playwright, designer, and director Brett Bailey, the artistic director of Third World Bunfight, joins Quick Center audiences in a two-month residency to create a locally cast version of his adaptation of the Orpheus myth, The Stranger.
Bailey uses performance to interrogate the dynamics of the post-colonial world, highlighting the blind, forgotten, broken and the voiceless. The Stranger originally premiered as Orfeus in Cape Town in 2006, and since then has been evolving in distinct versions made in different parts of the world in collaboration with 10 local performers, musicians, and other creatives, grounded in the contexts of the places in which it is re-made. The mythical Orpheus was our first musician as well as a foreigner, and this adaptation highlights the value of outsiders within our societies, as well as of our human transformation through grief–a particularly relevant theme after two plus years of the Covid pandemic.
Bailey is currently on the jury for the International Theatre Institute’s (ITI) Music Theatre NOW Awards. His works are presented across Europe, Australia, and Africa, and have won several awards, including a gold medal for design at the Prague Quadrennial.
