Honour for playwright

France awards order for excellence

SOUTH African playwright Brett Bailey will be honoured with the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters) award by France’s ambassador to South Africa, Christophe Farnaud, on behalf of French President Emmanuel Macron, at the Granger Bay Hotel School Restaurant in Mouille Point, Cape Town, tomorrow.

The Order of Arts and Letters was established in 1957 and is awarded by the French Ministry of Culture in recognition of significant contributions to the enrichment of the arts and literature, both in France and abroad.

There are three degrees: knight, officer and commander.

South African citizens who have been awarded the order are Johnny Clegg (1991), William Kentridge (2013), Gregory Maqoma (2017) and Zanele Muholi (2017).

Bailey is a designer, director and installation maker, and the artistic director of performance company Third World Bunfight.

He was the curator of South Africa’s only public arts festival, Infecting the City, from 2008 until 2011.

His works have played across Europe, Australia, Africa and Latin America and have won several awards, including a gold medal for design at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space Exhibition (2007).

He has worked extensively in France and was commissioned to create a visual campaign for the Marseilles France 2018 Festival.

Third World Bunfight’s newest production, Samson, will be staged at Woordfees in Stellenbosch from March 8 to 10. It’s a lyrical, apocalyptic music-theatre piece created by Bailey, with choreography by Vincent Mantsoe and music by Shane Cooper.

“Brett Bailey is a revolutionary director who’s broken the traditional boundaries by bringing theatre to the streets of Cape Town, during the public arts festival Infecting the city.

‘‘In France, the opera Macbeth, or the performance Sanctuary, dedicated to the migrants, or Exhibit B, in which he addresses the human zoos of the colonial era, were acclaimed in the recent years as masterpieces of the performing arts,” Farnaud said.