Looking at the Other/Seeing the Self: Embodied Performance and Encounter in Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B and Nineteenth-Century Ethnographic Displays

On 23 September 2014, the South African director Brett Bailey found himself in the eye of a media storm over the cancelation of the planned performance of his work Exhibit B by The Barbican at The Vaults in London. The thirteen tableau vivants of Exhibit B each represented a different moment in the history of Euro- pean relations with Africans between the seventeenth century and the present. Media attention focused upon the esthetics of the piece, criticizing Bailey’s use of ethnographic display, a genre of nineteenth-century popular entertainment in which indigenous actors from throughout the colonies performed dances and ritu- als deemed representative of their cultures at various European metropolitan cen- ters. These were carefully curated affairs in which the costumes and props of the performers were surrounded by highly coded messages about the inferiority of non-Europeans to Europeans. Whether deliberately or as a result of the linguistic barriers separating audience from performer, the actors in these shows were neces- sarily silent—embodying the image of the primitive Other. It is Bailey’s use of the ethnographic display to stage a history of the violent domination and subjugation of black Africans at the hands of white Europeans that proved so controversial.