- Written, designed and directed by Brett Bailey
- With Gaetan Schmid, Okello Sam, and the Ndere Troupe of Uganda
SAFARI is based on the journey of pioneering Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) to East Africa in 1925, where he spent three months living in the wilderness.
The experience - which he called 'a drama of the birth of light' - had a profound and lasting impact on him. Confronted with the people, animals and spirit of this primal landscape, Jung embarked on an astonishing safari to the very origins of consciousness.
A not very successful ritual drama, SAFARI was made in Kampala, Uganda, with members of a local music-dance group, the Ndere Troupe. The piece toured 13 towns and cities in Holland.
‘This was the silence of the eternal beginning.
I felt like the very first man.
Here, on the plains of Africa, I experienced the world as it had always been, before anybody had been around to know that it was the world. To the very brink of the horizon, I saw vast herds of animals: gazelles, zebras, giraffes, gnus…grazing, heads nodding, moving forward like slow rivers.
I felt like the first human being who suddenly recognised: “this is the world”.
What he did not know, that first man, was that in that moment he had first really created it…’
C.G. Jung