The last time the enfant terrible of post-apartheid theatre Brett Bailey was in the news, it was for reasons neither hoped for nor foreseen. In 2014, his performance piece Exhibit B - a reflection on racism and colonial violence which consisted of a series of living replications of colonial-era human zoos - was widely condemned and caused such outrage that its performances in London and Paris were shut down by protesters.As Bailey wrote then in the Guardian in defence of his work, the protesters "challenged my right, as a white South African, to speak about racism the way I do. They accuse me of exploiting my performers. They insist that my critique of human zoos and the objectifying, dehumanising colonial/racist gaze is nothing more than a recreation of those spectacles of humiliation and control. The vast majority of them have not attended the work."Now, speaking from Germany where he is showing a new work dealing with the crisis of the EU and the growing influx of refugees, Sanctuary, Bailey reflects that the controversy has changed his approach. But he still feels that Exhibit B "stands as it is"."I would present the work again, and I have presented the work several times subsequent to what happened in London and Paris, but it did cast a shadow over my creative process. It certainly made me think very strongly about how I work with other people's stories and how I present people, maybe because it's counterproductive if one's dealing with an issue and that issue gets overshadowed by another issue, as happened in London and Paris where everybody was talking about the controversy and not what the work was about."For Sanctuary, a piece consisting of eight scenes presented in a maze-like structure through which only seven audience members can enter at a time, Bailey spent two years travelling to refugee centres such as the now-closed Calais Jungle camp, the Greek island of Lesvos and Palermo in Italy, interviewing refugees, aid workers and activists to try and piece together the complexities and realities behind the media images and scare-mongering.Not blind to the responsibility that came with using the stories of real people living under harsh conditions and struggling with endless bureaucracy, Bailey interviewed around 60 "candidate performers" from Marseilles, Athens and Hamburg - the first three cities on the tour. He was looking for eight people "who were engaged with the themes that I'm working with, so some of them are refugees themselves, some of them are immigrants, some of them are translators or interpreters for refugees and the others are activists".Those selected spent a week on a residency in France. "I gave them just the very basic outline of what the scene was about, but then together with them developed the characters".Bailey did not want to work with their own personal stories, "because I feel that that is demanding too much vulnerability from them". Instead he sought to shape fictional characters "drawn from their own experiences, if they wanted", and from material that they might have come across in their lives.The idea for the sets for the piece came to Bailey from his research into labyrinths, the seemingly perfect visual illustration of the journeys of refugees. The most famous labyrinth is that in the Greek myth of the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull creature that devours people. It spoke to Bailey "about many things - about politicians who reduce people to statistics, about smugglers and people who are trafficking other people, and a sense of people being devoured by systems which they have no control over".Sanctuary was first shown in Athens last month but, unhappy with some of the material, Bailey reworked it before its next shows in Hamburg and Marseilles. While he feels that "the premise of the work is about people being stuck in limbo", it's also "about people whose sanctuaries have been ruptured and they're seeking a new sanctuary; people who fear that their own sanctuaries are about to be ruptured or under threat of being ruptured".Bailey, who says he does not "really believe that an artwork can effect an actual change", says "artists should be free to express what they want to express because I do think they bring things to the surface"."I feel that it's great for the debate to happen and for works to raise issues but for works to be shouted down is very counterproductive."It remains to be seen whether audiences will shout in approval rather than indignation, but either way it's difficult to believe that Bailey will cease his quest to make work informed by his commitment to the idea that "artists should be speaking about anything, really"."When the debate arises, let people use that debate, because if nobody is able to bring new things to the surface then they're not brought to the surface at all. I really think that no matter what we want to speak about we should be able to speak about it and let the debate happen thereafter."• Sanctuary will show next at the Festival of Marseilles (June 16-22), and then Amsterdam. For more information visit thirdworldbunfight.co.za..