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Cultural Identities, Interculturalism, and Theatre: On the Popular Yoruba Travelling Theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Joachim Fiebach
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Extract

Intercultural processes have become a major concern of European theatre people and critics since the 1970s. They serve to bolster the postmodern discourse marked by endlessly alterable and changing cultures and, therefore, by essentially elusive cultural identities. But the aggressive global expansion of audiovisually mediated performing culture, primarily American television, film, and video, is being viewed as a menace to received cultural identities. There are fears that European cultures are being submerged and disfigured by an ever increasing inundation of overpowering American cultural productions and may even disintegrate altogether.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , Spring 1996 , pp. 52 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1996

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References

Notes

1. Beier, Ulli, ‘Yoruba Folk Opera’, African Music—Journal of the African Music Society 1 (1954), p. 33.Google Scholar

2. Barne, Kwabena N., Come to Laugh (New York: Lillian Barber Press, 1985), pp. 8–12.Google Scholar

3. Clark, Ebun, Hubert Ogunde: The Making of Nigerian Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 123.Google Scholar

4. Lakoju, Tunde, ‘Popular Theatre in Nigeria: The Example of Olaiya Adejumo (Baba Sala)’, Nigerian Theatre Journal 1 (1983), p. 53.Google Scholar

5. Beier, , ‘Yoruba Folk Opera’, pp. 33–4Google Scholar. See also Beier, , ‘Yoruba Theatre’, Introduction to African Literature, ed. (London: Longmans, 1967).Google Scholar

6. Barber, Karin, Conservatism in Yoruba Popular Plays (Bayreuth African Studies Series 7, 1986), pp. 20–2.Google Scholar

7. Barber, Karin, ‘Popular Resistance to the Petro-Naira’, The Journal of Modem African Studies 20. 3 (1982), pp. 438–50Google Scholar. Cf. Fiebach, Joachim, Die Toten als die Macht der Lebenden. Zur Theorie und Geschichte von Theater in Afrika (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1986), pp. 244–84.Google Scholar

8. Clark, , Hubert Ogunde, pp. 108–9.Google Scholar

9. Beier, , Introduction to African Literature, p. 250Google Scholar: ‘He has made the whole range of classical Yoruba music available to Yoruba theatre; the hard metallic sound of the bata drum, the subtle dundun talking drum, the muffled sound of the okiti pottery drums … The rich musical texture of these plays goes hand in hand with complex dancing and singing. Here again Ladipo has studied the different singing techniques and dancing steps of Yoruba hunters.’ For scripted or recorded texts of Ladipo's products see Three Nigerian Plays, ed., Beier, U. (London: Longmans, 1967)Google Scholar; Ladipo, Duro, Oba Ko So (The King Did Not Hang) (Nigeria: Macmillan, 1970).Google Scholar

10. Ricard, Alain, ‘Hubert Ogunde à Lomé’, Revue de la societe d'histoire du théâtre, 1 (1975), p. 28.Google Scholar

11. During Ogunde's performance of a play on Yoruba legendary history in the National Theatre, Lagos, in April 1978, I audio-recorded the participatory singing of the audience, the comments of the viewers, and, in particular, the discussions among individual spectators on what was happening on stage.

12. Clark, E., Hubert Ogunde, pp. 103–6Google Scholar. See B. Jeyifo's interview with Funmilayo Ranko, leader of a major troupe in the 1970s, Jeyifo, Biodun, ‘The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre’, Nigerian Magazine Publication (Lagos, 1984), pp. 170–4.Google Scholar

13. Jeyifo, Biodun, ed., The Yoruba Professional Itinerant Theatre: Oral Documentation, Vol. 2, English edition (Lagos: Division of Culture, Federal Ministry of Social Development, Youth, Sports, and Culture, 1981), pp. 15–16.Google Scholar

14. Adedeji, Joel, ‘Alarinjo: The traditional Yoruba Travel ling Theatre’, Theatre in Africa, eds., Ogunba, Oyin and Irele, Abiola (Ibadan: University Press, 1978), pp. 39, 48Google Scholar. See also Adedeji, Joel, ‘The Alarinjo Theatre’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Ibadan, 1969Google Scholar; Adedeji, Joel A., ‘The Origin and Form of the Yoruba Masque Theatre’, Cahiers d'etudes africaines 12. 2 (1972)Google Scholar. Cf. Götrick, Kacke, Apodan Theatre and Modern Drama. A Study in a Traditional Yoruba Theatre and its In fluence on Modern Drama by Yoruba Playwrights (Göteborg: Lunds Universitet, 1984)Google Scholar. Götrick deals with the ‘Alarinjo’ theatre under the name ‘Apidan’.

15. Hubert Ogunde in a public lecture at the University of Ife in 1981, recorded in Jeyifo, , The Yoruba Professional Itinerant Theatre, p. 209 (see n. 13).Google Scholar

16. Fiebach, See J., Die Lebenden als die Macht der Toten, Part 1.Google Scholar

17. Barber, Karin, Radical Conservatism in Yoruba Popular Plays, p. 10Google Scholar. See her major work on the fluid or open attitudes of traditional Yoruba culture as manifested in the oriki performances, Barber, K., I Could Speak Until Tomorrow. Oriki, Women, and the Past in a Yoruba Town (Edinburgh: University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. For characteristics of precolonial or ‘traditional’ Yoruba societies and culture, cf. Africa's Ogun, Old World and New, ed. Barnes, Sandra T. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

18. See Pelton, Robert D., The Trickster in West Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 262–7Google Scholar: ‘The trickster … in juggling with his own body, in his manipulation of its parts, his toying with its wastes, his fascination with its orifices and their products, his confidence in its potencies, is the image of man in his openness to every other world and his readiness to meet and exchange with each, to be modified by each in turn.’

19. Cf. Adedeji, , ‘Alarinjo’, 1978Google Scholar; Adedeji, , ‘The Alarinjo Theatre, 1969, p. 102Google Scholar; Adedeji, , ‘The Origins of the Yoruba Masque Theatre: The Use of Ife Divination Corpus as Historical Evidence’, African Notes, Bulletin of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 6. 1 (1970), pp. 80–5.Google Scholar

20. See Margaret Thompson and Henry John Drewal's articles on egungun in Afric Aits 3 (1978)Google Scholar; Drewal, Margaret Thompson, Yoruba Ritual, Peiformeis, Play, Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

21. Dennett, R. E., Nigerian Studies (London: Macmillan, 1910), pp. 29–30.Google Scholar

22. Lakoju, Tunde, ‘Popular Theatre in Nigeria’, p. 57.Google Scholar

23. Karin Barber participated in television productions of the Oyin Adejoi troupe in the late 1970s and early 1980s. See her insider account in Barber, Karin, ‘Popular Arts in Africa’, African Studies 30. 3 (1987), pp. 66–9.Google Scholar