In his master's thesis, the late Nyoro theater scholar Joseph Mukasa- Balikuddembe (1973) thus summarized his findings on runyege, which emerged from his investigation of the “indigenous elements of theater” in Bunyoro and Tooro. Examining the ceremonies connected to the life cycle, royalty, traditional religion, and local forms of entertainment, Mukasa- Balikuddembe (1973: 368) considered local theatrical expressions as marked by the participation of the audience and a type of theatrical communication that he defined as “unpretentious,” in opposition to the mostly elitist Western drama forms. Focusing on a runyege performance where the song is about love and courtship, he showed the strict relationship between the song's lyrics and danced action and highlighted its theatrical dimension. Furthermore, he emphasized the connection between acting and telling a story, two fundamental elements of theater that can be found in contemporary performances of traditional genres like runyege.

In this chapter, I focus on the drama component of MDD (music, dance, and drama), understood not as theater pieces, but rather in Mukasa-Balikuddembe's sense of theatrical strategies and practices. In particular, I discuss the paradigms of narration, as the causal development of consequent actions similar to a story, and representation, as including acting, costumes, and makeup. I connect these theatrical devices as found in the traditional practice of singing, instrument playing, and dancing to their contemporary use within the national school festival. In my analysis, the theatrical practices of narrating, costuming, and acting emerge as essential dimensions of performing gender in today's Ugandan traditional repertoires, as it happens in other traditional music and dance contexts, such as in East Java (Sunardi 2015). By exploring the interconnectedness of dramatic strategies and elements with other performing arts, I seek not only to highlight the complexity of runyege as a genre, but also to suggest how, along with defined and hegemonic structures and meanings, which I analyze here, there are also possibilities of alternate interpretations that show the flexibility of the genre, as I examine in more detail in chapter 6.