The Development of African Drama
The Development of African Drama

Author: Michael Etherton

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-18

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1000952525

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Originally published in 1982, this book explores concepts such as ‘traditional performance’ and African theatre’. It analyses the links between drama and ritual, and drama and music and diagnoses the confusions in our thought. The reader is reminded that drama is never merely the printed word, but that its existence as literature and in performance is necessarily different. The analysis shows that literature tends to replace performance; and drama, removed from the popular domain, becomes elitist. The book’s richness lies in the constantly stimulating analysis of ‘art’ theatre, as exemplified in protest plays, in African adaptations and transpositions of such classical subjects as the Bacchae and Everyman, in plays on African history, on colonialism and neo-colonialism. The final chapters argue that the form of African drama needs to evolve as the content does.

Pre-colonial and Post-colonial Drama and Theatre in Africa
Pre-colonial and Post-colonial Drama and Theatre in Africa

Author: Lokangaka Losambe

Publisher: New Africa Books

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 9781919876061

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In this collection of essays written from different critical perspectives, African playwrights demonstrate through their art that they are not only witnesses, but also consciences, of their societies.

Vision of Change in African Drama
Vision of Change in African Drama

Author: Sola Adeyemi

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-08-05

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 152753796X

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Fémi Òsófisan is a major dramatist from Nigeria who experiments with forms and theatrical traditions. This book focuses on his development as a dramatist and his contribution to world drama as a postcolonial African writer whose major preoccupation has been to question the colonial and postcolonial issues of identity in theatre, literature and performance. The volume explores how Òsófisan exploits his Yorùbá heritage in his drama and the performances of his plays by reading new meanings into popular mythology, and by re-writing history to comment on contemporary social and political issues. Òsófisan has often introduced new motifs and narratives to energise dramatic performances in Nigeria and globally, and this text discusses developments in his theatre practices in the context of changing cultural trends.

Trends in Twenty-First-Century African Theatre and Performance
Trends in Twenty-First-Century African Theatre and Performance

Author: Kene Igweonu

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 9401200823

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Trends in Twenty-First Century African Theatre and Performance is a collection of regionally focused articles on African theatre and performance. The volume provides a broad exploration of the current state of African theatre and performance and considers the directions they are taking in the 21st Century. It contains sections on current trends in theatre and performance studies, on applied/community theatre and on playwrights. The chapters have evolved out of a working group process, in which papers were submitted to peer-group scrutiny over a period of four years, at four international conferences. The book will be particularly useful as a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in non-western theatre and performance (where this includes African theatre and performance), and would be a very useful resource for theatre scholars and anyone interested in African performance forms and cultures.

A History of Theatre in Africa
A History of Theatre in Africa

Author: Martin Banham

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-05-13

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 1139451499

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This book aims to offer a broad history of theatre in Africa. The roots of African theatre are ancient and complex and lie in areas of community festival, seasonal rhythm and religious ritual, as well as in the work of popular entertainers and storytellers. Since the 1950s, in a movement that has paralleled the political emancipation of so much of the continent, there has also grown a theatre that comments back from the colonized world to the world of the colonists and explores its own cultural, political and linguistic identity. A History of Theatre in Africa offers a comprehensive, yet accessible, account of this long and varied chronicle, written by a team of scholars in the field. Chapters include an examination of the concepts of 'history' and 'theatre'; North Africa; Francophone theatre; Anglophone West Africa; East Africa; Southern Africa; Lusophone African theatre; Mauritius and Reunion; and the African diaspora.

Modern African Drama
Modern African Drama

Author: Biodun Jeyifo

Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 646

ISBN-13: 9780393975291

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Presents eight twentieth-century plays from seven African countries, along with explanatory notes and over thirty background writings and works of criticism.

A History of East African Theatre, Volume 1
A History of East African Theatre, Volume 1

Author: Jane Plastow

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2021-11-13

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 9783030472740

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This book is the first ever transnational theatre study of an African region. Covering nine nations in two volumes, the project covers a hundred years of theatre making across Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Tanzania, and Uganda. This volume focuses on the theatre of the Horn of Africa. The book shows how the theatres of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, little known in the outside world, have been among the continent's most politically important, commercially successful, and widely popular; making work almost exclusively in local languages and utilizing hybrid forms that have privileged local cultural modes of production. A History of African Theatre is relevant to all who have interests in African cultures and their relationship to the history and politics of the East African region.