The Generation of Plays

The Generation of Plays

Author: Karin Barber

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2003-03-21

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9780253216175

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Since the 1980s, Yoruba popular theatre has virtually disappeared due to radio, TV and other mass media in Nigeria. This is the personal account of a theatre worker on tour with the Oyin Adejobi Company. Drawing on archives, interviews and transcribed plays, she describes a successful Yoruba drama.


Yoruba Ritual

Yoruba Ritual

Author: Margaret Thompson Drewal

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1992-03-22

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 0253112737

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Yoruba peoples of southwestern Nigeria conceive of rituals as journeys -- sometimes actual, sometimes virtual. Performed as a parade or a procession, a pilgrimage, a masking display, or possession trance, the journey evokes the reflexive, progressive, transformative experience of ritual participation. Yoruba Ritual is an original and provocative study of these practices. Using a performance paradigm, Margaret Thompson Drewal forges a new theoretical and methodological approach to the study of ritual that is thoroughly grounded in close analysis of the thoughts and actions of the participants. Challenging traditional notions of ritual as rigid, stereotypic, and invariant, Drewal reveals ritual to be progressive, transformative, generative, and reflexive and replete with simultaneity, multifocality, contingency, indeterminacy, and intertextuality. Throughout the book prominence is given to the intentionality of actors as knowledgeable agents who transform ritual itself through play and improvisation. Integral to the narrative are interpolations about performances and their meanings by Kolawole Ositola, a scholar of Yoruba oral tradition, ritual practitioner, diviner, and master performer. Rich descriptions of rituals relating to birth, death, reincarnation, divination, and constructions of gender are rendered all the more vivid by a generous selection of field photos of actual performances.


Black Theatre

Black Theatre

Author: Paul Carter Harrison

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2002-11

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9781439901151

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An insider's view of Black theatres of the world and how they reflect their culture, concerns, and history.


Odún

Odún

Author: Cristina Boscolo

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 9042026812

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A poetic ‘voice’ scans the rhythm of academic research, telling of the encounter with odún; then the voice falls silent. What is then raised is the dust of a forgotten academic debate on the nature of theatre and drama, and the following divergent standpoints of critical discourses bent on empowering their own vision, and defining themselves, rather, as counterdiscourses. This, the first part of the book: a metacritical discourse, on the geopolitics (the inherent power imbalances) of academic writing and its effects on odún, the performances dedicated to the gods, ancestors, and heroes of Yorùbá history. But odún: where is it? and what is it? And the ‘voice’? The many critical discourses have not really answered these questions. In effect, odún is many things. To enable the reader to see these, the study proceeds with an ‘intermezzo’: a frame of reference that sets odún, the festival, in its own historico-cultural ecoenvironment, identifying the strategies that inform the performance and constitute its aesthetic. It is a ‘classical’ yet, for odún, an innovative procedure. This interdisciplinary background equips the reader with the knowledge necessary to watch the performance, to witness its beauty, and to understand the ‘half words’ odún utters. And now the performance can begin. The ‘voice’ emerges one last time, to introduce the second section, which presents two case studies. The reader is led, day by day, through the celebrations –odún edì, Morèmi’s story, and its realization in performance; then confrontation by the masks of the ancestors duing odún egúngún (particularly as held in Ibadan). The meaning of odún becomes clearer and clearer. Odún is poetry, dances, masks, food, prayer. It is play (eré) and belief (ìgbàgbó). It is interaction between the players (both performers and spectators). It is also politics and power. It contains secrets and sacrifices. It is a reality with its own dimension and, above all, as the quintessential site of knowledge, it possesses the power to transform. In short, it is a challenge – a challenge that the present book and its voices take up.


Mirrors of Our Playing

Mirrors of Our Playing

Author: Thomas R. Whitaker

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780472110254

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Examines the major paradigms that have influenced modern English-speaking theater


Ancient Text Messages of the Yoruba Bata Drum

Ancient Text Messages of the Yoruba Bata Drum

Author: Amanda Villepastour

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1351958429

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The bata is one of the most important and representative percussion traditions of the people in southwest Nigeria, and is now learnt and performed around the world. In Cuba, their own bata tradition derives from the Yoruba bata from Africa yet has had far more research attention than its African predecessor. Although the bata is one of the oldest known Yoruba drumming traditions, the drum and its unique language are now unfamiliar to many contemporary Yoruba people. Amanda Villepastour provides the first academic study of the bata's communication technology and the elaborate coded spoken language of bata drummers, which they refer to as 'ena bata'. Villepastour explains how the bata drummers' speech encoding method links into universal linguistic properties, unknown to the musicians themselves. The analysis draws the direct links between what is spoken in Yoruba, how Yoruba is transformed in to the coded language (ena), how ena prescribes the drum strokes and, finally, how listeners (and which listeners) extract linguistic meaning from what is drummed. The description and analysis of this unique musical system adds substantially to what is known about bata drumming specifically, Yoruba drumming generally, speech surrogacy in music and coded systems of speaking. This book will appeal not only to ethnomusicologists and anthropologists, but also to linguists, drummers and those interested in African Studies.


Southern Postcolonialisms

Southern Postcolonialisms

Author: Sumanyu Satpathy

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2020-11-29

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1000083993

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Southern Postcolonialisms is an anthology of critical essays on new literary representations from the Global South that seeks to re-invent/reorient the ideological, disciplinary, aesthetic, and pedagogical thrust of Postcolonial Studies in accordance with the new and shifting politico-economic realities/transactions between the North and the South, as well as within the Global South, in an era of globalization. Since the emergence of Postcolonial Theory in the 1980s, the shape of the world has changed dramatically. Old Cold War boundaries have shifted in the wake of the collapse of communism, Globalization, on an unprecedented scale, has dramatically changed the meaning of time and space. The rise of the US as a new imperial power has profound implications for the world order. In the South, new emerging markets have challenged the older division of industrial ‘first world’ and non-industrial ‘third world’. In most parts of the world, the academy is struggling to keep up with these developments. One result has been a major transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences. Terms like ‘world history’, ‘globalization’, ‘glocalization’ and ‘transnationalism’ now dominate academic agendas worldwide. These changing circumstances raise far-reaching questions. What does the new emerging world order mean for established models of postcolonial theory? Is postcolonialism as a field of study being overtaken by models of globalization and transnationalism? What implications do the new configurations in the South have for postcolonial theory? This volume, drawn from a major literary conference at Delhi University, provides a set of perspectives on these questions. With a majority of contributions by scholars from the South, these research articles have a dual focus – they revisit older debates on postcolonial theory, while suggesting new perspectives and directions.


Nigerian Video Films

Nigerian Video Films

Author: Jonathan Haynes

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0896802116

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Nigerian video films--dramatic features shot on video and sold as cassettes--are being produced at the rate of nearly one a day, making them the major contemporary art form in Nigeria. The history of African film offers no precedent for such a huge, popularly based industry. The contributors to this volume, who include film and television directors, an anthropologist, and scholars of film studies and literature, take a variety of approaches to this flourishing popular art. Topics include aesthetic forms and distribution; the configurations of various ethnic audiences; the new media environment dominated by cassette technology; the video's materialism in a period of economic collapse; transformation of the traditional Yoruba traveling theater; individualism and the moral crisis in Igbo society; Hausa cultural values; the negotiation of gender roles, and the genre of Christian videos.


New South African Plays

New South African Plays

Author: Beverley Naidoo

Publisher: Aurora Metro Publications Ltd.

Published: 2019-04-02

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1910798894

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A collection of six plays dealing with the new South Africa, published in 2006 to celebrate 10 years of democracy post-apartheid. Plays about racial conflict, the impact of AIDS, power and corruption, the legacy of the past and female identity. Reprinted 2012, 2019. The Plays The Playground by Beverly Naidoo “...it floats on a haunting, echoing raft of traditional South African harmonies that make watching it a joyful experience as well as a thought-provoking one...” Time Out Critics’ Choice – Pick of the Year Taxi by Sibusiso Mamba: Edinburgh fringe first winner “a superbly written and produced play... A fine piece of work that’s refreshingly free of cliches.” Daily Mail, Pick of the Week Green Man Flashing by Mike Van Graan “...This finely crafted drama tears at the heart and soul of our democracy, and rips at the underbelly of corruption and political power through its astute writing...” Star Tonight Rejoice by James Whylie “... the cruellest irony of all is left until the end... the same one which has spelled the death of Rejoice... And millions more.” Friends of BBC Radio 3 What the Water Gave Me by Rehane Abrahams “tales that retrieve ancient magics and reveal contemporary terrors...” Cape Times To House by Ashwin Singh: Finalist in the 2003 PANSA (Performing Arts Network of SA) Festival of Reading of New Writing (the country’s foremost playwriting contest) “To House is an important piece of theatre; in it people voice opinions that are uncomfortable and edgy. The cathartic and therapeutic value of hearing these things said aloud in a public place is part of our essential healing process and proves, once again, that art has the ability to go where angels fear to tread.” Daily News, Durban


A History of East African Theatre, Volume 2

A History of East African Theatre, Volume 2

Author: Jane Plastow

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 3030877310

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This second volume of A History of East African Theatre focuses on central East Africa; on Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. The first chapter is concerned with francophone theatres, comparatively studying work coming out of Burundi and Rwanda alongside a focus on French language theatre in Djibouti. The chapter is particularly concerned to explore how French and Belgian cultural policies impacted theatre during the colonial period and how the French ideas of Francafrique and promotion of elite, French language art have continued to resonate in the post-colonial present. Chapters Two and Three look comparatively at the rich theatre histories of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and are divided between a study of British East African colonial impact and an analysis of the post-colonial period illustrating how divergent political thought and societal make-up led to exponential differentiation in national theatres. The final chapter, on Theatre for Development and related social action theatre, covers the whole East African region, offering the first ever historicised analysis of this mode of theatre making which, since the 1980s, has come to dominate funding and opportunity in performance arts.