Yorùbá Performance, Theatre and Politics

Staging Resistance

Glenn Odom

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137492791
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del teatro

This book explains the connections between traditional performance (e.g. masked dances, prophecy, praise recitations), contemporary theatre (Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Tess Onwueme, Femi Osofisan, and Stella Oyedepo), and the political sphere in the context of the Yorùbá people in Nigeria.

1

A Critique of Yorùbá Judgment: Individual Authority, Community Creation, and the Embodiment of À«÷

Andrew Apter argues that the expression of à«÷, which roughly translates as ‘authority,’ is ‘the most profound and most difficult stage of entry into Yoruba culture.’¹ Indeed structures of authority emerge across discourses, making it a core concern for ìfægbôntáayé«e. À«÷ defies definition, but in simplest terms it refers both to the mechanism by which authority is conferred on a person or an object and the mechanism by which that person or object demonstrates its power: the line between possessing and enacting authority is a slender one. À«÷ as related to form is the concept that authority has a specific context in which it must be enacted; that this context is related to metaphysical sources of à«÷; that, despite this metaphysical connection, form cannot confer authority without audience interaction; and that certain forms are more associated with authority than others.

As in each of the following chapters, the structural element in question – à«÷ in this chapter – changes from performance to theatre to politics, and these differences generate theatre’s political resistance. There are a variety of questions surrounding authority in Yorùbá culture. Who or what has authority? How is authority conferred or transferred? How is authority constituted? How does authority manifest itself? In keeping with the idea that ìfægbôntáayé«e is consistent across disciplines, variations of these questions emerge in theatre and performance. How does a given representational mode stake its claim to authority? To what extent is authority performed into being? What aspects of performance are salient to this authority? Politics must also rely on certain notions of authority, however diffuse or concentrated that authority may be.

Yorùbá performance does not exist in isolation from its concrete effects. The authority of a prophetic performance, for instance, is conferred through following an appropriate set of rituals, but then reconstituted when the prophecy’s validity is confirmed. The performance itself matters, but so do the concrete events that take place after the event. A performance’s concrete effects are often created and justified by an authority that is, itself, partially a product of the concrete effect of the performance. A felicitous performance produces an effect and the effect can be used to judge and enhance the felicity of a performance. This authority is produced through a metaphysical transaction with the audience. While authority may also be a theme of performance and theatre, it is an explicit fundamental structural element of them as well: à«÷ is the word for this type of authority in all aspects of Yorùbá culture. Despite discussions of à«÷ in the work of Wole Soyinka, Margaret Drewal, Andrew Apter, Karin Barber, and others, a vast array of contemporary criticism of African theatre still ignores this core of Yorùbá aesthetics and substitutes the systems of Western modernist performance as an analytical device.

While the authority of Yorùbá performance is contingent on audience interaction, this contingency makes the authority of the performance more powerful rather than less. The felicity of prophetic performance, for instance, relies on the ‘audience’ going out and living through/enacting the events noted in the prophecy. In Yorùbá performance, representation is incomplete until the audience has both approved of and capitulated to the authority being enacted. A felicitous performance, by definition, would be one that had created its own à«÷, and this authority is self-generated but requires the metaphysical participation of the audience. ‘Requires’ is a double-edged sword – the authority is incomplete until the audience participates, but the authority compels the participation as well. This paradox of mutually constitutive elements recurs in homologous forms through each of the structural elements I discuss in the remaining chapters.

Unlike the other facets of ìfægbôntáayé«e, the manipulation and implementation of à«÷ in performance has stayed consistent through the historical archive. This consistency can be seen both in sculptural performance – by which I mean the distinctive concrete ‘actor’/audience relationships formed when Yorùbá plastic arts interact with the world – and in Gëlëdê festivals (ceremonies consisting of dancers, singers, drummers, and masked figures, focusing on community and the power of female dancers). Sculpture may seem an unlikely place to open a discussion of performance, but every performance I witnessed had at least one object that was central to the process. For instance, the Gëlëdê festival contains a sacred staff or ide that is used in the process of establishing à«÷, and this staff is constructed according to specific iconography. These objects were obviously not ‘props’ in the sense of manufactured portions of a stage illusion, but their role in performance goes beyond the simple notion that they are considered to be ritually significant.

Some Yorùbá sculptural pieces exist independently of other performances, and many of these have a direct, tangible impact upon the audience by virtue of their à«÷ as well: these pieces can act as blessings, curses, or messages. Both sculpture and Gëlëdê rely on their ability to interact with the metaphysical powers of the Yorùbá world in order to establish some aspects of their à«÷, but alongside this metaphysical power, both sculpture and Gëlëdê require an active participation of the audience in order to concretize and reaffirm their à«÷.

While Gëlëdê and sculpture have the same notion of à«÷, they are at variance with political performance, specifically Olusegun Obasanjo’s political enactments of authority as he handed power over to the civilian government in 1979. In traditional performance – sculpture and Gëlëdê – there is a vital transaction between actor and audience, and this transaction involves acknowledgment, metaphysical support, and affirmation. Obasanjo performs a transactional but mundane mode of authority, rejecting the idea that his right to rule comes from any higher power.

At one level, Obasanjo’s removal of a divine, metaphysical, secret right to rule appears politically progressive. Disagreements with the ruler can be handled by open discussion and the facts of this discussion are subject to public scrutiny. Both in his military and civilian leadership, Obasanjo’s governments were considerably more open than other Nigerian systems have been. The difficulty is that this apparent openness and communication provides no outside recourse. Without a metaphysical punishment for the misuse or misinterpretation of à«÷, the group with the most power can act in whatever way they choose regardless of any transactions that have taken place.

On the other hand, once a metaphysical source of authority is recognized, the people are limited to following the parameters set by this authority, however transactional it may appear. It is precisely the illusion of transaction in both the mundane and metaphysical modes of authority that Osofisan attacks in Morountodun (1979). Osofisan’s work presents and then eliminates the possibility of a transactional authority. In his theoretical writing, Osofisan outlines the ways in which his theatre might act as political resistance with

a conscious tactics of deployment, one that has to be […] rehearsed to that particular moment, a covert and metamorphic system of maneuvering which, for want of a better term, I have summarized as ‘surreptitious insurrection.’²

Osofisan advocates a theatre driven by the dialectics of history ‘where we shall never have the truth completely within our grasp’ precisely because the truth must continually be recreated in light of the historical changes in the material conditions of the audience, playwright, and actors.³ It is neither the rhetorical transparency of Obasanjo’s government nor the metaphysical nature of traditional à«÷ itself that Osofisan objects to, but, instead, the failure of these modes of authority to deal effectively with the material conditions of the people. Osofisan’s idea of an ever-changing surreptitious insurrection is in keeping with the fluidity of ìfægbôntáayé«e – this insurrection responds to the changing flow of the world around it through structural, surreptitious means, not through overt content.

Traditional Yorùbá Aesthetics: The Voice of Art and the Authority of Performance

Traditional Yorùbá sculptural and Gëlëdê performances emphasize the metaphysical, secret, transactional aspects of authority. In performance, authority cannot exist without the approval of the audience. The mechanisms behind authority must be secret but immediately recognizable by the audience. As will be the case in each of the following chapters, in keeping with Yorùbá philosophy, I do not attempt to resolve these apparent contradictions because such contradictions are characteristic of Yorùbá philosophy.

The authority of à«÷ exists, in part, precisely because these contradictions are irresolvable: if the explanation of authority was simple, the mystery on which authority relies would be destroyed. The degree to which form and content are separate is a cornerstone of Western discourses of representation and demonstrates the necessary complexity of à«÷. In Yorùbá philosophy, the question of form and context is more immediate: Yorùbá aesthetics do not deny the possibility of conferring authority via formal elements, but this is simultaneously a demonstration of the power of forms and a reminder that this power is contingent upon the other mechanisms of à«÷. Form does not confer à«÷, but an object or performance without à«÷ could never be in the same form as an object of authority because a given form is directly connected to metaphysical authority. The right form at the right place at the right time will always generate a felicitous performance. A form taken out of this proper context ceases to have the formal properties that make it what it is. The form is read by simultaneously understanding its symbolic properties, its relationship to other forms, and its concrete effect on its immediate context. The idea that form can confer power or à«÷ suggests form’s connection to a metaphysical source of authority, but this authority is always in transaction with other forms and the communal interpretation of the form: form is only one aspect of the metaphysical transactional nature of à«÷.

David Doris discusses a limited number of poses or forms, each with a specific semantic meaning, in sculpture and photography that can confer a degree of à«÷.⁴ Photographic or sculptural subjects often adopt these poses or forms in order to associate themselves with the à«÷ of the pose: ‘the individuality of the portrait’s sitter is acknowledged, but it is also transfigured, as it were, by his self-identification with a category of persons.’⁵ Sitting in the pose of a king does not make you a king, but, conversely, one would not choose such a pose unless one wished to be associated with kingship – an association that would be dangerous for someone of a different rank. Rowland Abiodun also describes the à«÷-granting properties of ‘specific colors, patterns, motifs, and aspects of the subject matter’⁶ emphasized in the plastic arts. Certain forms, like the snake figures on Gëlëdê masks, are themselves semantically powerful – although even their power must perpetually be reestablished and reinforced. Knowledge of this form, or even the enactment of the form, is not, by itself, enough to generate à«÷, as seen by the relative potency of the charms made by various members of the community. The more potent the à«÷ of the individual, the more potent the à«÷ of the object, but the object may also confer its authority on people.

The idea that a form might carry some portion of the content with it is hardly surprising, but the Yorùbá connection of form to pragmatic effect is considerably stronger than this. Abiodun describes objects after they have been imbued with à«÷ – sculptures and other decorations on shrines – that ‘contribute to and share in the power of the sacred space.’⁷ These objects only maintain their significance when they are in an appropriate syntactic context, surrounded by the other trappings of the shrine. While the objects have innate qualities and have been imbued permanently with à«÷, there is a continual re-invocation of these powers and qualities that serves to reinforce the power of the objects and, as significantly, to remind the audience of this power. An object or a person has a permanent unchanging ìwà (essence) and à«÷, while still requiring the same rituals that were initially necessary to establish these things.

The degree of paradox in the above description of form is actually central to the concept of à«÷. This paradoxical nature also exists in the transactions between sculpture, performance, and audience. On one hand, some sculptural forms act as curses or blessings on their target audience; on the other hand, the ability to act on the audience is predicated on à«÷, which is, itself, predicate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Archive
• Glossary
• Introduction: Performance and Ìfægbôntáayé«e: Genre, Knowledge, and Politics
• 1 A Critique of Yorùbá Judgment: Individual Authority, Community Creation, and the Embodiment of Àṣẹ
• 2 What Matter Who Dances?: Self-fashioning, (non)Subjects, and the Nation
• 3 No Victor, No Vanquished, No Past: Ola Rotimi, Yakubu Gowon, Sani Abacha, and ‘The End of Nigerian History’
• 4 Values Beyond Ethics: From Stella Dia Oyedepo to Tess Onwueme
• 5 Conclusions: Civil Governance and the Politics of Yorùbá Theatre
• Bibliography
• Index