African Popular Theater example essay topic

Africa is a home to several traditions of theatre. Some traditions are of ancient origin, while others colonization of the continent in the 19th century and the subsequent imposition of western education, religion and culture. The older tradition are done in African languages. Many of the newer theatre traditions are text based, written in European languages or indigenous African Languages with Latin script.

The plays are designed to be performed in more or less formal theater buildings with fixed relations between performers and audience. The audience usually pays a fee, although the theater may not be expressly commercial. In all cases, as indeed in all societies, the functions of the theater traditions are broadly similar in their mixing of the pleasing and the pedagogical: their representations provide the audience with pleasurable entertainment while simultaneously channeling passions and sentiments in certain directions. The African theatre were basically about food, shelter, sex, children, power, and duty.

Rituals from each tribe differ from specific content and other tribes. Rituals may be intended to influence events. Theatre in Africa could be categorized into four district traditions: festival theatre, popular theatre, development theatre, and art theatre. Festival theatre is the foremost indigenous cultural and artistic institution. Festivals incorporate diverse forms, such as singing, chanting drama, drumming, masking, miming, costuming and puppetry. The accompanying theatrical enactments- from the sacred and secretive to the secular and public- can last from few hours to several days, weeks, or months.

Each festivals dramatizes a story or myth contemporary drama, as we experience it today, is a contraction of drama, necessitated by the productive order of society in other directions. Popular theater cuts across class or status boundaries. African popular theater are those with broad appeal, and are intimately linked with genre. One reason for such wide appeal of popular theater is that it is most often performed in the indigenous language, hybrids of them designed to be understand across linguistic borders. Generally, more recent forms such as the Yoruba Popular Theater, the Chikwakwa Theater of Zambia, and The South African Township Theater, are comprised of both male and female performers. The performers are in most cases organized as traveling troupes, performing in a variety of available spaces: open squares, enclosed courtyards of kings and chiefs, school classrooms, concert or cinema halls, and bars or nightclubs, and well-equipped theaters.

Most popular theater forms are not scripted but based on improvisations, giving the performers much leeway but also demanding an unusual dexterity in speech, movement, and gesture. Festival theater is performed in an open space in the town square or a similarity appointed location. Aesthetically, the performance may take a full range of styles, from realism to surrealism and spirit possession. There are two ways in which scholars label the festivals. Some scholars label the festival as "pre-drama" or "traditional ritual" or "ritual drama", because of its expansive multimedia format, its firm integration of the of the dramatic amidst the other arts, and the presence of both religious and secular reenactments. The argument of Whole Soyinka, Africa's leading dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, best exemplifies this view.

He insists that festivals be seen as constituting" in themselves pure theater at most prodigal and resourceful... the most stirring expressions of man's instinct and need for drama at its most comprehensive and community-in loving. The 1st physical theater company is a testament of action- a declaration of intent amongst artists working in South Africa. It teases together the dynamic elements of theater, ... dance, music, mime, design, voice, song and movement collide or come together in an atmosphere that is exhilarating and always illuminating.