Greg Mbajiorgu & Amanze Akpuda (eds), 50 Years of Solo Performing Art in Nigerian Theatre 1966–2016

Summary

Since the 1970s, performance art has championed site-specific artists conceptualizing singular visions as non-traditional theatre practitioners throughout the globe. The collective international rise of solo performances that utilize open spaces as diverse as street corners to shop windows has brought us revolutionary artists whose messages, offered to the people, are not for sale. Challenging and discarding many conventional theatre aesthetics, this minimalist theatre style began as a vehicle for agitprop, in your face performances to bring spectators into a raw engagement with the performer. 50 Years of Solo Performing Art in Nigerian Theatre 1966– 2016, is the first anthology to provide an overview of this practice as it has developed in Nigeria. Edited by Greg Mbajiorgu and Amanze Akpuda, this important addition to the study of performance art includes over 30 essays from Nigerian scholars and theatre artists, providing a definitive and up-to-date study of solo performance in Nigeria.

Organized in nine sections, the anthology begins with three essays from Moses Oludele Idowu, Emeka Nwabueze, and Chike Okoye that lay the historical foundations of performance art from a West African cosmology. Chapter 1, Idowu's Words of Power, and the Power of Words: The Spoken Word as Medium of Vital Force in African Cosmology leads off the edition with an essay on spoken word that captures the mystical root of ‘The Word’ in traditional African, Judeo-Christian, and Muslim religious belief systems, before narrowing in on Ase in Yoruba cosmology. Nwabueze (Chapter 2) continues to trace the origins of performance art in his essay through a narrative on the traditional griot as storyteller and guardian of the people that would also be of interest to African American spoken word artists. Throughout American streets and college campuses, countless young ‘Neo-griots’ rhyme and recite their poetry unaware of the African roots in their aesthetic. Okoye (Chapter 3) then takes us into sacred rituals surrounding Igbo masks/ masquerade and the evolution in scholarly arguments that identify the Igbo Mask as an example of solo performance. The first three essays are vital in locating the foundation of performance art in Nigeria far beyond twentieth-century Western avant-garde theatre.

Section B targets ‘Meta-Theoretical, Comparative, Analytical, and Generic Studies’ to pinpoint various approaches to the solo performer, from the American comedian Lily Tomlin to Greg Mbajiorgu.