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Werewere Liking: Pan/Artist and Pan-Africanism in the Theatre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
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The figure of Pan escapes definition. Should one even attempt to ascribe a gender? Try to seize him (or her) as the forest god and Pan will turn up as the spirit of fertile fields. Imagine Pan as an impish charmer and Pan transforms into a wily adversary. Pan is multiple and everywhere, englobing but also electrifying. Used as prefix, ‘pan’ imparts to political movements and aesthetic projects a Utopian vision, the progressive notion of broad-based co-operation and community. Yet ‘pan’ can also evoke a potentially discordant assembly.
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References
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1. Since the early 1970s, Werewere Liking has authored four novels, eight published plays, some half dozen unpublished playscripts, two television scenarios, one feature film script in draft form, a volume of poetry, and scholarly studies on marionettes, colonial statuary, and ritual theatre.
2. Werewere Liking's work has been recognized internationally through a series of prizes, including the Radio France Internationale Prize for Interafrican Theatre in 1986, the French Prix Arletty for women in theatre in 1991, the Fonlon Nichols Prize of the African Literature Association in 1993, and Les Palmes d'or from the French Ministry of Culture, also in 1993.
3. Werewere Liking and Manuna-Ma-Njock, À la rencontre de … (Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1980), p. 23: ‘I already had what West was searching for, she knew it: a communion with nature which had been lost in her country many years ago. She had dried out, like a root which had lost all contact with the nurturing earth: she was shrivelling up, a symbol of decline, a sign of the end of her race’ (my translation).
4. Since 1973, over fifteen exhibitions of Liking's paintings have been held in Africa, Europe, and the United States. While she now concentrates her artistic energy primarily on theatre work, she has never stopped painting.
5. The mvet, a traditional storytelling mode (including singing, dancing, and playing) of the Fang and Beti peoples, which is practised across a wide area of West Africa, simultaneously gives its name to the instrument played and the kind of epic story being told, usually focusing on wars and migrations.
6. For an overview of Cameroonian theatre, see articles in ‘Littérature camerounaise I:1'éclosion de la parole’, Notre Librairie (99, octobre-décembre, 1989).
7. The most important training school for theatre and indeed all disciplines in West Africa was the William-Ponty School of Senegal, an international school for gifted children sent to Senegal from the French colonial educational system. From the 1930s, William Ponty formed generations of Africa's intellectual and professional elite. But as V.Y. Mudimbe remarks in his essay ‘Société, enseignement, créativité’, the kind of education afforded by the colonial system allowed only an alienating creativity to Africans, as they were encouraged to be ‘creative’ within a knowledge system which had nothing to do with African society. See L'Odeur du père (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1982), pp. 75–81.
8. Soyinka, Wole, ‘Drama and the African World View’, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 37–60.Google Scholar
9. The increasing despotism of the government of the 1980s has closed down even veiled theatrical attempts at social criticism. Theatre, as it is, remains the province of a bourgeois elite, ‘culture’ not being a high priority of the current Cameroonian government.
10. The government which came to power after the death of President Houphouët Boigny likewise named a playwright, Bernard Zadi Zaourou, to the position of Minister of Culture (January 1994). In every speech he has pronounced since then, Zadi has stressed the importance of cultural work to nation building.
11. Speaking at the African Literature Association meeting in Ghana, 24 March 1994, John Conteh Morgan outlined the importance of the Ivory Coast in the theatrical move away from literary texts.
12. Nkashama, Pius Ngandu, Théâtre et scènes de spectacles: études sur les dramaturgies et les arts gestuels (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1993), pp. 36–7.Google Scholar Nkashama's stimulating and rich study has been very useful to this essay.
13. African Literature Association meeting, Ghana, 23 March 1994.
14. Nkashama, ibid., p. 139.
15. The information about Werewere Liking's artistic trajectory and influences comes from several interviews and conversations with her (Chalon-sur-Saône, October 1992, Guadeloupe, April 1993, Paris, May 1993, 1994) and from press dossiers made available to me by the Espace des Arts in Chalon-sur-Saône and archives consulted in the KiYi Village in Abidjan. Among the articles read, the most informative include Hawkins, Peter, ‘Werewere Liking at the Villa KiYi’, African Affairs (90, 1991), pp. 207–222Google Scholar and Pillot, Christine, ‘Le Vivre vrai de Werewere Liking’, ‘Théâtre/Théâtres’, Notre Ldbrairie (102, juillet-août 1990), pp. 54–60.Google Scholar
16. Hourantier, Marie-José, Du Rituel au théâtre rituel: contribution à une esthétique théâtrale négro-africaine (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1984).Google Scholar
The ritual theatre productions of Liking and Hourantier include: Hourantier, M.-J., Le Chant de la colline, rituel de réjouissanceGoogle Scholar, suivi de À l'aube de la conscience, rituel de mort (Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1980); Manuna Ma Njock a.k.a. Hourantier, M.-J., Orphée d'Afrique, rituel d'initiation (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1981)Google Scholar; Werewere Liking, La Puissance de Um, rituel de mort (Abidjan: CEDA, 1979); Werewere Liking, Une nouvelle terre, rituel d'investiture d'un nouveau village, suivi Du sommeil d'injuste, rituel de guérison (Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1980); Werewere Liking, Les Mains veulent dire, rituel de guérison, suivi de La Rougeole arc-en-ciel, rituel pour un procès (Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1987).
17. Marie-José Hourantier adds as an appendix to La Rougeole arc-en-ciel an interesting analysis of her own mise en scène.
18. In 1985 Hourantier formed her own company, the BinKadi, which also works out of Abidjan.
19. In a typical working day at the KiYi Village, the actors, all of whom are also dancers, singers, and/or musicians, meditate in specifically designated groups from 6 to 7 a.m. and from 5.30 to 6.30 p.m. Their meditation includes rigorous breathing exercises. They normally run at least for half an hour before the morning meditation and rehearse six to seven hours a day. In addition to dance movements and vocal exercises, rehearsals include practising a twirling technique meant to help fix one's thoughts through rapid capillary action in the brain and a staring technique meant to improve concentration by fixing a natural light source. The later techniques were learned from mvet and Mossi storytellers. Several of the actors also work to perfect their handling of the giant Malian marionettes used since 1986 in almost all of Liking's plays; others work on their percussive skills. Men and women receive equal training. There are no gender-based creative or artistic divisions.
20. This quote is part of a larger unpublished manifesto from the early 1990s found in the KiYi archives: ‘We attempt to dream our life in Utopian terms, that is freed of everything which blocks our continent today—the lack of knowledge of our own cultures and history, the refusal to question meaningless customs and to re-evaluate our assets, the blocked circulation of African energies inside Africa, the overdependence on external help for the least little initiative. […] We planned our village to be Pan-African, that is joining cultures from many different African origins, distancing them from a tribal or national frame in order to create a continental culture. We experience our village like the primal cell of a movement destined to provoke or make visible the birth or the relaunching of a new culture with continental dimensions’ (my translation).
21. For a clear and lively discussion of Pan-Africanism and a general theoretical overview of the movement, see Lemelle, Sid, Pan-Africanism for Beginners (New York: Writers and Readers, 1992).Google Scholar
22. I have borrowed this formula from Patrice Pavis, himself citing the anthropologist Camilleri, Camille, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, translated by Kruger, Loren (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 11.Google Scholar
23. The concept of the village as central to African cultural independence is an idea subscribed to by many African intellectuals, including the poet Urbain Amoa, who in conversation with me, 14 April 1994, added that ‘le village est le seul espace où la culture se pratique sans maquillage’ (‘the village is the only space where culture doesn't wear make-up’).
24. My analysis of these two productions is based on a production of Un Touareg s'est marié à une Pygmée I saw in Chalon-sur-Saône, 9 October 1992, a video of Singuè Mura I studied during a brief residency with the KiYi Company, 4–16 April 1994, and a familiarity with the KiYi's productions through having had the good fortune of seeing several of them in France and the Ivory Coast.
25. Soyinka, , ‘Drama and the African World View’, p. 41.Google Scholar
26. Werewere Liking's stage directions constitute a privileged domain for seeing how she abolishes boundaries in her own mind between actors and characters. She speaks through the didascalia to the characters as though they were living beings, conflating the character with the actor playing it.