The stage performance of Langbodo, a play, which Nigerian dramatist Wale Ogunyemi adapted from Soyinka’s The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, which, in turn, is a translation of D. O. Fagunwa’s prose, Ògbójú Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀. 'The bold hunter in the daemon-infested forest', exposed the limitation of the text as a bearer of meaning in the theatrical adaptation context. The limitation is analysed in this work to justify the centrality of adaptation in bridging the text-design-audience semiotic gap. This study examines the technical challenges of theatre design in D. O. Fagunwa’s works resulting from their adaptation as drama. The Yoruba apothegmatic idiom, Ẹnu ‘dùn ń rò’fọ́, agada ọwọ́ ṣeé ṣán’ko (which means, literally, that ‘vegetable soup can be prepared orally if a mere hand suffices for a cutlass’), a traditional derision for the inadequacies of the text, and the Barthesian notion of intertextuality serve as a dual theoretical structure in this study. A combination of methodologies including participant observation and ethnographic approach suffice for the retrieval and analysis of performance materials, respectively. Therefore, the study contends that the process of stage adaptation in Wale Ogunyemi’s play, Langbodo, used the technical contributions of theatre design, as a catalyst for connecting Fagunwa’s ideas to the final audience.
Using the Ọlóbà ritual dance of Adó–Èkìtì, in the Èkìtì–Yorùbá region of Nigeria as an example, this study examines the contextual shift in the visual realization of the African dance as evidence of transnationalism. The Ọlóbà tradition, as old as the Adó–Èkìtì town, is intended for cleansing the community to ward off evil. However, the visible matters that constitute the visual designs in the ritual process are gradually losing touch with the African tradition. Traditional props in the Ọlóbà performance are now being replaced by factory–made accessories, making it a hybrid of transnational cultures. Recent studies have focused on the aesthetics of the Ọlóbà dance, without paying adequate attention to the influence of transnationalism in the design elements. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the traditional African dance, today, is faced with complex contemporary realities that tend to redefine it. Based on Roland Barthes’s intertextuality and a combination of case study and survey research designs, data was collected through in–depth and key informant interviews. Using content analysis, the study concludes that the survival of traditional African dance compels it to use material constituents that characterize it as a hybrid of multiple transnational cultures.
This study focuses on the technical process through which available materials and space are transformed into motif-based animate floats and desired landscapes for carnival performances. Carnival performances are often guided by underlying conceptual scripts which basically depend on the technical processes of theatre design as a major requirement in connecting the carnival performance with its audience and which has not received adequate attention from existing theatre scholarship. The study adopts Roland Barthes’ semiotic theory, Intertextuality as the framework for analysing the interplay of carnival performances, material objects, technical process of theatre design and the carnival audience. The research design combined case study and survey. Data were collected using in-depth interviews, key informant interviews and participant observation. Ahmed Yerima, whose works in carnival productions informed this study, was selected as a case study. The study concludes that the technical process of theatre design is central to carnival performances because it catalyses the underlying imaginative dramatic scripts into visual pictures and animate carnival floats, thereby eliciting meaning from the conceptual dramatic scripts to the carnival audience. Adequate attention should therefore be paid to theatre design as the process of transforming imaginative scripts into visible pictorial carnival floats. Keywords: Materials, Animate objects, Theatre design, Carnival performance, Transformation
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