Dance and Theatre

Yoruba dance is a response to a text. The drum says something in Yoruba, and the dancer's job is to answer it with the body, which means a dancer who cannot follow the drum language cannot dance. This is not a poetic description of how music and movement feel connected. It is a technical requirement that determines who can perform and what a performance means, and it is the reason a Yoruba audience watching a dancer is receiving information rather than watching decoration. From this performance culture comes a theatre lineage that runs from the Ọ̀yọ́ court masque troupes of the eighteenth century through the travelling companies of the mid-twentieth to the Yoruba-language films now on Netflix.

The drum calls the step

The clearest statement of the mechanism comes from Oluwafemi Jacob's study of bàtá dance, quoting Oluwasogba: every movement has its meaning, and the step is a response to a particular speech or a dictate from the drummer 1.

The consequence is that the dancer functions as a translator. Jacob puts it directly: a person who cannot understand the language of the bàtá drum, but who watches the dance, can comprehend what the drum says through the movement of the dancer 1. The dancer is the interpretive layer between the drummed text and an audience of varying competence. Conversely, a new dancer who has only watched bàtá performance finds the steps very difficult until taught how to respond to the various tempos, and must acquire thorough knowledge of the drum's different dictates and punctuations rather than merely reacting to rhythm 1.

The contest. The relationship is agonistic, not obedient. Jacob describes a challenge running between drummer and dancer, in which the drummer instructs and each dancer demonstrates in performance that they are in command of the ordeal, decoding and interpreting; expert dancers reply with movements that ask the drummer what more he has, saying in effect that they are up to the task 1. The exchange is a duel conducted in two media.

Against the improvisation reading. Jacob quotes Jacqui Malone, and the passage is a useful corrective to Western descriptions of African dance as free expression 1:

rather than emphasizing individual talent, Yoruba dancers and drummers express communal desires, values, and collective creativity. The drumming represents an underlying linguistic text that guides the dancing performance... These characteristics should not, however, be confused with improvisation, which emphasizes the individual and bolsters her or his ego. The drummer's primary duty is to preserve the community.

Nketia makes the complementary point about the required collaboration, that the relationship between the structure of the music and the design of the dance, together with the latitude for spontaneous variation, demands that musicians and dancers pay close attention to one another 1.

The body

Polycentrism. Bàtá dance articulates the head, eyes, chest, hands, shoulders, legs and toes for appropriate expressions 1. Multiple centres of the body move on independent rhythmic lines simultaneously, which is the aesthetic feature that European observers have consistently found hardest to describe and easiest to caricature.

Ajótapá. Bàtá is called the dance that flings the feet, and the proverb enforcing it is exact 1:

Original

Oníṣàngó tó jó tí kò tàpàá, àbùkù ara rẹ̀ ni

Literal gloss

Oníṣàngó: a devotee of Ṣàngó, one who belongs to Ṣàngó. tó jó: who dances. tí kò tàpàá: and does not fling or kick out the feet. àbùkù: disgrace, blemish, defect. ara rẹ̀ ni: it is his own body, it is upon himself.

Idiomatic English

The failure of a Ṣàngó dancer to fling the feet while dancing will discredit him.

Translation as published by Jacob, from Oluwasogba.

Notes on the translation

Àbùkù is stronger than "discredit". It is a blemish or disgrace attaching to a person, and the phrase àbùkù ara rẹ̀ locates it on his own body, so the Yoruba says that the failure marks him physically rather than merely damaging his reputation. The dance requires the performer to be physically fit, strong, dynamic and enthusiastic 1.

Named bàtá dance variants include gbàmù, elése, afaṣégbòjò, elékòtó, ijó ògè and ògèsè, with gbàmù the most popular and, in Oluwasogba's assessment, the most bastardised and abused 1.

The structure of a bàtá performance, in Jacob's five-part scheme 1: a salient opening sound with songs and dances; ìjúbà, salutation and homage, delivered through chants and dances; an entertainment section, often in ABACADA rondo form, which may include acrobatics and magical display with prominent call and response, and which on secular occasions carries less Ṣàngó material and more oríkì of prominent people present; then a departure section that is a variant of the ìjúbà, giving thanks to the elemental forces; ending with a recession song and two lead dancers, one male and one female, left onstage for a climax cued by the lead drummer in a final burst of energetic dance.

The ìjúbà bracket at both ends is the structural signature. A performance opens by paying homage to the powers and closes by thanking them, and the entertainment sits inside that frame.

The aesthetic of the cool

Robert Farris Thompson's account of Black Atlantic aesthetics is built on the observation that African dancers dance hot with a cool unsmiling face, which he glosses as the mind of an elder within the body of the young 2. Coolness on this reading is an aesthetic ideal of balance and control, expressed across sculpture, textile, dance and comportment, with roots he traces to Nigeria 2. The Yoruba word underlying it is ìtutù, coolness, calmness, moisture.

The face is the load-bearing element. A Yoruba dancer working at maximum physical intensity holds a composed face, and the discrepancy between what the body is doing and what the face is doing is the aesthetic effect. It is the same criterion as tútù in sculpture, where figures in violent action wear calm half-lidded expressions, so the dance and the carving are being judged by one standard.

Thompson set out a fuller list of canons of fine form in African Art in Motion, including terms usually given as ephebism, ìtutù, the get-down quality, multiple meter, looking smart, correct entrance and exit, call and response, ancestorism, and vividness cast into equilibrium. Only the hot-body cool-face canon was verifiable in quotable form for this file, and the others are named here without gloss or page reference rather than paraphrased from secondary summaries 2.

Dance and possession

The performance dimension of possession belongs here; the religious institution belongs to the òrìṣà section.

Bàtá is central to Ṣàngó worship, and the tradition holds that Ṣàngó called for a drum that could stimulate him and suit his purpose, and that only bàtá satisfied him, with the omele akọ playing the lead role 1. What matters aesthetically is that the drum patterns are specific to the deity: a devotee is not moved by music in general but by a particular repertoire addressed to a particular power, and the possession is understood to be occasioned by the correct text being played correctly.

For Egúngún, the dùndún ensemble provides the drumming, with the ìyáàlù conveying coded messages that the masked dancer decodes through movement 3. This is the dancer-as-decoder principle again, and in the Egúngún case it is doing theological work: the masked figure is an ancestor returned, and its ability to answer a drummed text demonstrates that it understands, which is evidence of what it claims to be.

The metaphor of the possessed devotee as the mount or horse of the deity is standard in Yoruba and Afro-Atlantic religious studies and underlies the title of Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman. No scholarly source for it was verified for this file and it is noted rather than asserted; Margaret Thompson Drewal's Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency is the correct source for the performance-aesthetic treatment 4.

Aláàrìnjó: the travelling masque theatre

Joel Adedeji's 1969 doctoral thesis at the University of Ibadan is the foundational study 5. His account, as reported in the secondary literature, runs as follows.

He traced the origins of Yoruba theatre to the Egúngún masquerade, the cult of the ancestor, and posited three developmental phases, ritual, then festival, then theatre, tracking the use of the egúngún for both ritual and secular occasions 5. Ológbìn Ológbojò, a descendant of the ọba, adopted the masquerade to further his duty as retainer and head of court entertainers 5. Ẹ̀ṣà Ògbìn, who took Ológbojò as his professional name, led a band of costumed players and extended operations outside the Ọ̀yọ́ court throughout the Ọ̀yọ́ empire 5. The theatre flourished extensively during the eighteenth century, mostly within court circles, and participated in the annual egúngún festivals 5. The Aláàrìnjó were well-organised troupes deriving their entertainment modes from the old rituals 5.

The mechanism is the important part. A masquerade is a sacred form in which a masked figure is an ancestor. A troupe that takes that form on the road, performs it for payment, adds satire and impersonation, and detaches it from the specific ancestors of a specific lineage has converted a rite into a theatre while keeping the mask. Everything downstream, including Ogunde's companies and arguably the Nollywood industry, descends from that conversion.

A precise founding date, the distinction between Ẹ̀ṣà and Àpìdán, and the office of the Alápinni were not verified for this file and are not asserted. Adedeji's thesis and his journal articles are where those are settled.

Biodun Jeyifo's The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria and Karin Barber's The Generation of Plays are the other essential works, the first on the twentieth-century travelling theatre as an industry and the second on how its plays were actually generated in performance 6.

The travelling theatre, 1940s to 1970s

Hubert Ogunde, 10 July 1916 at Ososa in Ogun State to 4 April 1990 in London, called the father of Nigerian theatre 7.

His first folk opera, The Garden of Eden and the Throne of God, was performed in 1944 while he was still serving in the Nigerian Police Force, under the patronage of an African Protestant sect, mixing biblical themes with Yoruba dance-drama traditions 7. That combination is the point: the form is Yoruba masque theatre, the content is Christian, and the sponsor is an African church. In 1945 he founded the African Music Research Party, the first contemporary professional theatrical company in Nigeria, renamed the Ogunde Theatre Party in 1947, the Ogunde Concert Party in 1950, and the Ogunde Theatre in 1960 7.

In 1964 Yoruba Ronu, "Yoruba, think", provoked Chief Akintola, Premier of the Western Region, and the Ogunde Theatre was banned in the Western Region; the ban was revoked on 4 February 1966 by the military government of Lieutenant Colonel F. A. Fajuyi 7. A theatre company banned by a regional premier for a play title that is an instruction to its own people is a useful measure of what this theatre was doing politically.

Duro Ladipo. His three principal plays are Ọba Moro (1962), and Ọba Kò So and Ọba Wàjà, both 1964 8. Ọba Kò So, "the king did not hang", dramatises how Ṣàngó became the òrìṣà of thunder, and it received international acclaim at the first Commonwealth Arts Festival in 1965 and on a European tour 8. The three were published as Three Yoruba Plays in English adaptations by Ulli Beier for Mbari Publications in 1964 8.

Beier taught at the University of Ibadan and helped found the first Mbari Club there in 1961; inspired by it, Ladipo started the Mbari Mbayo Club at Òṣogbo and, with Beier's help, converted his father's house into an art gallery and theatre 8. That building is the institutional root of the Òṣogbo art movement, which is the same milieu that produced Susanne Wenger's work in the Ọ̀ṣun grove and Nike Davies-Okundaye's adìrẹ training.

Beier's role deserves a note rather than either celebration or dismissal. He was a European facilitator who provided platforms, publication, translation and international contacts to Yoruba artists who used them for their own ends. That is a real contribution and it also means a significant share of what reached the world as Yoruba modernism passed through one European editor's selection.

Kola Ogunmola, Elijah Kolawole Ogunmola, 11 November 1925 to 1973, dramatist, actor, mime, director and playwright, founded the Ogunmola Travelling Theatre around 1948 9. His adaptation of Amos Tutuola's The Palmwine Drinkard, in Yoruba as Ọmùtí, was first staged in 1963 at the Arts Theatre of the University of Ibadan with Ogunmola as Lanke, and was performed at the First Pan-African Cultural Congress in Algiers in 1969 9. It was published in 1968 by the Institute of African Studies at Ibadan, transcribed and translated by R. G. Armstrong, Robert L. Awujoola and Val Olayemi 9. Tutuola's novel was written in English by a Yoruba author drawing on Yoruba oral narrative; Ogunmola's adaptation returned it to Yoruba and to the stage, which is a round trip worth noticing.

Moses Olaiya Adejumo, Baba Sala, and his Alawada Theatre, brought comedy to the front of this tradition and were a bridge to the film era. Dates and details were not verified for this file and are not asserted.

Film, video and Nollywood

Celluloid. In the late 1970s Ogunde was spurred by the success of Ajani Ogun and Ija Ominira, the two pioneering Yoruba feature films, to co-produce his own first celluloid film, Aiye, released in 1979 with some sources giving 1980, inviting Ola Balogun to direct an adaptation of one of his own stage plays 7. Jaiyesimi followed in 1981, Aropin N'Tenia in 1982 and Ayanmo in 1988, all influenced by Yoruba metaphysics 7. The direct continuity is that Nigeria's first film industry was made by stage companies putting their existing repertoire on film.

The pivot to video. The celluloid period ran from the 1970s to the late 1980s and the video film industry emerged around 1988 to 1992, the boom generally credited to Kenneth Nnebue's Living in Bondage in 1992, directed by Chris Obi Rapu, shot on a VHS camcorder, released straight to video, produced for about 150,000 naira, roughly 12,000 US dollars at the time, and selling close to a million copies 10.

Living in Bondage is Igbo-language, not Yoruba, and this matters for an accurate account. The Yoruba travelling theatre had been making films for over a decade before it, so the Yoruba film tradition is older than Nollywood's usual origin story. What Living in Bondage established was the economic model: no cinema, no celluloid, no distributor, direct-to-cassette sale in the market at a price a mass audience could pay. That model then absorbed the Yoruba industry rather than creating it.

Tunde Kelani and Mainframe Films and Television Productions are the strongest case for continuity between the traditional material and the screen. Ṣaworoide (1999) is a political drama whose plot turns on a Yoruba norm in the town of Jogbo whereby a person cannot be crowned king unless the ṣaworo ide, the brass-jingle drum, is played by the right person 11. That is a film built on exactly the restricted-drum principle documented for gbẹ̀du: the instrument is a constitutional device, and whoever controls who may play it controls the succession. Its sequel is Agogo Èèwọ̀. Thunderbolt: Magun (2001) turns on the mágùn charm, following an Igbo and a Yoruba who meet during National Youth Service 11.

A Kelani Ṣàngó of 1997 is sometimes listed; the 1997 Ṣàngó film appears to be associated with Obafemi Lasode rather than Kelani, and neither attribution was confirmed for this file.

The current epic wave. Kunle Afolayan's Anikulapo (2022), a Nigerian epic fantasy distributed by Netflix, followed by Anikulapo: Rise of the Spectre 12. Femi Adebayo's Jagun Jagun, Bolanle Austen-Peters's House of Ga'a, and Lisabi: The Uprising, released on Netflix on 27 September 2024 with Lateef Adedimeji as executive producer 12. The cluster represents a shift toward epic historical storytelling in Yoruba-language cinema on international streaming platforms, drawing directly on the historical material covered in the history section.

Jonathan Haynes's Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres is the standard scholarly treatment of the industry and its genres 13.