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CONTINGENCIES OF PERFORMANCE: THE GAP AS VENUE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2009

Tejúmólá Ọláníyan
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Extract

Anyone who has staged a show has an idea of the numberless odd things that can go wrong. We expect, of course, that they will go right. From experience and knowledge, we can conceive the contingencies in categories; they range from the personal to the institutional and the natural (as in a force of nature). Contingencies of performance are the many variables that could impact performance in any number of ways, mostly unforeseen, and even if foreseen, mostly unpredictable in effect. Of course, contingency factors are time and space dependent, as what is contingent in one context or time may be completely under control in another context or time. We need to conceive of performance as fundamentally “a changing function of multiple variables,” as Barbara H. Smith once said of value. This changing function is a concept we need to hold tightly as we navigate common challenges of performance: What is our purpose or goal? What should we perform? What are the mechanics of the performance? Where should we perform? When? And for whom? These challenges are theoretically of indeterminate and indeterminable chronological sequence, and beginning from and working diligently through any one of them is bound to lead us into the others.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 50 , Special Issue 1: African and Afro-Caribbean Performance , May 2009 , pp. 23 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2009

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References

Endnotes

1. Smith, Barbara H., Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 10Google Scholar.

2. The question “What is our purpose or goal?” for instance, has been made particularly preeminent by distinguished director and theorist Herbert Blau. His particular phrase is “What are we performing for?” “Universals of Performance; or, Amortizing Play,” SubStance 11.4 (1983): 140–61, at 152 (Blau's emphasis). To take the question seriously is to implicate both the means and ends of performance and therefore the relations between and among performers, performance, and audience in space and time.

3. McKenzie, Jon, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001), iGoogle Scholar.

4. “The Fourth Stage (Through the Mysteries of Ògun to the Origin of Yorùbá Tragedy)” appears in Soyinka, , Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 140–60Google Scholar.

5. Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920; New York: W. W. Norton, 1990)Google Scholar.

6. Blau, Herbert, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 8Google Scholar.

7. Spolsky, Ellen, Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 209Google Scholar n. 1 (Spolsky's emphasis).

8. Ibid., 2.

9. See Agovi, Kofi E., “The African Writer and the Phenomenon of the Nation State in Africa,” Ufahamu 18.1 (1990): 41–62Google Scholar; and Mutiso, Gideon-Cyrus Makau, Socio-Political Thought in African Literature (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974)Google Scholar.

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13. Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Farrington, Constance (1961; New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963), 149–50Google Scholar, 152–3, 163.

14. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Moore, Samuel (1888; London: Penguin, 1967), 83, 85Google Scholar.

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16. Ibid., 82.

17. Fanon, 163.

18. Sembène, Ousmane, Xala (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1973)Google Scholar. English edition: Xala, trans. Clive Wake (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1976). The film was released in 1975 both at the Moscow Film Festival and in New York City.

19. First published in Gĩkũyũ as Thiong'o, Ngũgĩ wa, Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ (Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Books [East Africa] Ltd.), 1980)Google Scholar; translated by the author as Devil on the Cross (London, Heinemann, 1982; repr. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books, 1987).

20. Fanon, 227.

21. Bhabha, Homi K., “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817,” in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 102–22Google Scholar. This essay was originally published in Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 144–65.

22. Ibid., 108–9.

23. Ibid., 112.

24. Osofisan, Femi, “Beyond Translation: A Comparative Look at Tragic Paradigms and the Dramaturgy of Wole Soyinka and Ola Rotimi,” in Osofisan, Femi, The Nostalgic Drum: Essays on Literature, Drama and Culture (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001), 55–90Google Scholar, at 55–6.

25. Femi Osofisan, “Ritual and the Revolutionary Ethos: The Humanistic Dilemma in Contemporary Nigerian Theater,” in Osofisan, Nostalgic Drum, 91–104, at 99.

26. Olaniyan, Tejumola, “Femi Osofisan: The Form of Uncommon Sense,” Research in African Literatures 30.4 (Winter 1999): 74–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. For a perceptive scholarly introduction to Femi Osofisan, see Richards, Sandra L., Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre of Femi Osofisan (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

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