Download Free The Development Of African Drama Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Development Of African Drama and write the review.

Originally published in 1982, this book explores concepts such as ‘traditional performance’ and African theatre’. It analyses the links between drama and ritual, and drama and music and diagnoses the confusions in our thought. The reader is reminded that drama is never merely the printed word, but that its existence as literature and in performance is necessarily different. The analysis shows that literature tends to replace performance; and drama, removed from the popular domain, becomes elitist. The book’s richness lies in the constantly stimulating analysis of ‘art’ theatre, as exemplified in protest plays, in African adaptations and transpositions of such classical subjects as the Bacchae and Everyman, in plays on African history, on colonialism and neo-colonialism. The final chapters argue that the form of African drama needs to evolve as the content does.
In this collection of essays written from different critical perspectives, African playwrights demonstrate through their art that they are not only witnesses, but also consciences, of their societies.
Trends in Twenty-First Century African Theatre and Performance is a collection of regionally focused articles on African theatre and performance. The volume provides a broad exploration of the current state of African theatre and performance and considers the directions they are taking in the 21st Century. It contains sections on current trends in theatre and performance studies, on applied/community theatre and on playwrights. The chapters have evolved out of a working group process, in which papers were submitted to peer-group scrutiny over a period of four years, at four international conferences. The book will be particularly useful as a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in non-western theatre and performance (where this includes African theatre and performance), and would be a very useful resource for theatre scholars and anyone interested in African performance forms and cultures.
Fémi Òsófisan is a major dramatist from Nigeria who experiments with forms and theatrical traditions. This book focuses on his development as a dramatist and his contribution to world drama as a postcolonial African writer whose major preoccupation has been to question the colonial and postcolonial issues of identity in theatre, literature and performance. The volume explores how Òsófisan exploits his Yorùbá heritage in his drama and the performances of his plays by reading new meanings into popular mythology, and by re-writing history to comment on contemporary social and political issues. Òsófisan has often introduced new motifs and narratives to energise dramatic performances in Nigeria and globally, and this text discusses developments in his theatre practices in the context of changing cultural trends.
This book aims to offer a broad history of theatre in Africa. The roots of African theatre are ancient and complex and lie in areas of community festival, seasonal rhythm and religious ritual, as well as in the work of popular entertainers and storytellers. Since the 1950s, in a movement that has paralleled the political emancipation of so much of the continent, there has also grown a theatre that comments back from the colonized world to the world of the colonists and explores its own cultural, political and linguistic identity. A History of Theatre in Africa offers a comprehensive, yet accessible, account of this long and varied chronicle, written by a team of scholars in the field. Chapters include an examination of the concepts of 'history' and 'theatre'; North Africa; Francophone theatre; Anglophone West Africa; East Africa; Southern Africa; Lusophone African theatre; Mauritius and Reunion; and the African diaspora.
Presents eight twentieth-century plays from seven African countries, along with explanatory notes and over thirty background writings and works of criticism.
"In spite of the rich repertoire of artistic traditions in Southern Africa, particularly in the areas of drama, theatre and performance, there seems to be a lack of a corresponding robust academic engagement with these subjects. While it can be said that some of the racial groups in the region have received substantial attention in terms of scholarly discussions of their drama and theatre performances, the same cannot be said of the black African racial group. As such, this collection of twelve chapters represents a compendium of critical and intellectual discourses on black African drama, theatre and performance in Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, and Swaziland. The topics covered in the book include, amongst others, ritual practices, interventionist approaches to drama, textual analyses, and the funeral rites (viewed as performance) of the South African liberation icon Nelson Mandela. The discussions are rooted mainly using African paradigms that are relevant to the context of African cultural production. The contributions here add to the aggregate knowledge economy of Southern Africa, promote research and publication, and provide reading materials for university students specialising in the performing arts. As such, the book will appeal to academics, theatre scholars, cultural workers and arts administrators, arts practitioners and entrepreneurs, the tourism industry, arts educators, and development communication experts."
African popular theater includes conventional drama plus such nonliterary performance as dance, mime, storytelling, masquerades, vaudeville, improvization, & the theater of social action & resistance. Media such as radio, film, & television are included.
Generating a new understanding of the past—as well as a vision for the future—this path-breaking volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre as it is practiced today.Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the community; in Paul Carter Harrison's words, it "reveals the Form of Things Unknown" in a way that "binds, cleanses, and heals."