Duro Ladipo and Ritual Theatre
It is Wole Soyinka, significantly, who has most articulately grasped Duro Ladipo’s achievement in his fashioning of a new Yoruba operatic tradition. This is significant because although Soyinka and Ladipo were contemporaries, it is the former who has been more globally recognised as the postcolonial modernist hybrid, taking advantage of disparate traditions to form an avant-garde practice. This, one would imagine, is largely due to the fact that Soyinka has worked mostly in English; his work travels well; his themes seem to be familiar to Western audiences. Relatedly, because of his education and the trajectory of his career, Soyinka can be interpreted in dialogue with the tradition of European Modernism, regardless of whether he would entirely agree with this assessment or not. (Incidentally, Biodun Jeyifo in Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism (2004) has suggested that Soyinka’s reading of Duro Ladipo amounts to a meta-commentary on Soyinka’s own work.)
Soyinka establishes a difference between the ‘African world-view’ and the implied European world-view (similar to what Eliot calls ‘the temper of the age’ in ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’). Roughly speaking, God in the West is dead, and so is the sense of the sublime and of ritual; thus the death of tragedy and the need to create new forms out of the fragments of civilisation. Here is the cycle of Occidental intellectual history:
You must picture a steam-engine which shunts itself between rather closely-spaced suburban stations. At the first station it picks up a ballast of allegory, puffs into the next emitting a smokescreen on the eternal landscape of nature truths. At the next it loads up with a different species of logs which we shall call naturalist timber, puffs into a half-way stop where it fills up with the synthetic fuel of surrealism, from which point yet another holistic world-view is glimpsed and asserted through psychedelic smoke. A new consignment of absurdist coke lures it into the next station from which it departs giving off no smoke at all, and no fire, until it derails briefly along constructivist tracks and is towed back to the starting-point by a neo-classic engine.
This is not quite so in for example, Duro Ladipo’s Yoruba milieu, which is far from secular, and in which a communal and spiritual phenomenology is still general (as much now, arguably, as in the ‘60s and ‘70s). Soyinka’s contention is that ritual theatre, which Europe sporadically return to with its modernism (‘the search, even by modern European dramatists for ritualist roots from which to draw out visions of modern experience, is a clue to the deepseated need of creative man to recover this archetypal consciousness in the origins of the dramatic medium’), constitutes a kind of psychomachia, in which the tragic personages in the drama exist within a microcosm of the communities matrix of concerns and anxieties; in an almost expiatory role that constitutes ego death in the actor.
In Oba Koso, the tragedy of Oba Sango, gestured, danced and drummed out in a ‘poor theatre’ style that harkens back to the travelling theatre influence, is ‘not merely an interesting episode in the annals of a people’s history but the spiritual consolidation of the race through immersion in the poetry of origin.’ The plot: Sango is encouraged by his wives and vassals who stoke his ego, to manipulate two potential rivals, Timi and Gbonka to eliminate each other. Twice he tries and fails; the rivals unite and turn on him and he if forced into exile. In exile, his last remaining wife deserts him and he decides to hang himself. So the history goes; the mythology has it that he did not hang, and instead ascends to the heavens, disgusted with human fickleness, and in divine rage, punishes his enemies with fire and thunder from the skies. Thus, in his apotheosis, he comes to constitute a ritual cleansing of the pettiness of humanity; the actor in assuming the role of this god-king who is very much a Real Presence in the lives of the Yoruba (or Brazilian Candomble, or Cuban Santeria acolyte) risks divine possession. The lines between religious rite and performance are naturally blurred; the coherence of medium, idea and action constitute a kind of poetry with an objective correlative.
From the aforementioned Eliot essay:
The essential is to get upon the stage this precise statement of life which is at the same time a point of view, a world—a world which the author’s mind has subjected to a complete process of simplification. I do not find that any drama which “embodies a philosophy” of the author’s (like Faust) or which illustrates any social theory (like Shaw’s) can possibly fulfil the requirements—though a place might be left for Shaw if not for Goethe. And the world of Ibsen and the world of Chekhov are not enough simplified, universal.
If only Eliot, speaking in 1921, had waited for Duro Ladipo. Here was one who wrote his plays based on traditional oral sources, his natural absorption of the mytho-history of his people, blending his experience of church revues and moral plays, as well as Alarinjo Yoruba travelling theatre and masquerade; who wrote, directed, cast, produced and acted the part of the protagonist (who is both mythologically and dramatically the lifeblood of the play).
