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13 Literacy, Improvisation, and the Virtual Script in Yoruba Popular Theatre Karin Barber Aspiration to the Condition of Writing In Africanist literary criticism, a faint aura of romanticism still lingers around the notion of “orality.” It is a highly value-charged term, one that can be accorded almost talismanic authority. Oral modes of expression, underlying and breaking through into anglophone or francophone written texts, are what is said to give such texts their distinctive Africanity. Eileen Julien has brilliantly exposed the tendency in francophone criticism to claim oral effects as a guarantee of “authenticity” (Julien 1992), and the same tendency can be seen in anglophone critical discourses. Orality is treated both as a source—the origin and precursor of “modern” literature—and as a resource—a rich heritage or fund of themes, motifs, images, and techniques upon which the “modern” author can draw. According to Abiola Irele, the “distinctive mark” of written African literature in European languages is “the striving to attain the condition of oral expression, even within the boundaries established by Western literary conventions ” (Irele 1990, 63). But Yorùbá popular itinerant theatre, which ®ourished in western Nigeria from the 1940s to the early 1990s, displayed exactly the opposite tendency. It was a form that in actual fact and practice appeared predominantly oral, in the sense that the plays were improvised, unscripted, and collectively produced by the collaborative interaction of performers with each other and with audiences, drawing on repertoires of accumulated idioms and strategies of characterization . But it aspired to the condition of writing and was deeply internally con-¤gured by this aspiration. The presence of literacy as a point of orientation in this theatre—in its organization, its preparation, and its actual performance— was much more than a polite bow in the direction of the better-educated. It was a clue to the project of the theatre and to the constitution of a whole ¤eld of popular Yorùbá cultural production of which the popular theatre was an important part. The Yorùbá “intermediate classes”—who are neither the mass of farmers nor the highly visible elite—are most often described by lists of occupations: tailors, bricklayers, motor mechanics, drivers, petty traders, clerks, primary-school teachers. In the colonial period and after, it was these categories of people—who were mobile, entrepreneurial, and struggling to better themselves—who created new genres of popular expression to speak of new experience. Almost all the genres they created were directly or indirectly associated with school education, the church, and “modernity.” All addressed larger, more anonymous, and often more dispersed publics than older genres such as masquerade, festival drama, and oral poetry. Circulating between live performance, electronic media, and print, themes and motifs gained wide dissemination in multiple forms. The popular theatre was a central site in these ¤elds of mutating discourse, feeding on histories, novels, newspapers, street talk, oral anecdotes, sermons, and tales for its sources and supplying magazines, television, records, radio, ¤lms, and video with materials to recirculate. The audiences that crowded to see them tended to be conversant with all of these discourses and would even supply suggestions and materials for their elaboration. Yorùbá Popular Theatre Yorùbá popular theatre’s starting point was in the church, where choirmasters and choirs collaborated to produce “native air operas”: sung dramas on biblical themes that were performed in the church itself and designed to attract converts and raise funds to build more churches. However, from the very beginning another cultural strand deriving from popular music and imported vaudeville shows was entwined with the biblical materials, and very quickly, groups of performers responded to a voracious audience demand for entertainment by moving into secular, folkloric, or contemporary themes and into secular performance venues such as town halls, hotels, and schools (Jeyifo 1984). By the 1970s, many of these groups were becoming fully professional, commercial touring theatres. By 1980, there were estimated to be over a hundred of them. The most popular played to large audiences wherever they went, at times ¤lling entire football stadiums. But in the mid-1980s, economic catastrophe and a growing preference for ¤lm and video began to undermine the live theatre, and by the early 1990s most of the theatre companies had more or less stopped performing on stage. Some closed down; the more successful or fortunate ones put their efforts into making ¤lms, video dramas, and television shows. The performances and conversations discussed here date from the high point of the theatre, the 1980s...

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