Ghana's Concert Party Theatre

Improvising Popular Traveling Theatre

104 Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre Improvising Popular Traveling Theatre THE POETICS OF INVENTION 5 Concert parties occupy a nebulous position in Ghana’s cultural hierarchy. Lacking the prestige of scripted dramas written in English and the “authenticity” of so-called traditional cultural practices such as odwira festivals or adowa dancing, concert parties fall into that vast, amorphous terrain of African popular culture that has fallen outside the purview of dominant cultural paradigms (Barber 1987, 1997). The concert party’s historical roots in cultural syncretism are in part responsible for its ambivalent status. Shows of the 1930s and 1940s, much more so than those of subsequent decades, drew liberally upon Western sources. They featured plot scenarios from American films such as Sonny Boy and On with the Show; foreign dance steps such as the waltz, quickstep, and foxtrot; and songs such as “Stormy Weather” and “Don’t Fence Me In.” Some observers point to this history as evidence that the concert party began as a merely derivative performance form, a pale imitation of Western vaudeville, far too hybrid to be considered genuinely African. The concert party’s ancestry is certainly complex and heterogeneous. Yet, as I will argue in this chapter, the creative ethos from which it springs has deep roots in Akan culture. While concerts were a novel innovation of the twentieth century, they utilized techniques of creativity well-established in traditional Akan performing arts such as festivals and storytelling. Akan festivals have certain key structural elements that are always repeated. However, every expression of a set of patterns always involves “the principle of variation to greater or lesser de- Improvising Popular Traveling Theatre 105 grees,” according to art historian Herbert M. Cole (1975, 22). “No two chiefs or priests dress or embellish themselves identically nor do their entourages include exactly the same numbers of people or the same decorations” (22). This principle of repetition and revision so central to Akan festivals, storytelling, and proverb usage is also fundamental to the creative process of making a concert party. A related dimension of Akan artistry that concerts share with “traditional” cultural practices is the high value placed on performance, on the imagination and skill with which individuals embody ideas and enact them in front of spectators . Akan notions of performance are not bounded by proscenium staging or particular venues labeled as “theatre.” For instance, when concert actors on trek in the 1930s would arrive at a new town and parade through the streets wearing straw hats, they were purposefully performing a role, just as they would later in the day when they staged their show “on the platform.”1 In the folktale of Tortoise and Monkey analyzed in the previous chapter, Tortoise uses his ability to act, to role play and persuade through embodied simulation, in order to both dupe Vulture into carrying him up to the trees and to trick Monkey into assisting him down to the ground again. Proverbs, another “traditional” Akan performance genre, achieve meaning not merely through words but also through the poetry of action: a speaker’s style of communication, use of tone, elision, paraphrasing, and personalization (Yankah 1989b, 247–260). Whether one is invoking a proverb, telling anAnanse tale, or assuming a role for strategic purposes, performances within Akan culture are as likely to be impromptu , constituted in the everyday interactions of social life, as they are to be planned and circumscribed by temporal and spatial markers framing the event as extraordinary. For instance, proverbs can be spontaneously invoked during court proceedings, domestic quarrels, and informal conversations among friends and acquaintances. Similarly, an incident in daily life can trigger an ananses3m, especially if the storyteller wishes to communicate indirectly a message to the listener . Once while I was waiting at an electronics shop in Osu for my tape machine to be repaired, everyone in the shop gathered around the doorway to watch a young woman try to coax a drunk relative back into the family compound. The intoxicated aunt was verbally abusive and uncooperative, which provoked commentary and laughter among spectators. One person in the shop remarked, “3n3 concetfoc aba!” or “Today the concert people have come.” Everyone nodded in assent. The scene was not merely like a concert party, it was a concert party inasmuch as it incorporated the same domestic conflicts and dynamics of audience commentary and interaction that one finds at commercial concert events. Akan understandings of performance are far more fluid and dynamic than bounded Western definitions of...