Murray Edmond is Associate Professor of Drama at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. What different kinds of festival are to be found on the ever-expanding international circuit? What companies are invited or gatecrash the events? What is the role of festivals and festival-going in a global theatrical economy? In this article Murray Edmond describes three festivals which he attended in Poland in the summer of 2007 – the exemplary Malta Festival, held in Poznan the Warsaw Festival of Street Performance and the Brave Festival (‘Against Cultural Exile’) in Wroclaw – and through an analysis of specific events and productions suggests ways of distinguishing and assessing their aims, success, and role in what Barthes called the ‘special time’ which festivals have occupied since the Ancient Greeks dedicated such an occasion to Dionysus. The paper, therefore, submits that the Ikenge and Ifejioku festivals of Ossissa can be seen as complete drama just like any other Western dramatic forms. The study concludes that the African traditional performance mode is indigenous to African people and must not necessarily mirror the Western model. The findings of the study confirm that traditional African festivals are indeed dramatic performances. The study employs a field work-oriented methodology, involving participatory observation of the festivals, interviews, documentary analysis, audio records, and photographs of scenes and events. While the evolutionist school of thought argues that the traditional festivals are not drama but rituals, the relativist school claims that the traditional festivals in Africa can be considered as dramatic performances since most of the features of drama such as music and dance, audience participation, costumes, stage, etc., are present in the festival traditions. Based on this concept, Ruth Finnegan describes the indigenous festival traditions in Africa as “quasi-dramatic phenomena” that lack the Western dramatic structures. This controversy arose as a result of Aristotle’s concept of drama with its emphasis on imitation, plot, dialogue, conflict, etc. The study, which is a survey of the performance tradition, critically analyses the controversy surrounding the views of African dramatic scholars (the evolutionists and the relativists) on the question of what constitutes drama in the context of Nigerian traditional performances.
This paper evaluates the dramatic aesthetics of the Ikenge and Ifejioku festivals of Ossissa people of Ndokwa-East Local Government Area of Delta State, Nigeria.
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