From page to the stage: a choreographic analysis of Felix Akinsipe’s Struggling to Die

The juxtaposition of various artistic genres, ranging from the performative to the non-performative, to create an aesthetic whole is not novel in indigenous African society. This is evident in the artistic fusion of dance, mime, poetry, costume, sculpture, and other performative and visual arts in performance, and is a clear reference to the total theatre concept. However, postcolonial developments in contemporary African societies have fostered a new and compelling understanding of performance, which has led to a separation into three distinctive and often independent performative arts of dance, drama and music.

The situation then arose where dance which is considered to embody the idea of performance in indigenous African society lost its autochthonous articulacy in contemporary African performance, a point which is well noted in a 2001 co-authored paper with Sunday Ododo. At the heart of this 2001 paper is the understanding that, “even though, formal drama is considered younger than dance and music, drama often tries to force dance and music as artistic appendages to its own artistic expressions” (Ododo and Igweonu, 2001: 51). However, the paper goes on to argue that dance experiments and productions at the University of Ilorin are specifically geared towards re/asserting the position of contemporary African dance as a distinct artistic genre that has potentials, not just for spectacle, but as a perfect tool for didactics as is the case with performance in indigenous African society.