Introduction
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, known as Wole Soyinka, is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first sub-Saharan African to be honored in that category. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta.
A Dance of the Forests is one of the most recognized of Wole Soyinka's plays. The play "was presented at the Nigerian Independence celebrations in 1960, it denigrated the glorious African past and warned Nigerians and all Africans that their energies henceforth should be spent trying to avoid repeating the mistakes that have already been made. At the time of its release, it was an iconoclastic work that angered many of the elite in Soyinka's native Nigeria. Politicians were particularly incensed at his prescient portrayal of post-colonial Nigerian politics as aimless and corrupt. Despite the deluge of criticism, the play remains an influential work. In it, Soyinka espouses a unique vision for a new Africa, one that is able to forge a new identity free from the influence of European imperialism.
A Dance of the Forests is regarded as Soyinka's theatrical debut and has been considered the most complex and difficult to understand of his plays. In it, Soyinka unveils the rotten aspects of society and demonstrates that the past is no better than the present when it comes to the seamy side of life. He lays bare the fabric of the Nigerian society and warns people as they are on the brink of a new stage in their history: independence.
1. Past – present- future –
inter-connected (with reference to A Dance of the Forests)
A Dance in the Forests is an ‘atmosphere’ play that makes it rather difficult to understand textually. And like the other two atmosphere plays I have reviewed The Road and Madmen and Specialists, it is also heavily based on Yoruba mythology. In addition, the play incorporates many characters, some of which have a dual role as one section of the play is set in the past, at the court of Mata Kharibu, with these said characters acting a previous incarnation of themselves. There is a sense of timelessness within the play, between the present and the past, and the ever-present Dead Man and Dead Woman throughout time. There is also a sense of the ethereal in the interplay between the living, the dead, and the demigods. Clearly, there is a lot happening in a short span.
As an atmosphere play, there is no discernable plot. We are left with the characters and their motives, not all of which are clear in this jumble of activity. Yet for all its non-typical attributes, there is much to admire in the setup and the traditions and the myths. I feel Soyinka was aiming for a surreal journey where time and space are nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. And I can certainly see this pulled off with the right stage and direction and, possibly, an immersive setup. The ritual dances, the masks, the sudden bursts of energy would all go a long way in making it a unique experience.
Enter the beaters shouting. The flogger immediately breaks through them and sets out to clear a space with his long whip, which he freely exercises. The dancer follows almost at once, followed by his acolyte (a very intense young girl). She sprinkles the cleared space after the flogger. The dirge-man begins to recite within a few minutes of their entry. An assistant hands Agboreko the divination board, the bowl and kernels.]
Dirge-man: Move on eyah! Move apart
I felt the wind breathe—no more
Keep away now. Leave the dead
Some room to dance.
If you see the banana leaf
Freshly fibrous like a woman’s breasts
If you see the banana leaf
Shred itself, thread on thread
Hang wet as the crêpe of grief
Don’t say it’s the wind. Leave the dead
Some room to dance.
The mythology, as in many of Soyinka’s plays, centers around Ogun—the patron deity of poets and warriors, the god of creativeness and destructiveness. The play deals with the envy of a carver, Demoke, who is carving a giant silk-cotton tree into a totem for the festival of the gathering of the tribes in the forest; his fear of heights prevents him from reaching the top, however, Demoke’s apprentice, Oremole, climbs higher than he and in a fit of jealousy Demoke sends Oremole tumbling down to his death before lopping off the top of the tree. Demoke offends the deity Eshuoro of whom Oremole was a follower. So begins the rivalry between Ogun (Demoke’s deity) and Eshuoro, and the referee Forest Head.
Demoke: Envy, but not form prowess of his adze.
The world knew of Demoke, son and son to carvers;
Master of wood, shaper of iron, servant of Ogun,
Slave, alas, to height, and the tapered end
Of the silk cotton tree. Oremole
My bonded man, whetted the blades,
Lit the fires to forge Demoke’s tool.
And now he sat above my head, carving at the head
While I crouched below him, nibbling hairs
Off the chest of araba, king among the trees.
So far could I climb, one reach higher
And the world was beaten like an egg and I
Clasped the tree-hulk like a lover.
Thrice I said I’ll cut it down, thread it,
Stride it prostate, mould and master araba
Below the knee, shave and scrape him clean
On the head. But thrice Oremole, slave,
Server to Eshuoro laughed! ‘Let me anoint
The head, and do you, my master, trim the bulge
Of his great bottom.’ The squirrel who dances on
A broken branch, must watch whose jaws are open
Down below.
The focus tends to shift though from Demoke and his crime, to the confrontation between Ogun and Eshuoro, and to the Dead Man and Dead Woman who have been wronged in Mata Kharibu’s court (a shift to the past that helps explain the history between the characters living and dead), all of which indicates a build up to a natural catharsis—redemption—which never transpires. Instead, the play culminates in Demoke being the pawn of the deities and the sorrow of the Dead Woman. The resolution is unclear.
I state once again that in performance, the atmosphere, fluidity of movement and action, would indeed part a certain, unique experience. Or as Osofian adequately sums it up:
It was easy naturally to dissolve the fears of those who had only previously encountered the play in print, and concluded from their reading that the play was totally inaccessible. Even my cast began from such prejudices, until the play asserted its histrionic power, and surprised them with the richness of its theatrical possibilities. Soyinka is not made for reading, but for staging, for performance.
Thanks😊
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