A Critique of Yorùbá Judgment: Non-Western Performance Aesthetics and the Development of the Nigerian Stage

Abstract

Art historians have done extensive work explaining Yoruba systems of aesthetics, particularly with regard to the philosophy and practice of representation. Scholarship on Yoruba aesthetics has produced a series of questions surrounding the relationship of audience to representation, the relationship of representation to authority, and the fluidity, innate power, and interpretation of representation. This work, particularly the discussion of ase or the authority of art, has not become a regular part of discussions of African theatrical theory and practice: in point of fact, despite the work of Wole Soyinka, Margaret Drewal, Andrew Apter, Karin Barber, and others, a vast array of contemporary criticism on African theatre still uses Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud for theoretical grounding. Given that African writers are aware of Brecht and Artaud, and that the formal changes in theatre have a surface similarity to Brechtian alienation and Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, an understanding of contemporary Yoruba aesthetics can be found in the disjunctions and intersections between traditional Yoruba aesthetics and avant-garde Western theory. With recourse to Artaud’s discussion of Western modes of representation as a point of contrast, this article explains the explicitly political ramifications of alterations of traditional Yoruba aesthetics. In the Yoruba system, where representation is always an act of authority but also conceived as fluid, the avenues of resistance are less clear than in the Western system, where the authority of representation, generally conceived as stable, is present as an aftereffect in the audience. If one accepts the arguments of modernist Western theatrical practitioners such as Brecht, Artaud, Augusto Boal, and Jerzy Grotowski, the crisis point in Western aesthetics and its relationship to politics came early in the development of Western theatre. When Parmenides postulates that all being is unified, he effectively erases the possibility of representation. If that-which-is is and that-which-is is unified and unchanging, then there can be no divisions in the univocality that would allow man to intervene and create representations. Aristotle opens the possibility of an analogical world in which every being is related to that-which-is, but not part of the same being. The scholastics, humanists, and neoplatonists take this as a point of entry into their understanding of both metaphysics and representation, and thus,