In his pioneering study of
Yoruba theatre, Joel Adedeji traced its origins to the
masquerade of the
Egungun (the "cult of the ancestor"). The traditional
rite is controlled exclusively by men and culminates in a masquerade in which ancestors return to the world of the living to visit their descendants. In addition to its origin in ritual, Yoruba theatre can be "traced to the 'theatrogenic' nature of a number of the deities in the
Yoruba pantheon, such as
Obatala the orisha of creation,
Ogun the orisha of creativeness and
Sango the orisha of lightning", whose worship is imbricated "with drama and theatre and their symbolic and psychological uses." The
Aláàrìnjó theatrical tradition sprang from the Egungun masquerade. The Aláàrìnjó were a troupe of traveling performers who were masked (as were the participants in the Egungun rite). They created short,
satirical scenes that drew on a number of established stereotypical characters. Their performances used
mime, music and
acrobatics. The Aláàrìnjó tradition influenced the
Yoruba Travelling Theatre, which was the most prevalent and highly developed form of theatre in
Nigeria from the 1950s to the 1980s. In the 1990s, the Yoruba travelling theatre moved into television and film and now gives live performances only rarely. "Total theatre" also developed in Nigeria in the 1950s. It used non-Naturalistic techniques,
surrealistic physical imagery, and exercised a flexibile use of language. Playwrights writing in the mid-1970s made use of some of these techniques, but articulated them with "a radical appreciation of the problems of society." Traditional performance modes have strongly influenced the major figures in contemporary Nigerian theatre. The work of Chief
Hubert Ogunde (sometimes referred to as the "father of contemporary Yoruban theatre") was informed by the Aláàrìnjó tradition and Egungun masquerades. He founded the first professional Nigerian theatre company in 1945 and served in many roles, including playwright, in both English and Yoruba.
Wole Soyinka is "generally recognized as Africa’s greatest living playwright" and was awarded the 1986
Nobel Prize in Literature. He writes in English, sometimes a Nigerian pidgin English, and his subjects (in both plays and novels) include a mixture of Western, traditional, and modern African elements. He gives the god Ogun a complex
metaphysical significance in his work. In his essay "The Fourth Stage" (1973), Soyinka argues that "no matter how strongly African authors call for an indigenous
tragic art form, they smuggle into their dramas, through the back door of formalistic and ideological predilections, typically conventional Western notions and practices of rendering historical events into tragedy." He contrasts Yoruba drama with
classical Athenian drama, relating both to the 19th-century German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche's analysis of the latter in
The Birth of Tragedy (1879). Ogun, he argues, is "a totality of the
Dionysian, Apollonian and
Promethean virtues." He develops an aesthetic of Yoruba tragedy based, in part, on the Yoruba
religious pantheon (including Ogun and Obatala).
Akinwunmi Isola was a popular novelist (beginning with
O Le Ku,
Heart-Rending Incidents, in 1974), playwright, screenwriter, film producer, and professor of the Yoruba language. His works include historical dramas and analyses of modern Yoruba novels. ==See also==