LARGER THAN HIS FRAME:
Critical Studies & Reflections on Olu Obafemi

Edited by

Duro Oni
Sunday Enessi Ododo

@2000

CENTRE FOR BLACK AND AFRICAN ARTS & CIVILIZATION 

Ten
The Communicative Indices of Dance 
in Drama Production: A 
Choreographic Approach to 
Olu Obafemi's Plays
Felix A. Akinsipe
Introduction
Although dance and drama are two separate and independent media of communication in the theatre, they have both been used very often together as supportive of one another to enhance the communication process of a performance in the theatre. It should be noted that dance need not be used within a dramatic work at all. There are straight plays and pure drama where dance/music does not feature.
Therefore, if dance is to be used in a dramatic production, there are three fundamental levels in which it can be used. These include using it along with drama and music as a total theatre on one level where dance shares equal usage and space as drama and other arts of the theatre employed. In this case, dance is used as an independent and communicative medium on its own within the dramatic piece. Dance can still be used as a total theatre without being on an equal plane with drama or other arts of the theatre but it is built into the plot structure in such a way that, like the first instance given above, it becomes inseparable from the work. An attempt to remove the dances or play down on them, will therefore affect the understanding and message of the play. The third level is the use of dance as supportive/embellishment to the dramatic work in such a way that its removal, for whatever reason, may not have any particular effect on the understanding or appraisal of the dramatic work. Thus many playwrights and dramatists have used dance to a large extent, in their dramatic works to enhance and to achieve various effects 
and results, most especially, contemporary African playwrights and dramatists. The use of music (instrumental and vocal) in a dramatic piece has in most cases, automatically brought dance into use in such works. This is because in Africa
dancing takes place in a great number of musical occasions. While music can and is often performed on its own, dance rarely occurs without music (Euba, 1982:223).
Olu Obafemi is one of the many contemporary Nigerian playwrights and dramatists who have employed the use of dance, in various ways in their dramatic works. This essay examines the use of dance with mime and pantomime in the plays of Olu Obafemi with the main objective of providing the choreographic approaches a choreographer may employ towards realising the suggested dances in these plays to make them relevant and communicative.
The three plays in the Collected Plays of Olu Obafemi (1) (1993), "Nights of a Mystical Beast", "The New Dawn" and "Suicide Syndrome" are used for our discussions in this essay. These three "plays adequately represent his use of dance in his other works. The essay concludes that like most contemporary Nigerian playwrights, Olu Obafemi belongs to the category of playwrights who use dance more as an aesthetic feature in their works with considerable dependence on mime and pantomime. This usage of course calls for the input of an experienced and a highly creative choreographer to make them communicate effectively and meaningfully in his plays. We shall now take a general look at the communicative abilities of dance in dramatic productions before focusing on Olu Obafemi's use of them in his works.
The Communicative Impact of Dance in Dramatic Productions
The essence of dance is expression. It is a powerful and probably, the most natural way of expressing deep internal feelings which words may not adequately convey. Human movements are not usually aimless:
Man moves in order to satisfy a need. He aims by his movement at something of value to him. It is easy to perceive the aim of a person's movement if it is directed to some tangible object. Yet, there also exist intangible values that inspire movement. (Laban, 1972:72).
Therefore, one usually dances as an expression of his (inner or outer) feeling, mood or instinct. This expression is what is in turn

communicated to the audience in the theatre. It is said that:
The prime function of ballet as we customarily know it... is either to tell a story, put across a point of view.or express feeling or mood-picture. It can also be a combination of any or all of these functions and it very often is. (Woodward, 1977:21)
Dance has remained a powerful medium communicating within and outside the theatre. Dance in the theatre apart from communicating on its own, in pure dance performances like ballet, modern dance, post-modern dance, etc. is also able to communicate when integrated with any other performance art. Dance can be used, within a dramatic production to put across series of ideas ranging from complex situations, actions, messages to the seemingly simple expression of the integral beauty of dance itself.
As a theatre language, dance can also be used to reinforce stage spectacle while communicating in movements that the audience can easily relate to within a given geographical region. It can thus be effectively used to enliven a dense situation, draw more attention to the play and/or sustain the audience's interest: "In artistic terms, «~dance increases the concentration of the audience on the performer. By gathering cosmic energy dance creates a channel of transition" (Enekwe, 1991:14).
Dance can also be most effectively used in creating mystical characters in a dramatic production. Therefore, with relevant movements and technical aids, the establishment of mood, theme, atmosphere and characterisation in a play can be successfully achieved through dance. Laban (1972:73) maintains that "a character, an atmosphere, a state of mind, or a situation cannot be effectively shown on the stage without movement, and its inherent expressiveness".
Dance can also be used to manage time in a dramatic production. Actions that tend to take too long can be captured briefly in dance. The dynamic nature of dance makes it possible, sometimes, to pass a message across in a shortest possible time because movement can "convey sophisticated meaning in a more compact and rapid manner than speech" (Enekwe, 1991:11). Similarly, dance can be used to extend or enlarge a rather short play performance.
It is against this background that this essay now examines the use of dance/mime/pantomime in Olu Obafemi's plays.
Mime, Pantomime, and Dance in Obafemi's Plays
Mime and pantomime are established forms of entertainment in the theatre. Mime, which is said to have its origin in Greece and Rome

had been established as a traditional feature in the annual floralia festival in Rome before the birth of Christ.
Through the ages, mime has come to be recognised as a
purely silent art, where meanings were conveyed solely through gesture, movement and expression — an art where emotion and dramatic action was expressed solely by the use of face, the limbs, and the body. (Woodward, 1977:61).
Over the years, in Italy, mime became the main feature of their major form of entertainment called the commedia dell' Arte (or Italian improvised comedy) of which the English equivalent is the pantomime (Woodward, 1977:62-63).
When mime found its way into the ballet, it gave the dancers another opportunity of expressing themselves in 'dramatic terms' because its act came close to the dance form. However, in modern ballets and today, the use of classical mime has been dropped and great distinction made between dance and mime. Dancing is not the same as miming and miming is not dancing.
In Olu Obafemi's plays, one can identify two forms of mime and pantomime. The first is the direct use of mime and pantomime, while the second is the indirect use of mime and pantomime. In Nights of a Mystical Beast, the very first part opens with a direct use of pantomime/mime:
A scene played in pantomime with a raconteur narrator speaking the lines of the actions in performance in timed rhythms .. the mime shows a high-priest receiving offerings from ... (p. 7).
A similar thing is found in The New Dawn, the mime is done to a song:
This short chorus should be repeated many times as work song as he proceeds with the day's job. He moves to the felled palm tree. Improvise, and mime all the movements. He trips but balances, (emphasis mine) (p. 60)
Also in Suicide Syndrome we have...
A movement of silence followed by a macabre dance. The DIRECTOR'S voice over loud speaker, lead in the characters in the dance who come in from back stage through an opening up stage right. They are costumed and act according to the description of the voice before joining the dance round the hanging figure, (p. 83)
The action described above is a combination of direct and indirect use of mime as each character comes in and acts according to the
description of the voice the character is miming. However, he joins tin- dance round the hanging figure after his mime and this is also repeated by the next character.
This is an indirect use of mime/pantomime, a situation which would have been difficult to achieve in pure dance to the words of a narrator:
... A woman crashing under the burden of assistance Men maimed and mangled Men physically disabled and mentally disparaged people turning to kainkain (local gin) or to cocaine people prostituting themselves people robbing; people killing ...  (p.83)
There are other indirect usage of mime in the plays. Some are not through miming per se but through dancing to a narrator's speech or to songs. This is a situation where the lyrics of the songs must be strictly followed. Such actions/movements invariably lead to miming
because
Dances that are to be motivated by songs have the tendency to be mimetic, such dance tend to make use of gestures to dramatize the text content of the songs. Movements, however conform to the rhythmic beat of the song. (Ugolo, 1997:183-184)
In Olu Obafemi's plays, there are instances where the author suggests that the movements must conform with some particular actions. In Niglits of a Mystical Beast, we have this example:
At this point, a song is raised to deride the lazy folks at the prompting of an intruding loafer... the last line should be well portrayed with the l)iittoeks rlu/tliinically raised up many tunes... (p. 8) (my emphasis)
Talking about the use of dance in Olu obafetni's plays, it will be discovered that his plays are full of dances that merely accompany music. I'he dances are in most cases stimulated by the natural instinct of Africans to want to dance when music is played. This is why Ugolo (1997: ISO) considers dance as "a reflection of the social dynamics of. music1"
In Nights of a Mystical Beast, for instance, the Cripple in self pity
...  pats the blindman and they start singing

Olowo laiye mo
Oluwa temi dowore
Gbogbo lala eda
Nitori owo ni
Wa fun wa lowo
Ka wa na ko petesi
Ko si fona han wa
Ka wa na ra moto
(they dance and the friends warm up to it and join in ... (p. 18)
Also in The New Dawn we have Dele, Tayo, Funke and Aina dancing in with the Oro chorus
Ore re tigo Oba rere A ho in bo
repeated time and again (p. 61)
We also have many scenes ending in singing and dancing. In fact, all the three plays end this way with the actors and actresses singing and dancing into the audience. Many of the dances are not therefore built into the thematic/plot structure of the plays. In other words, if the dances are removed they will not affect the play in any fundamental way. The plays will still be perfectly understood and interesting. No part of the message will be lost at all. Dance is therefore highly supplementary and subordinate to drama in Olu Obafemi's plays.
Olu Obafemi's use of dance which is described by Oloruntoba-Oju as 'occasional' and in 'flashes' could however be purposeful
on the part of the playwright which is dictated by the principles of the proletarian theatre. As Director in Suicide Syndrome explains in respect of that play, Obafemi's dramaturgy 'is no entertainment of the kind you are used to'. (Oloruntoba-Oju, 1998:111).
In other words, as an emergent playwright whose theatre thrives on 'direct action which would translate to direct intervention in the class struggle as well as direct presentation and language', the introduction of sophisticated dances may constitute a distraction.-
Choreographic Approach
Despite the fact that the use of dance is not too pronounced in Olu Obafemi's plays, the few suggested ones must be handled by a seasoned choreographer to make them more effective in performance. Attempts will be made here to give several ways (choreographic approaches) a choreographer may take in realising

the suggested dances in the plays under consideration.
There are five basic apprbaches that can be used. The first is the lyrical/literal approach which gives the opportunity to make dance movements express exactly (and literally) what the lines (of a narrator) or lyrics of a song or poem are saying. This shows that all the lines that are suggestive of movements discussed earlier in this essay can be realised beautifully by interpreting them into dance literally.
Another approach is the concept and theme approach which provides the choreographer the opportunity to create for the concept or theme of a particular scene or situation where the dance is to take place within a dramatic piece. The approach comes into use when the script is not prescriptive of particular movements to be used.
The mood approach which is realised through the breaking down of the story or situation into sequences and identifying the different moods which are then developed through dance movements is also an alternative (Ugolo, 1998:7). The mood approach enables the choreographer to use his inner resources.
—. The rhythmic/instrumental approach is yet another. Here, the choreographer identifies the rhythm of a song/instrumentation through meter and he develops movements to suit the rhythmic beats rather than the lyrics of the lines (Ugolo, 1998:7).
Finally, the abstract approach can also be very effective in realising dances on stage. A dance is said to be abstract
when the dance creator has abstracted some ideas about a particular object or a group of objects or when for example he has abstracted some thoughts about a natural phenomenon (e.g. moon, sun, rain, etc.) and he is now transmitting these objects or natural phenomenon through movement image that resemble them (Bakare, 1994:5).
Although all the above approaches can be applied to each of the plays of Olu Obafemi, but some are more suitable to some dance situations than the others. The lyrical/literal approach definitely cuts across all the plays because of the mimes/pantomimes and the dances that need to reflect exactly what the songs/speeches are saying.
However the concept/theme approach is the best for the dances in The New Dawn. This is because the suggested dances in the play have to be relevant to the subject matter of many of the scenes/situations. (See, for example, the suggested dance on p. 56.) The use of instrumental or mood approach in this particular play will make the dances too abstract and this may be distracting to the overall message of the play. This is because the dances will only be a reflection of the mood or in response to the instrumentation. It will not interpret the story in the play.
The abstract approach will be more effective in the Nights of a Mystical Beast. By this approach, the choreographer will be free to take the actions into abstraction. He can then create movements that are colourful and mind-tasking. This will in no small measure contribute to the aesthetic beauty of the play. This approach becomes more suitable because most of the suggested dances in this play, merely, accompany songs (see pp.16,18 and 29).
As for Suicide Syndrome, the lyrical approach will do as there are few dances in the play and the general mood of the play is sombre. The lyrical approach therefore enables the choreographer to interpret the actions without causing any distraction to the tempo and flow of the actions. Mama's song on p. 85 is a good example here.
Conclusion
We have tried in this essay, to examine the use of dance with mime and pantomime by Olu Obafemi in his plays vis-a-vis the roles of dance in a dramatic production. We also went further to suggest various approaches to help choreographers in working on Olu Obafemi's plays. Our conclusion is that choreographing for Olu Obafemi's plays may pose some challenges to a choreographer because of his method of writing which utilises dance more as an aesthetic feature while emphasising mime and pantomime. Despite this, the innovative choreographer can make meaningful contributions to the interpretation of the play.

References
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Kuba, Akin. 1982. "Introduction to music in Africa." In: African History and Culture. Richard Olaniyan (ed.), pp. 224-235. Lagos: Longman Group Limited. 
Knekwe, OnuoraOssic. 1991. Theories of Dance inNigeria:Aji Introduction. Nsukka: Afa Press. 
Laban, Rudolf. 1972. "Movement, Dance and Dramatic Expression." In: The Uses of Drama-Acting as a Social and Educational Force, John. Hodgson (ed.), pp. 71—83. London: Eyre Methuen. 
Obafemi, Olu. 1993. Collected Plays of Olu Obafemi (1). Ilorin: Joe-Noye Associate Press (Nig) Ltd. 
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