Paper short abstract:

The powerful presence of the theatricalised post-colonial body, despite (and sometimes even because of) its derogations, suggests that foregrounding corporeality can be a highly positive, active strategy for staging resistance to imperialism

Paper long abstract:

The powerful presence of the theatricalised post-colonial body, despite (and sometimes even because of) its derogations, suggests that foregrounding corporeality can be a highly positive, active strategy for staging resistance to imperialism. Traditional enactments such as ritual and carnival demonstrate that the performing body can help to regenerate and unify communities despite the disabilities, disintegrations, and specific disconnections of the individual bodies involved. Ritual renders the body open and mutable while often requiring or producing highly formalised actions, such as dance or professional movement, which display the ritual force as energy in action. Theatrical practice can translate the principles of ritual movement into a strongly physical interpretation of a role. What we intend to show in this study is that as a culturally coded activity, dance has a number of important functions in drama: not only does it concentrate the audience's gaze on the performing body/bodies, but it also draws attention to proxemic relations between characters, spectators, and features of the set. Splitting the focus from other sorts of proxemic and kinesic - and potentially, linguistic - codes, dance renegotiates dramatic action and dramatic activity, reinforcing the actor's corporeality, particularly when it is culturally laden. Wole Soyinka's plays, our raw material, abound in bodies and voices, in spectacle and movement and colour; in multiple settings, flashbacks and dramatic re-enactments