Wole Soyinka Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by S. Beth Atkin

Page 3 of 7

Theater

You said that "Theater is more that text. Theater is the most revolutionary art form." What did you mean?

Simple, because it's so prone to self-transformation. It changes all the time. It responds to the atmosphere. There's a kind of dynamic quality about theater and that dynamic quality expresses itself in relation to, first of all, the environment in which it's being staged; then the audience, the nature of the audience, the quality of the audience. The space, the mutual space of interaction between audience and stage. And no two performances are ever the same. Theater can respond immediately. What I call "guerrilla theater" for instance, can respond immediately. Some people call it living theater, some people call it newspaper theater. Whatever it is, street theater, it can respond immediately to both events and the changing pattern of events. It responds to the dynamics of any situation.

It's the tension between the performers on stage and the audience watching, where the hope for some kind of a transformation comes about.

That nebulous territory which is constantly being traversed by lines of force from both sides. I think that's really what creates the magic of theater.

And for you, and let me quote you, you said that "Theater is the most social of the art forms." What did you mean by that?

Well, let's take a painting for instance.

You go into a gallery and you respond to the artworks in the gallery but it's one to one. Yes, you can discuss a painting with a nearby observer or afterwards. And that's quite normal, in that sense there's a social extension of this individual communication between a painting and an individual. A concert, the same thing happens. There's a kind of absorption by every individual on different levels of emotion in a response to a concert. But theater, because of its nature, both text, images, multimedia effects, has a wider base of communication with an audience. That's why I call it the most social of the various art forms.

You said earlier today in a talk with students on campus that you thought that community involvement was the place where theater could have its greatest social impact.

Yes, there's no question at all about that. I distinguish between the theater of socialization, relaxation, even of a quest for experience, for emotion, the kind of well-made theater, Broadway, West End, the completed work, with stars, and even with sparks of genius. Really a unique experience. I distinguish that from the theater which emerges from the community and is returned to the community, takes place within the community. There are various forms of that. There's is the kind of theater where a side of the community is encouraged to bring out its themes, and those themes are worked over either by a separate company or by a core company in relation to that community. Or the kind of theater which I describe as "guerrilla theater," which is a group which studies a situation within a community and responds to that situation, those anomalies, those problems, theatrically. Obviously that has greater transformational potential than, shall we say, the theater of Broadway.

Most recently you've been in Jamaica and you've been working with inner-city kids along the lines that we're talking about.

Yes. It is one of the happier experiences I've had since I went into exile. And it was a very creative process, a creative interlude, which I appreciated enormously and which had ramifications that I had not expected. I was going to direct The Beatification of Area Boy in Kingston, Jamaica, an opportunity at which I leapt because I know Kingston very well. I've taught at the university there periodically as a visitor. I had not, however, been aware of how really deeply, profound similarities there were between, shall we say, the deprived youth of, let us say, Lagos, and the deprived or inner-city youths of Kingston. And some of the things I did were very similar to what I used to do in Nigeria.

Take the kids, that was the basis of the foundation of Orisun Theater, which I've run for a number of years in Nigeria. I just took these kids, inexperienced, totally underprivileged, and extracted from them their hidden talents and turned them into my theater company. I did something similar in Kingston. We brought these kids and auditioned them and integrated them into the production of the The Beatification of Area Boy, increasing their roles. But in addition, they then reformed themselves into a group which they called the Area Boy Crew or Area Boy Company, and began to bring their own experiences from the ghettos, their difficulties. They had really horrendous lives. And [we began to] write little sketches about them which were then worked upon by a small team, The Company Ltd., it's called, headed by Sheila Graham. And eventually they built their own repertoire of sketches and songs depicting their lives and their hopes and ambitions, experiences. Entitled these, "Border Connections." And now they are a group unto themselves, they perform everywhere. They publish their own little magazine, a four page thing called Area Boy News with cartoons and so on. And I'm looking forward to going back on Sunday, to just interact with them again and see how they developed, and talk to them.

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