Oral Literature as Repository for National Security Intelligence Gathering
Oral Literature as Repository for National Security Intelligence Gathering
Abstract
This article discursively examines one question: how does festival construct a
separate space outside the everyday? To be able to address this question, it
takes a chart across what constitutes everyday life, then explores the notion
festival as a theatrical form, and finally explores how festival operates to draw
distinction particularly spatial (and temporal) distinction - between itself and
everyday life. Methodologically, the paper is cast as a critical examination of
how festivals as theatrical forms are sites of distinctions from everyday
occurences, towards revealing the operational variations created in space and
time to achieve the transformation from everyday life to festival. The paper
draws theoretical insights from French philosopher, Henri Lefebvre
specifically his articulations in Critique of Everyday Life on the one hand, and
Wole Soyin
Theatre on the other in establishing the core requirements of the African
approach to festival space creation. The paper concludes that the festival
requires a particular form of intentionality or planning, elaborate or facile, to
effectively create a separate space outside the everyday. However, while this
intentionality in the occidental imagination comes with physical and timebound arrangements, in the traditional African creation of festival, the festival
is essential because in good measure, it is functional. While festival is
sometimes separable from the everyday functioning of society, it is oftentimes
realised within it or even transcends it into the existential sphere