Performance Contexts of Rituals in Transition: The Ikeji Masquerade Festival of Arondizuogu as Paradigm

Abstract

This study is predicated on Harrison’s (1913) view that “when ritual wanes, art waxes”. It is therefore an attempt to record and study the Ikeji Masquerade Festival of Arondizuogu of South East Nigeria in order to discover the relationship between tradition and talent as well as how a communal ritual performance can transmute into individual aesthetics and mercantile art. With the negative connotations of the word “Ritual” among the unenlightened, it has become pertinent to conduct a study into ritual performances so as to dispel these untoward cleavages as well as tap into the healing and expiating values of ritual. Ritual performances may therefore provide answers to the ongoing investigations into “theatre as therapy” which the French man Antonin Artaud had tried to postulate in his “Theatre of Cruelty”. As is obvious, the frontiers of performance studies get expanded by the day; hence there is need to evolve a new aesthetics distinct from the orthodox critical canon of looking at ritual performances as enactments that must tell recognizable stories. As usual, performance contexts most times, mediate on the content hence the ritual content of these performances in transition get watered down.