It was a cool Saturday evening, and the sound that reverberated at the Freedom Park on Broad Street, Lagos, were hastening footsteps of theatre lovers, as they made into the event venue. The reason was not far fetched: Lagos Live Festival.

Organised by the German culture mission in Nigeria, Goethe Institut, the festival attracted guests from all walks of life, including the diplomatic corps and expatriate community.

There were series of theatrical enactment from groups such as, Crown Troupe of Africa and its children company, Footprints of David; Monster Truck from Germany and others, as well as solo performances from Yacoub Adeleke and Busayo Olowu.

Very remarkable of the series of performances this Saturday evening was Punctuation, a co-production of KiNiNso Koncepts and Goethe Institut.

Its message and deployment of theatrical elements and nuances gave the audience at the amphi-theatre of Freedom Park reason to cheer. The piece talks about reasons for man’s existence in life: His destiny and fate. It also talks about good and evil, poor and rich, man’s existence and essence and all that occur till his death.

Punctuation looks at the reactions of people to questions like, who are you? Where do you come from? Are you a Christian or a Muslim? Have you eaten? And why can’t man relate freely with his kind?

However, what strings together all these themes is religion. Christianity, Islam and Buddhism are used to explain man’s relationship with his creator. The piece concludes by saying despite man’s submission to the will of God, why is there religious crisis in the world?

Punctuation was the lighting rod of the festival. The performance was more of poetry in motion, taking on, as it were, elements of total theatre. When it was poetry in flight, there was a resort to lines and movement, and as theatrical performance, dance took over.

The performance opens with a spotlight on eight singers cum dancers in a tableau. After some minutes, they begin to sing songs of praise to their creator. Shortly after, light finds some other characters in a new setting: a mosque, as they pray to their creator.

The director, Joshua Alabi uses different shades of lights to differentiate one setting from the other without fading, and in such beautiful vocals, the actors tell through their quick switch of costumes the story of different races, traditions religions and cultural practices across the globe.

He says just like the true meaning of punctuation in the English dictionary, which is the use of certain marks to clarify meaning of written materials or something that makes repeated and regular interruptions or diversions, the performance is all about “the logical theory of dualism of life as through the total theatre, a contemporary art piece which gives its own view about African belief of death and re-birth, it is a metaphor for those ideologies that cause or create repeated and regular interruptions throughout man’s existence using poetry, dance, movement, music and symbols to clarify meanings as man contends with itself.”

There was more for the audience at the main theatre, Freedom Park, when the Junkyard professor (Yacoub Adeleke) took the stage. Dressed in tattered clothes-like an insane person, the Prof. who probably lost his sanity due to ‘too much knowledge’ is trapped in a world of confusion, he appears to be insane to the public, but to him, they are bunch of insane people.

As light comes on the Prof. in his dirty yard of rags, he holds a microscope, and wearing a torn clothe and a wig on his head. He speaks to himself, and from time to time would use the microscope on the audience to test their sanity.

The Prof. had disappeared from the university for over 20 years; two foreigners in a junkyard discovered him. The foreign researchers, working on recycling scraps, they brought him to the light (the audience). Just out of curiousity, the researchers moved him to a new environment and provide a platform for him to present his outcome of 20 years experiment and research as a junkyard professor.

Adeleke uses the state of an insane person to pose and address some societal irregular happenings in Nigeria, such as the Boko Haram insurgency, religious crisis, killings by Fulani herdsmen, Niger Delta militants and so on.