Fela’s Queens: Bold, Ambitious, Meandering
Fela and his Kalakuta Queens, the new stage production on the Fela Years, will animate conversations among theatregoers for a while. It will be around the usual question: How close was this to the real thing? The musical drama is audacious in its deployment of visuals. It is bold in terms of the multimedia set design; stretching the combination stage/cinematic platforms farther than many Nigerian stage shows of recent memory. The play benefits from the musical career and stage presence of the saxophonist Laitan (Heavywind) Adeniji as Fela. And the playful adroitness of Osas Ighodaro Ajibade as Malaika. Adeniji’s lack of conventional stage drama experience projects the sort of naivety that creates the kind of hero that Fela was. The producers of Fela and his Kalakuta Queens have clearly kept the phantasmagoria in focus all through the planning of the play. They try to bring the incidents in a typical Fela Yabis nite at the Kalakuta shrine closer to the audience than did Fela, (the broadway musical).

And there’s no doubt where the referencing is. “We need to tell our stories the way we want it to be told”, said Bolanle Austen Peters, the play’s daring, energetic director and self- acclaimed story bearer. The idea was to tell the story from the angle of the Queens; the 27 women Fela married in one fell swoop if you like, or the “girls” known to many as Fela’s dancers which, in the view of the play, society has pilloried all through the years. Instead the performance meanders from long stretches of Fela’s story to small incidents in the lives of the queens. And it is so long; Three hours and twenty minutes, a significant part of which comes across as what radio people call “dead air”. There’s the sense that a familiar story has to be retold again in the fashion that people already knew. This tendency stands in the way of new angles. The standard challenges of BAP productions come back to haunt this play; the unwillingness to problematize a key aspect of the story and let the story take you as far as it can. The narrative of Fela’s Queens is complicated-yes let it be; the producers could have explored it further, for all our sakes and rein in the temptation to perfume the stink. For all that, Fela and his Kalakuta Queens is awesome feel-good drama. Nigeria’s under-entertained middle class will enjoy this feast of grandeur, which runs at Terra Kulture Art arena every weekend from this evening till the new year season ends.

Bolanle, Please Stop Saying This
“Qudus is here”, Bolanle Austen Peters declared, in the middle of a Talk session at ARTX in November 2016. “Before we came there was no dance in Lagos”. She was narrating the story of TerraKulture, the arts event centre she founded, and the role it plays in the cultural life of the city by the lagoon. There were no questions from the audience asking her to put that statement in context: whether she was talking about dance as part of the Total Theatre Performance in stage plays or dance as full stage productions on their own. But anyone who was in doubt that this was about TerraKulture showing us the way out of darkness would have been enlightened by her welcome remarks at the Command Performance of her new stage production Fela and his Kalakuta Queens. Right there, in the middle of credits to sponsors, Mrs. Austen Peters recalled the production of Waaka, her last stage play, in London, United Kingdom and declared, in the context of owning our own narrative, “we were the first Nigerian stage play in London in certain areas”.

What do ‘certain areas’ mean? This self -tripping about “We are the first to do it”, which is not based on truth, does not help anyone. Are the areas of the UK in which the actor/producer/dancer/playwright Duro Ladipo performed to wide theatrical acclaim in 1968, any different than the spaces in which Mrs. Austen Peters’ Waaka was staged at? Does she know that the London’s Evening Express described Duro Ladipo’s performance in Oba Koso in these words: “nor do we (the British drama system) have a person like Duro Ladipo, who writes, sings, performs, and directs, with so much adeptness, all like an engine”. Does Mrs. Austen Peters know of TIME magazine’s piece on the actor Jimi Solanke, after a performance of a Nigerian play, by a full Nigerian cast in the United States, in the late 70s? It is TIME magazine we are talking about. The Nigerian play has been travelling out there for over five decades. In his book Drama and Theatre in Nigeria, Yemi Ogunbiyi, publisher and one time theatre critic, writes of his first encounter with Duro Ladipo after the latter’s performance of Oba Koso in 1975. And what about dance? Is Bolanle’s definition of dance what is at issue here? In terms of the razzmatazz that she infuses her plays with, has she been told of the precursor in form of Fred Agbeyegbe’s festive plays in Lagos in the early 80s? And the dance choreography in those plays that formed the content of the Ajo Festical? Has she heard of the French choreographer Claude Brumachon’s workshops in Lagos in the 90s and the effects they had in remapping the frames of dance performances on the city’s stages in their aftermath? No one can deny Mrs. Austen Peters’ place in Nigerian Theatre history and her effort in hoisting the flag, but her willingness in undermining the history is worrying. It would not be so worrisome if not for the fact that Nigerian media plays up these stories of memory loss.

Calendar; Nina Simone at Park Theatre, Adesewa at Muson.. And ONSWAG at the Federal Palace
My Nina Simone, which wraps up at 7pm today (Sunday, December 17, 2017) at the Freedom Park on Lagos Island, is a one-man written and performed by Ese Brume and directed by Najite Dede. Around the same time at Hard Rock Café on Victoria Island, Nonso Amadi is headlining his own at his Homecoming concert.  Wizkid will feature in the Pepsi Rhythm Unplugged at the Eko Hotel on December 22, with Davido, Olamide, Tiwa Savage, Runtown and others. Adesewa, a play by the Thespian Family, featuring Tunji Sotiminrin and others, runs at Muson Centre from December 23 to 25, at 3pm and 7pm each day. One Night Stand With Adekunle Gold (ONSWAG) is Adekunle Gold’s end of year concert on December 26 at the Federal Palace.

• Compiled by staff of Festac News Agency
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