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191 pages

English

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"Experiencing WS is a deeply engaging, exceedingly insightful, and well-written account of the experience and history of acting and directing since the mid-twentieth century. Its originality is manifested in every paragraph; its cumulative impact creates a revolutionary path to the understanding of acting in post-colonial Africa; its fabulous take on the mentor-mentee relationship is so compelling as to lead to an analytical framework on how to teach others. Euba has achieved what is hard to come by: a fact-based, rigorous, and sincere take on African theater situated within a rich historical context in order to understand the complexities of individual characters in their lived realities, along with the politics and culture of watershed moments. This fascinating book will certainly hold the interest of the reader from the very first page to the last." > > - Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin; author of Counting the Tiger's Teeth: An African Teenager's Story

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Philosophie et théologie

Memoir

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Publié par	Austin Macauley Publishers
Date de parution	29 janvier 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781645365822
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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> - Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin; author of Counting the Tiger's Teeth: An African Teenager's Story" />

E xperiencing WS
The Making of an Artist Scholar
Femi Euba
Austin Macauley Publishers
2021-01-29
Experiencing WS About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Acknowledgment Prologue: The Ritual Process of Artistic Experience—An Overview Scenes One: The Call and the Calling: The Lure of a Dynamic Scenes Two: Looking Through the Lens of a Prospective Mentor Scenes Three: An Introvert at Large Scenes Four: Coming of Age: Conflicts and Challenges Scenes Five: In-Between Creative Growths: Forays into Playwriting Scenes Six: "Happy That I Am Black:" Fields of Discrimination Scenes Seven: The Reluctant Professional Actor: The Ife Years—1976-86 Scenes Eight: Artist of the Theater: Quests into Directing Scenes Nine: Re-Experiencing Soyinka: Oyedipo at Kolhuni (2002) Scenes Ten: The Artist-Scholar: Coming Full Circle with Death and the King’s Horseman Epilogue: Some After Thoughts: “A Prophet Unrecognized…” Appendix: Conversations
About the Author
Femi Euba is a Ph.D., MFA, MA., playwright, theater director, actor, novelist, and scholar. Currently Professor of Theatre and English at Louisiana State University, he studied acting at the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama in England, Playwriting and African American Studies at Yale, and Literature-in-English at the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University. His works include Archetypes, Imprecators, and Victims of Fate ; Poetics of the Creative Process ; Camwood at Crossroads , a novel; the BBC Radio plays; and full-length plays such as The Eye of Gabriel and Dionysus of the Holocaust .
Dedication
For WS and all the creative artists that have influenced my work.
Copyright Information ©
Femi Euba (2021)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The story, experiences, and words are author’s alone.
Ordering Information
Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Euba, Femi
Experiencing WS
ISBN 9781643789828 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781643789835 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645365822 (ePub e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020909717
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2021)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302
New York, NY 10005
USA
mail-usa@austinmacauley.com
+1 (646) 5125767
Acknowledgment
I acknowledge and thank all characters who have made this endeavor possible; also my persistent, unflagging, and creative mind that has evoked and pursued my re-memory of all the anecdotes therein.
Prologue
The Ritual Process of Artistic Experience—An Overview
I, alias BBGD, had entertained no ambitions to writing a memoir. Such an endeavor, to my mind, should be left alone to people of great importance, such as my former mentor, brother, and friend, Wole Soyinka. This is especially so when such people are much older and are only looking back at their accomplishments and the summation of all that had contributed to their success. But perhaps that’s old thinking, since memoir writing seems to have expanded its horizons to include people who have something to say about life and how they’ve survived an event or a predicament. Nevertheless, I still stand by my own understanding.
Regarding that, yes, I could boast to a certain degree of some artistic success—come to think on it, in acting as well as playwriting and directing—experiences of a career that could describe some form of development or structure. But these achievements, to my mind, were nothing that could conjure up an interest to a considerable number of audience-readers, or could whet the appetite of a following of fans, such that Wole Soyinka commands. A Yoruba proverb comes to mind, strange as it might seem to apply here: “If you have to eat a frog, you might as well eat one with eggs (of gold)”—the parenthesis is by implication. In other words, in the context of a memoir, if one decides to embark on such a project, one should make sure it is potentially functional, fruitful, and therefore worth the effort. The question is, whether my career efforts and achievements merited such a preoccupation. On the other hand, perhaps like Anton Chekhov was, or as WS has often expressed, I am sometimes given to self-deprecation.
What triggered the present endeavor to legitimize a memoir in its own right, an obvious change of mind, began about ten or so years ago. It was at the inauguration of what came to be known as Soyinka Festival—an idea fashioned at the time by the imaginative foresight of a young Nigerian, then a graduate student at the University of Southwestern Florida, in Orlando * . There, I presented a paper entitled “Experiencing Soyinka: Reflections on 2002 and the 1960s.” In the paper, presented in a roundtable to a few other scholars who attended, I reminisced on the last production of the Soyinka play in which I participated, Oyedipo at Kolhuni (an adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus ), and the experiences that initiated and launched my acting and theater career in the 1960s, under the tutelage of Wole Soyinka. What significantly aroused the reflection was the distinctive parallels I felt could be drawn between both periods, even though separated by about four decades. One period initiated an acting career while the other re-engaged that profession after some years of seeming inactivity, thereby calling attention to its rather dubious development and what transpired in between that hiatus.
As it happened, at close regard, the perceived dormant state was rather specious and therefore superficial; alongside the acting had developed other artistic/creative forms, namely playwriting and directing. These, in fact, would seem to have taken over the acting experience, submerging its possible development into an acknowledged, though fond and nostalgic, oblivion. However, the takeover called attention to the possible reasons that much later confronted me—reasons why I had allowed the seemingly artistic coup to happen in the first place. This situation will be engaged in Chapter One—or Scenes One, as preferred for the memoir—and more fully in Scenes Nine.
Indeed, it was a response to the presentation at Orlando that facilitated my interest in writing a memoir. What was expressed in the paper drew the attention and fascination of my small audience, especially that of a younger professor, the late Dr. Esiaba Irobi. It was Esiaba that made me conscious of the fact of the presentation as embarking on a prize project. He saw the paper as an initial skirmish for a larger project that could describe a special relationship between a mentee and his mentor, and meant to capture the interest of a larger audience. As Esiaba visualized it, the project fashioned by such an idea could elicit dimensions of the mentor that nobody else could talk about but the mentee—perspectives that spanned some forty years of relationship.
Thus, after much contemplation, the project grew from paper presentation to book form. In addition, it has expanded in scope, from acting to every aspect that describes or privileges my person as a theater practitioner. For, looking at and assessing each aspect, whether as actor, director, playwright, or in fact as scholar, Wole Soyinka happened to have had an influence, in varying degrees of course, in every one of them. And, as the book began to gain form, especially with a focus on the making of a theater practitioner, it became convincing to me that the memoir could stand in its own right to engage the interest of the curious reader.
Although my acting career seemed to be short-lived, concentrated in two or three time periods, the total experience spread over many years encompassing three continents. Apart from the acting, it included not only productions that involved Wole Soyinka either as playwright or director, or as both, but also the many productions I directed, some of which were of Soyinka’s plays. Furthermore, while these experiences dated back to the launching of my acting career through the preliminary encounter with Mr. Soyinka, between 1958 and 1962, they presupposed my training at one of the best conservatories in England at the time—the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama—and, thereafter, my professional thrust into the career. In fact, that opportune thrust, which spanned less than a decade (from 1962 to 1970), included some noteworthy productions—two Soyinka’s, one of Shakespeare ( Macbeth with Alec Guinness as Macbeth). It also involved an encounter with prominent theater personages, such as Bill Gaskill, Lindsay Anderson, Simone Signoret, and of course Sir Alec himself—all of whom were conversant with the increasing popularity of Wole Soyinka during those early years. The experiences also germinated other artistic interests, mainly playwriting and, later, directing. Furthermore, they remarkably increased my fascination for the other WS of Strafford-upon-Avon, where I paid frequent visits to immerse my creative energies and culturally nuanced thoughts in productions of the Bard’s plays.
The second period of acting flourished six years later, between 1976 and 1986, that is, after graduating from the Yale School of Drama as a playwright, and working for two or three years as a visiting artist at a college-preparatory school for women, the Ethel Walker School. As fate would ritually have it in 1976, both m