Friday 19 April 2013

Adulawo: (Re)presenting the Black Race





KiNiNso-Koncepts is an art ensemble/dance-theatre company. It was established with the sole aim of making statement of relevance with a deep root in researching our culture and tradition. Kininso make use of different performance styles and story-telling techniques that will not only entertain, inform and educate but challenge our audience towards nation building.

Through dance, drama, music, movement and poetry, we create stories, infuse visual elements,  with a strong sense of creativity and aesthetics. Our belief and adoption of the physical and experimental theatre technique is a means of portraying Africa as a centre of social and cultural integration. We think just beyond a theme, a venue and an audience.  At KiNiNso-Koncepts, our vision is to have a standard repertory theatre just like our foreign counterparts whose government believe in the arts as a tool for reconstruction. 


The Play
Adulawo: The Black Race (written and directed by Joshua Alabi)
Alongside groups from Georgia, Italy, Egypt, brazil, Sweden, Greece, iran and Romania. Kininso-koncepts was chosen to represent Nigeria and west Africa at large. Adulawo (the Black Race) is a dance-theatre piece which creatively and artistically discusses and portrays the challenges; problems, day to day activities, occupation, culture/tradition, and general way of life of the black people using Nigeria as it focus point. It’s a total theatre piece with an infusion of poetry, dance, drama, drums, chants and songs to create an excitingly new but contemporary performance art which would be acceptable by global audience of different age groups. 

At different points, playwrights, dramatists, directors and scholars have written about the black race at large. It must be pointed out that the story of the African race is a wide topic to be treated in just a dance/drama performance rather picking out the major and significant parts which relates to the growth and development of the region today. The play highlights not the entire slavery process and the colonialist intrusion but the pit which the white masters dug for us which is ‘democracy’ which apparently means nothing to them. The performance projects more of aesthetics in the African set and the boundless communal traits. 

DATE: 22ND APRIL, 2013
VENUE: UNIVERSITY OF LAGOS, MAIN AUDITORIUM
TIME: 4.00 PM

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