Total Theatre

Music to an African man is a way of life, it follows him from birth to his grave. Nigeria as a country has a very rich musical tradition that expresses and reflects both the social and ceremonial functions related to daily human activities. Since theatre is an expression of human emotions and aspirations, the essence of music cannot but be found as an ancient and important part of African theatre. Bode Omojola(1994; 147) asserts that "music in traditional Nigerian societies is generally conceived as part of a multi-media, total theatre experience within which different aspects of the performing arts such as poetry, dance, drama, often combined for effective communication."
Some scholars believe that dance is never done without some form of rhythm or music because music and dance go together. In Nigerian theatre, music can actually stand on it own, so also drama. Moreover, theatre practitioners, directors and playwrights have been using music to realize their works either at the conceiving stage (script writing) or the actual performance of such works.
        This thesis, among other objectives, however seeks to evaluate the authenticity of music as a major wheel on which a Dance theatre moves, in corporations with other theatrical elements which make up the contemporary African total theatre.

As early as 1923 when Kiesler had proclaimed a “crisis of theater” in
his first piece on theater, calling for a new “stage totality” and the col- lective fashioning of “the whole stage form,” this had the ring of
the tasks that Gropius had formulated for the stage department installed at the Bauhaus in 1921: “We are exploring the various problems of
space, the body, movement, form, light, color and sound. We represent the movement of the organic and the mechanical body, the sound of language, music and noise, and build the stage space and the stage fig- ures.”24 Kiesler’s desire for a renewal of the stage “from the ground
plan” and Gropius’s demand for a “cleansing and renewal of the modern stage” and its rebuilding “based on the primal foundations of its his- tory” also bear an affinity in terms of content. We see another similarity when Gropius longed for a “common, all-uniting focal point” for the stage that “had lost the deepest relations to the world of human emo- tion”25 and Kiesler felt that the theater “should be a dynamic factor of the times” and “grow out of the soil of time.”

This chapter discusses the use of microphones as 'interfaces' in contemporary music theatre. By means of compelling case studies, Verstraete unpacks the multi-medial usage of the microphone as instrument in theatre performances that constitute a digital 'Gesamtkunstwerk' on the stage, through sound and image. He discusses the implications of such aesthetic strategies and practices in sound design as acoustic feedback, motion tracking, the placing of voice (from vocal exercises), and interfacing the voice for the production of a 'total theatre of voice and sound' in the 21st century.

This article discusses a production of Shading the Crime by Christine Roberts, co-directed by the authors for Lusty Juventus Physical Theatre in 1998. The play is set in a Special Police Unit where gender-specific torture is used to humiliate, control and exert power over female 'political prisoners'.  The article explores how, as theatre-makers, we attempted to present a situation that was 'fixed' while simultaneously expressing a sense of agency.