Performance poet Donna Ogunnaike has begun the journey to help her audience remember emotions and recover memories that need to be repaired.
Through her brand of therapeutic theatre, Donna, who is also a theatre practitioner, lawyer, oil and gas expert, brings to Nigerian theatre, Strelitzia … An experiential journey to self, slated for the 2018 British Council’s Lagos Theatre Festival (LTF) from tomorrow to March 4.
Emotions are every man’s unique weakness, and over the ages, men have learnt to master their emotions. But when men lock away memories that evoke emotion, those emotions might become real problems, and that is what Strelitzia seeks to unlock.This is all to ensure people do not just master those emotions, but become better versions of themselves.
The production by Ogunnaike, which was the only Nigerian theatre chosen to represent the country at the World Cultures Festival, 2017 in Hong Kong on November 4 and 5, is simply put, a remembering of emotions from memories long forgotten.
Strelitzia, which in the 2017 LTF was performed 10 times, has received impressive reviews locally and internationally.
Speaking with Ogunnaike on the essence of the show and why it has been successful in spite of the unusual nature of the performance, she explained that Strelitzia… is a therapeutic journey of remembrance that allows you heal even after dredging up memories, which lead to forgotten emotions and hurt. These past experiences she says are usually the things that dictate, who, where and what we are today.
It is at the same time a captivating and liberating kind of theatre. It uses theatre in one of its ancient and intended forms – a means of achieving healing of self.
In her words, “Strelitzia is not a theatre that can simply be explained, it has to be experienced, and each person’s experience is different. Imagine flipping through a diary where you experience the memory of the point in which that entry of the diary was written. In the last performance, we had people who saw it multiple times, while some became quite emotional.”
Strelitzia, for which performance, a purpose built art installation was placed within Freedom Park, Lagos Island, walks you through experiences of a different time, allowing the audience to relate with the past. The performance comprises six sequences – each representing a different human memory and experience. All scenes are sown in a quilt of memory-evoking recollections of stories that will leave any audience in wonder and delight.
It is an interactive kind of theatre that seeks to heal a troubled world. Strelitzia, according to a critic, has the ability to “help the audience free themselves from the pent-up inner tensions and trauma of the past, which may hinder their individual and group attainment of freedom. Its approach to freedom is to take the audience through a psychological journey facilitated by music, ûlm, poetry and images that could free the clustered human mind and ultimately lead to self-rediscovery.”
While per show, the production cannot take more than 30 people so as not to lose some members of the audience, the performance shows multiple times.
Ogunnaike had her debut theatre production, Love Like Slave, at the 2016 LTF.