‘Why I wrote the play Akon’

Dr. Arnold Udoka is a lecturer in the Department of Theatre, Dance and Carnival Studies, the University of Calabar. Former director with the National Troupe of Nigeria, Udoka is also a Commonwealth scholar, foremost Nigerian Choreographer, and dancer. He tells Edozie Udeze in this encounter why he wrote the play Akon and that pandemic and other worries of the society do not speak well for theatre and the entertainment industry generally

There are many terminologies associated with pandemic, face mask, quarantine, hand sanitizer, social distancing, isolation, lockdown, etc. Are we likely going to have some dance patterns, styles or choreography from you to illustrate these movements?

The corona virus (Covid-19) pandemic arrived in a swoop and took everyone unawares. With the advisory from the NCDC and WHO we have been equipped with protocols to help us avert the infection or at least keep it in check. The terms that the corona virus advisory has released into the Nigerian consciousness are not new lexicons, but with the pandemic, they have assumed new significance and deeper meanings. These terms are already influencing the thoughts of all creatives and I am not an exception. There is, after all, nothing to celebrate about the corona virus pandemic. As an infection, it is anti-human and anti-life and, therefore, is undeserving of any celebration or to be given any social significance through dance.

Yes, expect choreographic representations of these terms not just for entertainment purposes. Some of the lexicons will be abstracted and imbued with both literary and metaphorical movements to ensconce them in the nation’s healthcare idiom of hygiene, prevention of diseases and for reference in our lifestyle.

Lockdown, solitude and isolation periods are apt for creative minds to be more productive. What are the new works from you during this period?

It is true that periods of lockdown, solitude and isolation are moments for creative minds to ponder, wander, wonder, visualize, analyse and crystallize their thoughts into tangible forms. However, this lockdown came upon everyone first as war, and with full blown trepidation. The fear, speed of preparation, movement and protection of family members, distracted every ray of creative insight for a while. However, I have engaged in a research during the period and the outcome from that should be out very soon. I have had online discourses and online conference paper presentations are ongoing. As a theatre practitioner, with the lockdown, it has been difficult to put up stage performances since theatre has to abide by the covid-19 protocol of social distancing.

Your play Akon remains one of the most remarkable political and prophetic plays on Nigerian political space. Can we have glimpses into the elements that informed the play?

Thank you for this question. An interesting question. Let me give you a little background to Akon. I wrote this play in 2008, published it in 2011; it made the long list of the 2014 NLNG African Prize for Literature; a recommended text in some universities in Nigeria and is pirated in some countries of the world. Akon was inspired by the challenges of the girl-child and the woman in a modern Nigerian society, away from the customs of old and yet still held back and subjected to them. That way they are not fully liberated or permitted to bond with the new socio-political space. The issues here include gender, outdated customs, marriage, education, political marginalization, segregation, repression, male chauvinism and political thuggery. These elements ought not inhibit or prohibit the girl-child or woman from aspiring to lead wherever she is qualified to do so. There ought to be equity. Traditions and customs must adjust because they are products of man and man is, like what he calls culture, not static. I am in total shock to realize that the play has been deemed prophetic considering the unfolding drama in the Cross River State judiciary this year; 12 years after it was written and 9 years after its publication. It is patently startling and uncanny especially when the major character in the play shares both name and profession with the protagonist in the case of the Cross River State judiciary and also caught within the web of customs. I am delighted that Akon is making literary and political progress by influencing decisions and at the same time inspiring the girl-child and woman in our new political space. My wish is that this literary work succeeds further and farther in its mission so that political thuggery and intimidation may make way for reason, equity and political nationalism.

After many years as a commonwealth scholar and foremost choreographer, what is the state of stage dance, choreography, et al, in Nigeria?

Thank you for this good and difficult question. Stage performances of dance have grown in leaps and bounds in the last quarter of a century. There has also been a significant growth in the number of dance companies in the informal sector of the economy as well as the robust presence of state-paid dancers. There is hardly any event that dancers are not on call. Only the corona virus caused a break as everyone had to maintain the NCDC advisory on public health safety.

As a Named Scholar of the Commonwealth, I have supported efforts at bringing dance to mainstream education at the university level and also raised the consciousness of the Nigerian society to the educational, professional and administrative potential dance and choreography hold for the nation. I have personally trained several dancers from across the country and some have shown interest in choreography. They must go to where they can hone those skills. I pray they find the resources to further their training. As I speak, I still serve as the Chairman, National Advisory Council of the Guild of Nigerian Dancers (a body we set up since 1997) to cater for the welfare and development of the dance and its practitioners. In the year 2013, precisely in April, I invited my colleagues within the academia to the National Theatre, Lagos, for a roundtable discussion on dance in the academia. At the end of that deliberation, we were able to set up what came to be known as Dance Scholars Society of Nigeria (DASSON) with me as the President. Today, the body is known as Association of Dance Scholars and Practitioners of Nigeria. We have been registered and in existence for seven years and making steady progress. Stage performances also need academicians to theorize.

As the former National Choreographer and Dance Director with the National Troupe of Nigeria, I can say without any fear of contradiction that the state of choreography in the country is fairly improving. I am saying fairly improving because choreography requires specialized training for the professional. Our Arts Councils in the states have need of skilled choreographers in order to attract internally generated revenue to their states through their outstanding works, but that’ll be lost if such personnel are not tooled for the job. All our villages, clans and towns are inundated with dances, but with very little or nonexistent support to our natural rulers, some dances are slowly disappearing even as their performers are diminishing in number and no leadership to sustain the practice. The mushrooming dance troupes all over the cosmopolitan centres need skilled choreographic labour to guide the teeming youth. Most Nigerian youths are showing interest in choreography, but they need intense and purposeful training to direct their energies and skills so that they can be more useful in promoting the ethos of society and the development of the dance economy. At the moment, the profession needs pubic-spirited individuals, philanthropists and corporate organizations to support training in the best academies of individuals who show proven abilities in this area. Their acquired skills would bring added advantage to the country’s quest for a diversified economy especially within the axis of the nation’s cultural, creative and tourism industry and improve our Gross Domestic Product.  In all, my assessment is that the state of dance and choreography in Nigeria is that of steady growth, albeit, with very minimal policy support. It could be better if there is a coordinated national approach to explore the potential of this veritable resource of our human and cultural heritage.

There is this agitation to make dance a department in Nigerian universities. How does that sound to you?

It sounds like a very good idea to me. You see, I would rather not term it an agitation. I would say it is an idea, a desire awaiting its time. If we are to look at the development of education in our society since 1862, you would agree with me that something went wrong somewhere. Dance has never received the attention in our developmental history since the beginning of the 19th century. Check. Even the National Policy on Education and the Cultural Policy for Nigeria (now moribund for almost twenty years), have only exteriorized the place of culture in education and not the place of education in our culture. None of them is sincere in implementation. Lip service you would say, and I dare say that is all it is.,,lip service.

Ancillary to this, is that the foundation of the modern theatre in Nigeria is literary theatre. So when you hear of Theatre Arts, Dramatic Arts, Performing Arts or Creative Arts departments, each stands to defend and protect the literary theatre from what actually obtains traditionally within our cultures as Nigerians. Literary theatre has been promoted and propagated since the introduction of Western drama in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies in the 1950s, the School of Drama and later Department of Theatre Arts of the University of Ibadan where it was invented for us as the legitimate theatre. Ulli Beier was also party to this Western-looking theatre with the creation of Oba Koso. Aristotle, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Zeus, Dionysus, Apollo and other mortals and immortals, heroes, heroines and villains of the Western world were some of the personalities that peopled the body of our literary canons. We have depended on these canons for our writings and presentation of theatre over the decades. You must adhere to the Greco-Roman dramatic graph. Our minds are formatted by these practices and as a student of theatre arts, you must anchor your experiments on them. Should your practice not follow suit after graduation? To date, we are still victims of that philosophy of replacement. On the other hand, our dance-based indigenous performative phenomenon is on the fringe and is essentially poached and appliquéd as an appendage to drama in theatre practice in Nigeria. Now, every theatre practitioner is proud to bear the tag of Thespian as an emblem of honour instead of compunction. I am giving you this background so that you can understand some of the reasons why the suggestion or desire for a dance department is being canvassed by some of our scholars.

For Nigeria as a nation, the idea of dance departments in our tertiary institutions is long overdue. The development of scholarship, manpower and entrepreneurship in the province of dance within the culture and creative industry are stalled as specialized training in more than thirty areas of study within the field is not accessible within the country. The idea of dance departments in our universities at this point in time is, for me, however, quite ambitious, but not impossible in the nearest future. Let me make myself clear. You see, as I speak, research shows that dance only enjoys very negligible credit hours in crowded curriculums in all our tertiary institutions. So, how do you produce the quintessential dance personnel? What about the manpower?

Do we have scholars that can service the courses of a full blown dance department at the present? My answer to that is a straight and emphatic NO! What about the texts and instructional materials for teaching and to guide research among other things? These are accumulating slowly and even at that, we must sieve them to arrive at what can provide and support scholarship. With the absence of dance as a scoring subject at both primary and secondary school levels, how cognitively prepared are the people we intend to admit to this department? Should they be exposed to dance at the tertiary level without any foundational training before the sophistication of dance scholarship at the tertiary level? Can we claim that a full blown dance department in a Nigerian university at the moment can survive without all the facilities and subject areas to cater for the diverse and variegated needs of students; meet global best practices or even the NUC Benchmark Minimum Academic Standard (BMAS)? I would say no, having been in this business for the past forty-nine years as a dancer, Student-Demonstrator-in-Dance, Sessional Dance Teacher, Choreographer, Dance Scholar and Dance administrator at the highest level in government. As I speak, no university in Nigeria offers a first degree course in dance. What is offered is Bachelor of Arts Degree in Theatre Arts, Performing Arts and etc.  Postgraduate studies in dance in Nigeria are sparse and limited in scope. All that can be done now is for our dance scholars to work closely with their HODs to develop purposeful and robust curriculums in the departments where they serve and encourage the employment of manpower even outside the shores of Nigeria to assist us expand and standardize our dance courses by thinking through the subject matter and instructional materials. With this approach, we should be able to end up with very functional and purposeful overall blueprint for an independent dance department. I am saying all these based on my experience and exposure. For the benefit of your readers, after my first degree in Theatre Arts, I obtained my three-dimensional Masters Degree in Dance Studies (Choreography, Dance History and Sociology of Dance) from the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance at the University of London Goldsmiths’ College, London, where I also lectured briefly in the Community Dance Section under Chris Thompson.

At the University of Calabar where I lecture at the present after disengaging from the National Troupe of Nigeria as the Director (Dance), we are developing postgraduate programmes that would be responsive to the needs of the society, We also developed in the early 1990s, what constitutes a major part of the curriculum in first degree dance teaching in Nigerian universities to this day. I can also assure you that the leadership of the Association of Dance Scholars and Practitioners of Nigeria is working hard to put modalities and strategies in place for the Department of Dance Studies to come on stream in the nearest future in Nigeria.  So, how does the idea of a dance department sound to me? I would say again, it is a good idea, but it needs time and the support of our academic planners for it to come to fruition in a not too distant future.

As a poet, playwright and all, where is the meeting point between poetry and dance on stage?

Well, one is a literary art and the other a performing art, but both are emotional and cognitive responses to human experiences. While one – poetry – depends on verbal language, the other – dance – depends on biomechanics and yet both rely on rhythm to animate imageries evoked, provoked and convoked verbally and spatially, respectively on stage for the purpose of uplifting and ennobling the human spirit by presenting their characters and conditions. Both serve human function on stage. In my works I always make the effort to provide my audience the opportunity to share my poetic and choreographic insights in order to engage their imagination and interest in the audio-visual conversation on stage.

After many years with the National Troupe of Nigeria, you have once again moved back to the academia, let’s know how you have been able to resettle at the University of Calabar?

One is no stranger to his father’s house. Having spent most of my life from the age of 18 years in a university environment, that space always holds an allure for me. The Presidential appointment of 1991 was an honour I could not reject and my Vice-Chancellor at the time, late Prof. Charles Effiong asked that since I was head-hunted for the position, I should be a good ambassador from the University of Calabar to Nigeria.  I made my modest contributions while serving the nation at the National Troupe of Nigeria and remain ever grateful to the Federal Government and peoples of Nigeria for the opportunity I was given to serve. How have I settled in upon my return to the University of Calabar? It is homecoming for a Malabite and I am grateful to the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Zana I. Akpagu for demanding that I return to the lecture hall. I am truly at home to the glory of God.