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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Concert Parties: Paintings and Performance
Author:Gilbert, MichelleISNI
Year:1998
Periodical:Journal of Religion in Africa
Volume:28
Issue:1
Pages:62-92
Language:English
Geographic term:Ghana
Subjects:painting
theatre
Religion and Witchcraft
Architecture and the Arts
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1581827.pdf
Abstract:The theme of this essay is the large colourful signboards displayed throughout southern Ghana advertising modern morality-cum-vaudeville plays performed by itinerant musicians and actors. The essay also examines the performances themselves, which are called 'concerts' or 'concert parties' and which are a night-long combination of popular music, sketches, comedy, and the main play. The bricolage of images displayed in the 'roadside' paintings betrays the content of the performance based on everyday events, folklore featuring mythical dwarves and forest giants, Christian prayer groups, Hindu tracts, Indian films, and Japanese and Hollywood B-grade films and videos. The performances show Christian, Islamic, and 'traditional' religious practices, vivid but uneasy bedfellows as they are in real life, and the juxtaposition of ill-defined relations between time and space, lacking in societal structure and control. The traditional and the modern coexist and reinforce or compete with each other. The plots merge in the minds of the audience into a kind of fuguing intertextuality, reinforced as each plays shows a progression from discomforting and amoral categorical confusion to a simple conflict between good and evil, providing a sense of renewed, restituted order in society. Bibliogr., notes.
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