Getting back to ritual

'As an actor in Africa, you don't just speak, you're a dancer and a singer.' Bisi Adigun tells Peter Crawley how he's uniting Irish and African traditions

Ki lo fa ta fi n palo? It's a simple question, of course, and one you've probably heard many times before, yet there's still no definitive answer: Why do we tell stories? Bisi Adigun, the former presenter of the TV show, Mono, now turned theatre-maker and academic, is clearly an authority on the subject. One of the most animated speakers you could ever meet, Adigun leans as far forward as possible during conversation, propelling his points on with quick, expansive gestures.

At such moments his speech becomes almost musical, ebbing and flowing with anecdotes and key points, leading him into persuasive rhetorical crescendos, such as "So! What I'm trying to tell you is this . . ." or "Now! What I'm saying to you is . . .". Adigun, you quickly realise, is a consummate storyteller.

Growing up in Nigeria, he vividly remembers being on a street one day, springing coins in the air and dancing to music. He and his six siblings were singing a joyful-sounding phrase in Yoruba, the language of his people, which he repeats now (much to the bemusement of the others sitting in this Dublin hotel bar).

"It means 'Mother has gone home, gone home forever'," he says.

This was the song of his mother's funeral procession, following a tragic motor accident when Bisi was just nine years old. The coins, he explains, were significant. If one of the Yoruba dies tragically, they may have had left unpaid debts behind. The coins clear their dues.

"Now that is a ritual performance," says Adigun, "of how we send our mother from the world of the living into the other world. All of us, supposedly, are sojourners on earth, and one day we will return home. When our mother is dead, we cry and feel depressed about it, but we dance and wish her well to the other world. That's performance. So what we put on stage is a slice of that."

IN 2003, ADIGUN founded the theatre company, Arambe (which translates as "work together"), with a production of The Gods Are Not to Blame, in order to foster an African artistic community in Ireland and to honour its performance traditions. Unlike most new companies, Arambe received Arts Council funding on its first application. But, also unlike most new companies, Arambe serves a pertinent political-cultural interest.

"The truth of the matter is that I've been living here for about 10 years, right," he says. "And the more diverse the country is, the more the theatre and other art forms should reflect that diversity."

Many companies have tried to do this, of course, but as Adigun points out, if the Abbey, or Druid, or Rough Magic, or whoever, have required black actors, they have tended to recruit them from London.

"If we're going to reflect diversity in Ireland," Adigun says, "why don't we use home-bred actors? That's where the idea for Arambe came from. To develop the tradition of people living here, to develop the theatre tradition, to develop an artistic community within Ireland and also to reinterpret some Irish classics."

Of course, in a place like Dublin, a city still hesitantly adapting to an influx of new cultures, Arambe's agenda has not gone unopposed. A couple of years ago, for instance, Arambe was invited to present a short theatre piece at a multicultural event. Adigun chose an excerpt from Jimmy Murphy's gloomy depiction of Irish builders in London, The Kings of the Kilburn High Road. After the performance, Adigun took some audience questions.

"So tell me," one man began, "do you think it is right for you people to come to this country, take our jobs, take our houses, and now you've started acting our plays as well? Don't you have plays of your own?"

This sequence is dramatised in a new double-bill from Arambe, uniting two of the company's previous productions, Once Upon a Time and Not So Long Ago.

The first is a selection of "African moonlight stories" performed by a cast of Irish African immigrants using chant music and movement. The second uses a similar storytelling style to enact various experiences of Africans living in Ireland.

"We call it total theatre," Adigun says of the Yoruba's performance tradition - one that inspired a mini-festival of workshops and performances, called African Griot, in 2004 - and one he considers representative of all African performance styles. "As an actor in Africa, you don't just use your voice, you're supposed to be a dancer and a singer. You're supposed to understand the whole language [ of performance]. Because being an actor doesn't mean 'just say your lines and don't bump into the furniture'. No. You have to understand that, at the end of the day, theatre is a slice of people's lives. And music, song and dance is part and parcel of our life."

Currently studying Non-Western Theatre at Trinity College, while researching a PhD on the Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka, Adigun believes that the western theatre tradition could tap back into its origins.

"Don't let us forget how the theatre began," he says. "From the Greeks, from ritual."

Once the prevailing western trends of naturalism and realism have been exhausted, he thinks, we will return to the exaltation of the ceremony.

At times Adigun holds up Yoruba as a bastion of cultural purity, unblemished by the march of time. This is not without reason. Ritualistic worship is the blueprint of Yoruban performance style and while languages such as Ibo are gradually dying out, Yoruba is still going strong.

"It's the one culture that has withstood erosion from the west," says Adigun.

Is the resilience and inflexibility of a culture something to be particularly proud of, I wonder. Adigun looks at me in disbelief. "Hello?!" he trills.

A COUPLE OF weeks later, in a rehearsal room in the city, just around the corner from a republican rally, Adigun's large cast rehearse numerous scenes of intercultural exchange. One, a confrontation rife with misunderstandings, in which a Nigerian man buys clothes from a Dublin shop but is unable to get a plastic bag to protect them from the rain outside, is adapted from Adigun's personal experience. Another shows an actor of mixed race auditioning for a play, before she is informed that the producers are only casting Irish actors.

"But I am an Irish actor," she replies.

The show is not exactly subtle in its politics, and the young cast exude the rambunctious energy of a classroom on a Friday afternoon. On a few occasions Adigun resorts to shouting out his instructions. Still, there is something cheering about its bright enthusiasm, the heavy strokes of its optimistic message and its sketch-show briskness.

"A lot of Africans see theatre as a very modern bourgeois thing," Adigun says. "So they don't go very much."

A lot of Irish people think the same thing, and it's a difficult to disabuse them of that opinion.

The atmosphere of the rehearsal room is one of hands-on involvement, however, and the show is never less than scrupulously accessible. Hoping for a 50/50 split between Africans and Irish in the audience, Adigun doesn't want simply to preach his message of racial harmony to the converted. The theatre, he thinks, is effective at talking to opinion-makers in the culture at large, and with each audience Arambe's message expands like a ripple effect through ever-widening circles of influence.

"In an increasingly diverse country, conflict is everywhere," Adigun says. "But what is conflict? That's the most important ingredient of theatre. So let's put it on stage."

Recently Adigun was approached by a publicist looking for "non-nationals" to contribute to a new project. The publicist meant well, but the invitation got Adigun's back up.

"I've been here for 10 years," he says. "What if I don't want to be a non-national any more? I don't feel Nigerian. I feel Irish now."

It has taken him years to decode Irish culture, enjoy the food and understand the jokes - "to find a joke funny, you have to understand the culturalcontext" - but Adigun is now a negotiator between Irish and African experience. In the theatre, it seems, they are not so far removed.

"If you want to know what Africans are going through," he says, "go and see Kings of the Kilburn High Road. Emigration is a universal phenomenon."

Of course, so is storytelling. And Adigun is currently working on a new version of The Playboy of the Western World with Roddy Doyle. As the centenary of Synge's classic play looms next year, they feel the time is right for an African Playboy.

"Look at Christy Mahon," Adigun says. "He killed his father and is entitled to seek refuge. By the power of storytelling he becomes a hero. He realises his potential. So! What I'm trying to say to you is this: some Africans here are running from persecution, some are running from religion, but what they're looking for is a sanctuary, a place where they can realise their potential, a place where they can better their lives."

The Irish stage is just such a place. And that sounds like a story worth telling.

Once Upon A Time and Not So Long Ago run at the O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College, Dublin, from next Tue to May 27