SPATIAL ANIMATION: AN ETHOS OF THEATRE DIRECTION

Abstract

Modern Nigerian theatre’s advancement is verifiable through rigorous professionalism and a sturdy academy. While directing has evolved into a sophisticated interpretive cornerstone of Nigerian theatre practice, the training of students has remained incongruously yoked to western texts, theories and techniques. Consequently, the spatial animation directorial principle proposes an alternative pedagogical prism that exploits mythology-related creative techniques in modern theatre directing.
Conceptually positional in orientation, spatial animation’s impulse is humanity’s creation myth complexus. Adopting the practice-based experiential mode of enquiry, the paper accentuates the methodological import of Creative or Artistic Humanistic Reflection
(CAHR) – for research in creativity-inclined disciplines – in concert with comparative mytho-analytical procedures. 

Majorly stimulated by creation myths’ primal spatial chaotism, spatial animation conceptualises modern theatre’s pre-performance stagespace as dead. The art of theatre directing is anchored in instinctual recreative spatial intercession, its origin, the dead primeval space’s archetypal spatial revivification enactment by the divine directorial impulse. Mytho-logically, then, modern theatre directors are the creator-deity-director’s professional descendants: thus, inheritors of a unique spatial animation gene. Central to this order-form-restoring technique is a tripartite trans-substantiational complex encompassing the ase creative accent; imole intexterior illumination; and atunda deconstructivist-(re)constructivist formula. 

The spatial animation principle re-theorises theatre directing as an existential space-order restorative act and a stage-spatial aesthetic intercessory art. Sourcing its constitutive properties – constructivist assets and creative codes - from Yoruba meta-philosophy, the artistic compositional counter-ethos advances African theatres’ decolonial discourse.