A Critical Reading of Olorunjuwon Oloruntoba’s Dance Drama Anthology

By Peter Adeiza Bello, PhD

Associate Professor of Dance and Theatre Performance Practice. Current Head of Department of Performing Arts and Music, Ajayi Crowther University, Oyo, Oyo State, Nigeria.
CEO, House of Arimata Theatrics

Olorunjuwon Oloruntoba’s ten play anthology, Inherited Freedom: Culture in Chains, Freedom in Dance, is a genuinely ambitious act of dance dramaturgy, ten dance dramas built across seven documented Nigerian performance traditions, plus one further piece tracing the Atlantic crossing into Cuba. Read as a whole, the collection asks what a body carries forward once everything else has been taken from it, and answers that question ten different ways without repeating itself in method, even where its subject matter recurs.

What sets Oloruntoba’s approach apart from conventional dance drama is his refusal to let dialogue and choreography compete for narrative authority. Spoken text is withheld until two people can no longer reach each other through movement alone, or a private wrong becomes public enough to demand naming aloud. In Ash on the Wind, he sustains a single character’s silence across nearly the entire play, resolving it in exactly one spoken word timed to land at the healing rite’s climax, a level of patience rarely attempted in scripted dance drama. In Sango’s Verdict, a mythic strand and a contemporary strand run in visual counterpoint rather than narrated parallel, so the audience feels the historical echo in the body before any line confirms it. This is where the anthology’s subtitle, Freedom in Dance, earns its place rather than merely describing its contents: in Oloruntoba’s hands, freedom is not illustrated by movement, it is located inside the choreographic structure itself, a blend of practical choreography and ethnographic research that has few real precedents in the existing dance drama literature.

The “Culture in Chains” half of that title is where Oloruntoba’s methodological rigour is most visible, and it is rigour of a professional, not amateur, calibre. The strongest evidence is what he chooses to withhold. In Chains, the Lucumí and Palo devotional cues that anchor several key moments are named but deliberately left unscripted, with Oloruntoba stating plainly that this material remains the property of the practitioners who hold it, a serious methodological position, not a stylistic flourish. He is equally careful about naming where he has taken invention rather than documentation: Two Tides identifies its central custodianship practice as a fictional family tradition rather than a documented pan Efik institution, and Aruefen’s Crown states outright that its royal figures are fictional composites. Swange for the Fallen and Nine Nights each carry explicit statements of non partisanship on live, unresolved material, a farmer and herder conflict still producing real casualties, and the Nigerian Civil War, still contested ground in national memory. Taken together, this is fieldwork translated into stage movement with a historian’s caution, evidence of research discipline rather than dramatic convenience, the chains of inheritance handled with the same rigour as the freedoms built against them.

Technically, Oloruntoba rarely treats movement and dialogue as alternating modes. In Nine Nights, the reconciliation between Nneoma and Ikenna is entirely spoken, yet the wake keeping drums sound quietly beneath the whole exchange rather than falling silent for dialogue, so that grief remains physically present even in a scene built from words. He is equally deliberate about the opposite choice: in Chains, Alegria’s response to her own assault is staged as a solo entirely without speech, her fury only becoming legible when it spreads into the ensemble’s collective movement.

Beyond Nigeria’s borders, the anthology’s most durable value is its consistent refusal to present itself as the final word on any tradition it engages. Its glossary and citation of real, named forms, among them Ekombi, Gelede, Owu, Bata and Elegun Sango, Bori, Swange, Igue Ivbioba, function less as a text to be staged verbatim by outsiders and more as an entry point that redirects readers toward the living communities who hold these practices. That posture, structural rather than gestured at, is precisely what serious cross border engagement with cultural material now demands. Its most immediate institutional home is likely to be university theatre and performance studies departments, particularly within Nigeria, where the practitioner relationships the text calls for, a Bori healer, a Sango priest or priestess, a native Igbo or Efik speaker, are locally available rather than aspirational. It is difficult to overstate what that represents for the field: a text authored from inside the traditions it draws upon, offered outward, positioned to shape how global practitioners, choreographers, and dance anthropologists talk about inherited performance for years to come.

Judged specifically as an author, Oloruntoba’s most consistent skill is structural patience: his mastery of a device such as a character’s silence or a recurring gesture is what allows it to develop across a full play rather than announce itself early, the mark of a writer thinking in complete dramatic architecture rather than scene by scene effect. His handling of moral complexity is equally authoritative: antagonists across the collection, among them Perez in Chains, Chief Okikiolu in Sango’s Verdict, and Kunle in Ẹ̀yìnjú, are each given an interior history that explains their cruelty without excusing it, a genuinely difficult balance the author sustains across the whole anthology rather than achieving only in isolated scenes. Just as notable is Oloruntoba’s refusal of easy resolution: Swange for the Fallen ends not with reconciliation but with two grieving fathers laying stones beside each other in silence. This is a writer’s compelling command of irresolution, trusting his audience rather than manufacturing comfort for them, and it reads as a deliberate authorial signature rather than an accident of pacing.

That discipline, however, has a limit. Three of the ten plays, The Weight of Silence, Ẹ̀yìnjú, and Aruefen’s Crown, resolve violence against women through structurally similar means: an institution or a community intervenes, and a private wrong becomes a public reckoning. Cultural specificity does real work distinguishing the three from one another, yet a reader moving through the anthology in sequence is likely to notice the shared architecture before fully registering the differences beneath it. Naming that pattern honestly does not diminish the individual plays; it simply marks the one place where Oloruntoba’s considerable range has not yet extended as far as it clearly could.

Taken as a whole, Inherited Freedom is the work of a writer operating with unusual discipline across both craft and conscience, equally attentive to what a body can say without words and to what a text should never say on behalf of a tradition that is not fully his to narrate alone. It is a collection that rewards being read start to finish, and one likely to remain a live working reference for choreographers, dramaturgs, and cultural historians well beyond its first publication.