A Re-Interpretation of Efua Sutherland’s The Marriage of Anansewa as a Ghanaian Musical Theatre.

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2016-07

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University Of Ghana

Abstract

Ghanaians have all along been involved in drama through rituals, festivals, events of enstoolment of chiefs, oral narratives, ceremonies, and so on. Music has always played integral part in these events. Various musical types such as Opera, Operetta, American Minstrelsy and Vaudeville emerged as a result of external (colonial acculturation, exposure to foreign media patronage, etc.) influences. Adaptation of foreign musicals genres into local content, which imitate Ghanaian socio-cultural life is another effect worth noting. Examples of these can be drawn from our popular early ‘Itinerant’ Concert Party, ‘Keysoap’ Concert Party, Osofo Dazie, Obra, and Cantata television programmes. However, a regular feature across all these Ghanaian musical adaptions is the borrowing of existing songs by both traditional and popular musicians to convey the plot of the story. This thesis examines a particular kind of musical genre with a connective story expressed in script or dialogue with emphasis on speaking, singing and dancing in the story telling process. The music usually scored out of a libretto (lyrics) from play text by a composer, referred to as book musical. As a Master of Fine Arts project (MFA), the experiment seeks to re-interpret some spoken dialogues into sung dialogues with Ghanaian traditional and popular music styles and accompaniment using Efua Sutherland’s The Marriage of Anansewa as case in point. The creative process begins with the interpreted play texts as song texts, converted into melodies with their musical accompaniments through MIDI technology. The performative aspect follows with audition, production conference, rehearsals, and performance. The main objective of this project is to model a Ghanaian book musical theatre

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Thesis (MFA)

Keywords

Re-Interpretation, Marriage of Anansewa, Musical Theatre, Drama, Ghana

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