Abstract:
The Kenya Schools and Colleges Drama Festival is a series of student-theatre competitions in, held
from January to April annually. Students across all learning institutions take part in these festivals. The
competitive nature of these festivals provides an opportunity for participants to be creative in their
submissions. The festivals feature many genres, including cultural creative dances. Traditional dances,
as a sub-genre of orature, play are integral to the appreciation and maintenance of traditional cultures.
They tell creative or literary stories orally and in a modern context. Therefore, this article seeks to
articulate how cultural creative dances performed during drama festivals tell creative or literary stories
orally. The study sought to describe the literary stories told and themes addressed through the dances,
analyse the dramatic and oral literary features of these stories and the literary features included during
performance and adjudication of cultural creative dances. The study used descriptive and analytical
methods to underline important practical, philosophical, aesthetic, and psychological considerations in
determining the artistic quality of cultural dances in Kenya’s Drama Festivals. It thus relied on
qualitative data obtained through textual analysis, interviews, focus group discussions and participant
observation. The study employed the performance theory and theatre semiotics to examine the unique
literary quality of these dances. The study found that cultural creative dances tell stories unique to the
cultures from which they are composed. They also address themes of human or universal relevance
out of those cultures. Moreover, cultural creative dances exhibit all features of literariness in terms of
their composition. Some of these features make it to the stage performance and adjudication process.
However, adjudication examines other technical aspects of production based on the themes prescribed
for the festival by the government. This research underlines the place of cultural creative dance as
dramatic genre and oral literary performance. |
