ABSTRACT
In radio, words jostle with music, cooperating and at times competing, and no doubt sometimes carrying differing priorities for differing listeners and situations. In film, long a familiar medium in Africa, spoken or sung verbal dimensions may be relatively prominent, in this sense comparable to other genres of verbal art; but language does not always lie at its heart, for crucial roles are taken by visual manifestations, by music and other sonic input, sometimes by dance – all of which make it possible, as with the popular indigenous films in Nigeria, to communicate polyvocally across linguistic boundaries. A signal move was the so-called ‘breakthrough into performance’ first enunciated in anthropology and folklore. By now this has pervaded many disciplines, a highly productive strand running across literary, cultural and sociolinguistic studies and also crystallizing in the now established field of performance studies.
