ABSTRACT
In Igboland, to watch a masquerade dance is to watch complexity-elegance, agility, masculinity, beauty (sometimes ugliness), shifting patterns, entertainment, ritual, and art (art that is simultaneously classical and baroque in its complexity and paradox). The constant in all this is movement (paradox!). The masquerade is territorial (literally) in its (the masquerade is a spirit, remember!) claims, enforcing shifting distances between performer (masquerade) and audience. An element that is crucial in this interaction takes us back to art-perspective. The Igbo used lessons learned from their encounter with the masquerade to articulate the way they see and relate to/with the world-from different perspectives. The crucial elements in the encounter between the Igbo and the masquerade-shifting patterns, territorial claims, location, movement, aesthetics, paradox, and perspectives-punctuate the history of feminist engagement (as theory and practice) nationally and globally.
