ABSTRACT
There is a serious effort among Igbo scholars to define the relationship between Igbo myth, ritual and drama. M. J. C. Echeruo who expresses the view that myth is the main substance of drama, argues that Igbo drama cannot evolve until this myth is freed from the ritual in which it is buried. 1 Echeruo’s article has generated much controversy, especially at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka where the article was first presented at a seminar on Igbo language and Literature in November, 1971. A battle line seems to have been drawn:
So far, two schools of thought seem to crystallize around the question deriving from attitudes which one could reasonably call evolutionary and relativistic. The evolutionist theory is well represented in an article by Professor M. J. C. Echeruo called ‘The Dramatic Limits of Igbo Rituals’. Professor Echeruo uses the Odo Festival to illustrate his thesis. His central proposition is that the Odo Festival, like the Greek Dionysian and Apollonian festivals contains dramatic elements capable of future development into full-bodied drama. Ritual and myth, in his view, would first of all be shorn of their coagulating sacredness and rendered sufficiently mobile for use in a secular drama built on the destiny of differentiated, individual characters.
The relativistic view flatly contradicts the evolutionary one and insists that the ritual festivals in Africa represent full and authenticated drama that should be recognized as such; that they are communal dramas which differ from secular, individuated modern drama with its precise separation of its stage from the auditorium, of actors from the audience and stage time from the duration of the experience enacted on the stage. 2
