ABSTRACT
Western-style theatrical performance with a stage separating the audience from the performers did not exist in traditional African societies. Instead object performance was part of dramatic spectacles that fulfilled three primary functions – rituals that often marked the transition of ancestors from the material to the spirit world, storytelling that provided moral education for youth, and masquerade spectacles that served to build community. Slavery destroyed the social institutions that supported public dramas like Kongo processions and Geledé masquerades. If the enslaved had been permitted to organize such dramatic spectacles, they could easily have organized revolts. African object performance survived, however, in fragmentary form. Cycles of tales such as the Brer Rabbit and Anansi stories persisted in the oral literature of the Black Atlantic even when the storytellers were prohibited from using figures to act them out. Syncretism with Catholic rituals enabled New World Africans to continue honoring some ancestral spirits and folklore characters in street dramas during processions for Catholic saints and Carnival masquerades even though colonial officials banned the traditional body masks that had originally covered dancers’ faces. Thus New World Africans continued to carry out the primary functions of African object performance even without objects.
