ABSTRACT
The African oral tradition distills the essences of human experiences, shaping them into memorable, readily retrievable images of broad applicability, with an extraordinary potential for eliciting emotional responses. These images are removed from their historical contexts so that performers may recontextualize them in artistic forms. The oral arts, containing this sensory residue of past cultural life and the wisdom so engendered, constitute a medium for organizing, examining, and interpreting an audience’s experiences of the images of the present.
