Now showing
Beauty and the Beast: Two Igbo Masquerades
About this film
African Encounters Video Series Beauty and the Beast A video program with videography and narration by Herbert M. Cole. The video was taken in 1983 in the Agwa village-group in Nigeria. Beauty and the Beast: Comparing Two Igbo Masquerades By Herbert M. Cole This video compares two quite different, separate masquerades in a single Igbo community: Ekeleke, a dance of several stilt maskers, along with a masked leopard and diviner, contrasting with Okoroshi, a more complex and lengthy masquerade featuring a few pretty white-faced maidens and a much larger contingent of dark masculine masks. Ekeleke, played twice daily over five days week, shows several types of virtuoso stilt dancing and a brief play in which the lead stilt masker, with the diviner’s help, subdues the leopard. Okoroshi plays night and day for six weeks, with as many as a hundred maskers, most of them the dark males, some powerful, with twisted and ugly faces. Ekeleke is primarily entertainment, whereas Okoroshi, at least a few decades ago, was a serious display of Igbo values under spiritual sanctions, with some maskers exercising social control by pressuring errant behavior. Beauty vs. Beast notions play out twice: fi…
Directors & creators
Herbert M Cole, Karen L Morell
Subjects
Nigeria, Igbo, Igbo (African people) -- Social life and customs, Masquerades, African Art History, Masks, Dance, Music, University of Washington, Ethnographic films, Documentary films
More from this pool