Port Harcourt, Nigeria -- Dan Hoyle, a San Francisco native, created the solo shows "Circumnavigator" and "Florida 2004: The Big Bummer." He is in Nigeria on a Fulbright scholarship gathering material for a third show about oil politics. He's also gained fame at oil-worker bars for his hip-thrusting karaoke interpretations of Buddy Holly songs..
"Waity don dey kolo o!" came a mocking voice from the darkness. It hit me like a verbal rotten tomato, rocking me back on my heels. I shook it off as fast as I translated it: "White man's going crazy!" Then came the follow-up: "Abeg o, comot dier!" That was more explicit: "Get off the stage!"
In San Francisco, performing this scene from my solo show "Circumnavigator" was always a highlight; the crowd always laughed, and I could feel their eyes trained on my pivoting body, engrossed. But that was in front of a mostly white American audience. This time, I was performing under the dim lights of the Crab, the University of Port Harcourt's theater, in front of 200 Nigerian students.
Time slowed to a nightmarish crawl, my vision blurred, faces in the crowd seemed to melt like wax figurines, and my brain added some sinister and distorted circus music. My Nigerian performance debut was on the verge of bombing big time.
It hadn't gone this way in dress rehearsal. The day before, students and professors received my performance with great acclaim. The presiding theater professor, in the formal and abrasive critique session he unleashed on every performer, even let slip his prediction that "the public is going to enjoy it very much."
Indeed, they were enjoying it, but that was the problem. They were enjoying it too much. In Nigeria, enjoyment at the theater takes many forms. It can be at the actors' expense, laughing at him for the sake of laughing at someone exposed and vulnerable, or it can have nothing to do with the actor. There is no expectation that the audience will be quiet and attentive. In their minds, they've paid to get in. They can do whatever they want. It was midnight at Uniport, a university of 25,000 students with a reputation for plenty of partying and tricky women, and I was only a small part of the show. To my right, the DJ was fighting with the director of the previous play. "O boi, u wan trai mi?" I could hear him shouting. He had insisted on playing hip-hop between scenes instead of the traditional Nigerian drumming, as the director had rehearsed for two weeks.
It was an unfair power play by the DJ, and he knew it, and thus he repeated the only relevant question which meant "You want me to leave?"
I realized I had to get bigger and louder to battle the sideshows for the audience's attention. Fortunately, I'd reached the appropriate part of my scene: the moment when, surrounded by hostile teenagers on a deserted road in Kenya, I burst into freestyle battle rhymes and deflated the tension. But as I began the freestyle, I realized that my audience might not even understand me. My American accent isn't easily understood in Nigeria, even when I'm not rapping.
Freed from the need to make any sense at all, I went wild, opening up on the audience with a flurry of fast lines like a hail of blind punches in a drunken bar brawl. "*****, get off of it, I'm from San Francisco, you never heard of it? The place where chicks let weird s -- grow out of their f -- armpits!" I felt the crowd rock back a bit. I'd landed a body blow. Never mind that probably no one got the joke I was making about San Francisco's liberal, aging, hippie culture. I had put together a bunch of words quickly, and they rhymed. More important, I was now on the offensive, which is almost a permanent condition for most Nigerians, on and offstage. It was cultural sensitivity, Nigerian style.
" 'Cause I squirm like worms coming out of Medusa's sperm," I continued, squiggling like a worm. "But nothing that I say is ever permanent, I'm sick and nasty like diseased vermin and ..."
The line stunned even me, and everything was still but sharp, like a camera flash. I could see the expressions on the faces in the crowd, perfectly clear, and for a moment, the crowd and I were one, frozen in communion. I felt like Romero the matador when he thrusts his sword into his bull's neck in Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises."
They started to clap. I kept rapping and they kept clapping, and I wasn't sure who should stop. Then the DJ blasted music, a hostile get-off-the-stage cue, like at the Academy Awards when they need to go to a commercial break. I considered bowing and running off, but the scene wasn't over.
I had to present my work in its complete form. I was back in my American theater artist mind-set. The spell of pure Nigerian audience contact had been broken.
I swiveled toward the DJ and drew a line across my neck with my finger: Cut the music. He did, and then it was quiet, and I had to bring this Nigerian audience back to my Kenyan road, had to play the Kenyan muggers reacting to my rap, letting out enthusiastic shouts of approval and launching into their own (horrible) raps.
Scholars have traced hip-hop's origins from funk to soul to jazz to blues and all the way back to African rhythms. So normally the scene teems with irony: In it I play myself playing Eminem, the white rapper whose virtuosity and accessibility helped thrust hip-hop, originally a largely African American art form, into mainstream American pop culture.
I evade a mugging by performing a white man's version of their own -- stolen -- culture. Meanwhile, my would-be muggers can't rap at all but spend their afternoons imitating Eminem, a white guy who, like so many white boys in urban America, grew up wanting to be black. The irony is not lost on urban intellectual audiences in America.
Performing at the Crab in Nigeria, in front of a completely African audience for the first time, the irony overflowed and seeped into the aisles, unnoticed. Half the crowd was a lot like those boys on the Kenyan road, blustery Americana imitators kitted out in G-Unit chains and 50 Cent hats, reciting the latest Eminem rhymes in a hollow African accent.
I was a white guy interpreting African guys interpreting a white guy interpreting black American guys, this time in front of African guys. I finished the scene, bowed and bounded off the stage. No one clapped. It was only later I learned that people don't normally clap after a performance, only during, when they like something.
Outside, a few of my friends greeted me. "You tried, oh, you really tried, " said Dearest, a lanky med student in complete hip-hop wear. "I'm from San Francisco, I'm from ... you know!" shouted Buky, a drunken ex-military officer enrolled as a theater arts student. I wasn't sure if he was doing me or the Kenyan rappers, or trying to impersonate me and thus becoming like the Kenyan rappers. Perhaps he couldn't tell the difference.
I didn't know whether people liked the performance until the next day, when all around campus I was greeted with shouts of "Eminem! You look like Eminem!"
But this time, they didn't want my money. They just wanted me to teach them how I rap, and they wanted me to be in their play. The offers were numerous, but I finally settled on a role I couldn't refuse: playing a white missionary captured by the king of Benin. My older brother Jonah had come to visit me, so we both offered our services.
A short rehearsal consisted of constant shouting, a lot of confusion and not much concrete planning. The next day, we arrived at noon, inexplicably on time. At 4 p.m., after moving the venue twice, waiting for the rain to stop, waiting for the actors to arrive, waiting for the crowd to come and then running out to buy film for the camera, Jonah and I made our first entrance.
To play 19th century missionaries, we were instructed to wear our regular clothes, plus ties. Entering through the audience, I summoned up my best colonial English twit persona, which was incredibly hammy.
Nigerian acting is, by Western standards, incredibly hammy. Jonah, in only his second day in Nigeria, looked profoundly confused. Since we were playing captured missionaries accused of killing the prince of the kingdom, his confusion was probably in character.
A videographer stumbled around the stage, aiming her camera all too often at Jonah and me (as white actors in Nigeria, we were automatic celebrities). The performance didn't resemble the rehearsal at all.
There were many new characters: a cross-eyed second chief (who kept asking me if I knew how to pray), a juju priest who seemed to have escaped from a budget version of the lion king and about four women, all vying to play the part of the virgin who gets sacrificed.
Never before had I seen so many virgins clamoring to be sacrificed. And there were many new scenes. Jonah and I were captured, put in chains (mimed), freed and crowned with chieftaincy titles and given canes and beads (real) three times instead of once as in rehearsal.
Scenes that had lasted five minutes took 15. The director, an enthusiastic but wildly disorganized man named Joshua, played the king's servant and took every opportunity to improvise slapstick comedy. For some reason, he played the role shirtless. Several unplanned fights broke out. As far as I can tell, Nigerians love nothing more than a fight onstage.
When the king said he needed a virgin, I turned to the crowd and asked for volunteers, which got a laugh. When I tried it again, someone shouted insults. I resumed playing the hammy missionary in chains and was rewarded with a compliment. Jonah was now past confusion and doing his best not to explode in laughter. By the final scene, 300 people had gathered to watch our play. They were transfixed.
When the virgin was ordered to be sacrificed by her own father, the crowd shrieked. During a three-minute sob fest, the father-daughter combo received the ultimate compliment: Several audience members stepped onstage and sprinkled them with 20 naira notes (the local currency, about 15 cents apiece).
When Joshua performed the grand special effect -- dousing the virgin, at this point rather unconvincingly represented by a bundle of clothes on a wooden board, with gasoline and lighting her on fire. The crowd roared.
"Things That Happened at the King of Benin's Court," as Jonah titled the play, was a huge hit.
I have since performed at the American Consulate in Lagos and for a special dinner of British military police and Nigerian senators in Port Harcourt, but these elite audiences don't provide the instant feedback and thrill of unpredictability that the Nigerian popular theater does. I worry that performing back in the States, for audiences who wait to clap at the end, who sleep instead of heckle you when they're bored and who never shower you with money, might seem a bit bland.
Who knows, maybe I could carve out a career as a character actor playing missionaries and Eminem types in Nigeria. Just the other day, Joshua said that he wants to shoot a movie and that he has the perfect role for me.
"Waity don dey kolo o!" came a mocking voice from the darkness. It hit me like a verbal rotten tomato, rocking me back on my heels. I shook it off as fast as I translated it: "White man's going crazy!" Then came the follow-up: "Abeg o, comot dier!" That was more explicit: "Get off the stage!"
In San Francisco, performing this scene from my solo show "Circumnavigator" was always a highlight; the crowd always laughed, and I could feel their eyes trained on my pivoting body, engrossed. But that was in front of a mostly white American audience. This time, I was performing under the dim lights of the Crab, the University of Port Harcourt's theater, in front of 200 Nigerian students.
Time slowed to a nightmarish crawl, my vision blurred, faces in the crowd seemed to melt like wax figurines, and my brain added some sinister and distorted circus music. My Nigerian performance debut was on the verge of bombing big time.
It hadn't gone this way in dress rehearsal. The day before, students and professors received my performance with great acclaim. The presiding theater professor, in the formal and abrasive critique session he unleashed on every performer, even let slip his prediction that "the public is going to enjoy it very much."
Indeed, they were enjoying it, but that was the problem. They were enjoying it too much. In Nigeria, enjoyment at the theater takes many forms. It can be at the actors' expense, laughing at him for the sake of laughing at someone exposed and vulnerable, or it can have nothing to do with the actor. There is no expectation that the audience will be quiet and attentive. In their minds, they've paid to get in. They can do whatever they want. It was midnight at Uniport, a university of 25,000 students with a reputation for plenty of partying and tricky women, and I was only a small part of the show. To my right, the DJ was fighting with the director of the previous play. "O boi, u wan trai mi?" I could hear him shouting. He had insisted on playing hip-hop between scenes instead of the traditional Nigerian drumming, as the director had rehearsed for two weeks.
It was an unfair power play by the DJ, and he knew it, and thus he repeated the only relevant question which meant "You want me to leave?"
I realized I had to get bigger and louder to battle the sideshows for the audience's attention. Fortunately, I'd reached the appropriate part of my scene: the moment when, surrounded by hostile teenagers on a deserted road in Kenya, I burst into freestyle battle rhymes and deflated the tension. But as I began the freestyle, I realized that my audience might not even understand me. My American accent isn't easily understood in Nigeria, even when I'm not rapping.
Freed from the need to make any sense at all, I went wild, opening up on the audience with a flurry of fast lines like a hail of blind punches in a drunken bar brawl. "*****, get off of it, I'm from San Francisco, you never heard of it? The place where chicks let weird s -- grow out of their f -- armpits!" I felt the crowd rock back a bit. I'd landed a body blow. Never mind that probably no one got the joke I was making about San Francisco's liberal, aging, hippie culture. I had put together a bunch of words quickly, and they rhymed. More important, I was now on the offensive, which is almost a permanent condition for most Nigerians, on and offstage. It was cultural sensitivity, Nigerian style.
" 'Cause I squirm like worms coming out of Medusa's sperm," I continued, squiggling like a worm. "But nothing that I say is ever permanent, I'm sick and nasty like diseased vermin and ..."
The line stunned even me, and everything was still but sharp, like a camera flash. I could see the expressions on the faces in the crowd, perfectly clear, and for a moment, the crowd and I were one, frozen in communion. I felt like Romero the matador when he thrusts his sword into his bull's neck in Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises."
They started to clap. I kept rapping and they kept clapping, and I wasn't sure who should stop. Then the DJ blasted music, a hostile get-off-the-stage cue, like at the Academy Awards when they need to go to a commercial break. I considered bowing and running off, but the scene wasn't over.
I had to present my work in its complete form. I was back in my American theater artist mind-set. The spell of pure Nigerian audience contact had been broken.
I swiveled toward the DJ and drew a line across my neck with my finger: Cut the music. He did, and then it was quiet, and I had to bring this Nigerian audience back to my Kenyan road, had to play the Kenyan muggers reacting to my rap, letting out enthusiastic shouts of approval and launching into their own (horrible) raps.
Scholars have traced hip-hop's origins from funk to soul to jazz to blues and all the way back to African rhythms. So normally the scene teems with irony: In it I play myself playing Eminem, the white rapper whose virtuosity and accessibility helped thrust hip-hop, originally a largely African American art form, into mainstream American pop culture.
I evade a mugging by performing a white man's version of their own -- stolen -- culture. Meanwhile, my would-be muggers can't rap at all but spend their afternoons imitating Eminem, a white guy who, like so many white boys in urban America, grew up wanting to be black. The irony is not lost on urban intellectual audiences in America.
Performing at the Crab in Nigeria, in front of a completely African audience for the first time, the irony overflowed and seeped into the aisles, unnoticed. Half the crowd was a lot like those boys on the Kenyan road, blustery Americana imitators kitted out in G-Unit chains and 50 Cent hats, reciting the latest Eminem rhymes in a hollow African accent.
I was a white guy interpreting African guys interpreting a white guy interpreting black American guys, this time in front of African guys. I finished the scene, bowed and bounded off the stage. No one clapped. It was only later I learned that people don't normally clap after a performance, only during, when they like something.
Outside, a few of my friends greeted me. "You tried, oh, you really tried, " said Dearest, a lanky med student in complete hip-hop wear. "I'm from San Francisco, I'm from ... you know!" shouted Buky, a drunken ex-military officer enrolled as a theater arts student. I wasn't sure if he was doing me or the Kenyan rappers, or trying to impersonate me and thus becoming like the Kenyan rappers. Perhaps he couldn't tell the difference.
I didn't know whether people liked the performance until the next day, when all around campus I was greeted with shouts of "Eminem! You look like Eminem!"
But this time, they didn't want my money. They just wanted me to teach them how I rap, and they wanted me to be in their play. The offers were numerous, but I finally settled on a role I couldn't refuse: playing a white missionary captured by the king of Benin. My older brother Jonah had come to visit me, so we both offered our services.
A short rehearsal consisted of constant shouting, a lot of confusion and not much concrete planning. The next day, we arrived at noon, inexplicably on time. At 4 p.m., after moving the venue twice, waiting for the rain to stop, waiting for the actors to arrive, waiting for the crowd to come and then running out to buy film for the camera, Jonah and I made our first entrance.
To play 19th century missionaries, we were instructed to wear our regular clothes, plus ties. Entering through the audience, I summoned up my best colonial English twit persona, which was incredibly hammy.
Nigerian acting is, by Western standards, incredibly hammy. Jonah, in only his second day in Nigeria, looked profoundly confused. Since we were playing captured missionaries accused of killing the prince of the kingdom, his confusion was probably in character.
A videographer stumbled around the stage, aiming her camera all too often at Jonah and me (as white actors in Nigeria, we were automatic celebrities). The performance didn't resemble the rehearsal at all.
There were many new characters: a cross-eyed second chief (who kept asking me if I knew how to pray), a juju priest who seemed to have escaped from a budget version of the lion king and about four women, all vying to play the part of the virgin who gets sacrificed.
Never before had I seen so many virgins clamoring to be sacrificed. And there were many new scenes. Jonah and I were captured, put in chains (mimed), freed and crowned with chieftaincy titles and given canes and beads (real) three times instead of once as in rehearsal.
Scenes that had lasted five minutes took 15. The director, an enthusiastic but wildly disorganized man named Joshua, played the king's servant and took every opportunity to improvise slapstick comedy. For some reason, he played the role shirtless. Several unplanned fights broke out. As far as I can tell, Nigerians love nothing more than a fight onstage.
When the king said he needed a virgin, I turned to the crowd and asked for volunteers, which got a laugh. When I tried it again, someone shouted insults. I resumed playing the hammy missionary in chains and was rewarded with a compliment. Jonah was now past confusion and doing his best not to explode in laughter. By the final scene, 300 people had gathered to watch our play. They were transfixed.
When the virgin was ordered to be sacrificed by her own father, the crowd shrieked. During a three-minute sob fest, the father-daughter combo received the ultimate compliment: Several audience members stepped onstage and sprinkled them with 20 naira notes (the local currency, about 15 cents apiece).
When Joshua performed the grand special effect -- dousing the virgin, at this point rather unconvincingly represented by a bundle of clothes on a wooden board, with gasoline and lighting her on fire. The crowd roared.
"Things That Happened at the King of Benin's Court," as Jonah titled the play, was a huge hit.
I have since performed at the American Consulate in Lagos and for a special dinner of British military police and Nigerian senators in Port Harcourt, but these elite audiences don't provide the instant feedback and thrill of unpredictability that the Nigerian popular theater does. I worry that performing back in the States, for audiences who wait to clap at the end, who sleep instead of heckle you when they're bored and who never shower you with money, might seem a bit bland.
Who knows, maybe I could carve out a career as a character actor playing missionaries and Eminem types in Nigeria. Just the other day, Joshua said that he wants to shoot a movie and that he has the perfect role for me.
Buy on AliExpress.com
