An Exploration of Ivom Dance Festival of the Tiv People of Nigeria

Abstract

In Tiv society like most societies in Africa and the world in general, the primary and most general function of a festival is to renounce and then to announce culture; to renew periodically the life stream of a community by creating new energy, and to give sanctions to its institutions. In sum, a festival presents a holistic range of behavioral modalities, each related to the modalities of normal daily life. At festiva l times, people do something they normally do not; they abstain from something they normally do; they carry extreme behaviors that are usually regulated by measure; they invert patterns of daily social life. This paper is thus, a synoptic appraisal of what constitutes the world of the Ivom dance festival and how it can be treated to become a reference African theatre tradition. To this end, the paper is a product of an anthropological survey of the Ivom dance festival of the Tiv people of central Nigeria with emphasis on performance aesthetics. The methodology employed in this paper was based on the writer’s participatory-observation approach. The essentials of this paper are achieved by realizing some of the objectives of the Ivom dance festival by demonstrating the nuances of the dance performance as well as establishing the facts about its socio-cultural, and political aesthetic functions.