STAND-UP COMEDY, SPOKEN WORDS, SOLO ACTING AND THE FESTIVAL OF SOLO PERFORMANCE IN AFRICA

The creative industry in Nigeria continues to make giant strides in order to keep the industry vibrant and promote the arts; and the maiden edition of the festival of solo performance (Solo Africa) is one of such remarkable events. This paper aims to illuminate the performances of the main Stand-up Comedians, Solo Actors, Spoken Word artistes and other solo artistes at the event and portray them as the continuation of the storytelling tradition. The African folkist theory will be adopted in this research with the avantgardist theory of the theatre which allows ample room for experimentation. The Field Study approach is employed in this paper because it gives prominence to observations made de-emphasising numerical data; it is a descriptive qualitative method. Findings in this paper reveal that the storytelling tradition that seems to be going into extinction has long been reborn in the performances of today's solo performers. This implies that the storyteller has been split into the different styles of modern solo performance but an adept storyteller can still manifest all these styles in his performance. This paper therefore recommends that research should not be left in the hands of only scholars and critics, performers should be encouraged to research their own performances and theorize about them, to engender a proper connect between theory and practice.