In traditional Africa, everyday life, blending profane and sacred activities, is permeated with music, dance, rhythmic movement, symbolic gestures, song, and verbal artistry. Body adornment—costuming, painting, tattooing, decorating, and masking—is not only a mark of status, age, and sex differentiations but also serves as an element of beautification, play, imitation, impersonation, and visual communication of religious values.

Dramatic performances by soloists and groups of actors interacting with active spectators originate from the combination of these features in recurring formal settings. Simple routine activities as well as momentous events—the hoeing of a field, the telling of a tale, the recitation of an epic, the coming out ceremony of a newborn child, the celebration of a marriage, the initiation of young men and women, the enthronement of a chief, or the burial rites of a headman—are accompanied by dramatic performances, all with...