Aesthetics: The Dialectics and Theatrics of Theatre and Communication

Introduction
The book Aesthetics: The Dialectics and Theatrics of Theatre and Communication is a comprehensive discourse on the various aspects of aesthetics and its critical connection with the theatre. In recent times, there has been a growing concern among scholars over the quality
of media presentations; thus raising the age-long debate on the acceptability of certain artistic and aesthetic standards. This concern has equally generated rigorous scholastic debates on the quality of teaching in our higher institutions and the quality of presentations either in the mass media, creative arts, music, literature or theatre.

E. D. Akpan has been Widely credited as the scholar who ignited serious academic concerns on this subject in the last quarter of the last century. Since then, there have been books and a journal devoted to the on-going debate on aesthetics.

Dr. Johnson’s effort is, scholastically speaking, one which has broken new grounds in the area of theatre arts and communication. I have not read a more comprehensive discourse on the subject by any Nigerian. The book, which has eight lucidly-written chapters, is quite detailed in all the aspects of the author’s exposition.

Johnson, an accomplished practitioner, seems to see aesthetics in almost all aspects of theatre production – from the script, acting, directing, costume and make-up to music, songs, sound, lighting, scenery and the stage.

Dr. Johnson’s style seems to improve with each chapter and he appears to be in his elements when he draws from his teaching or stage experience. Some of his statements read like poetry or even like a rhapsody. As a work which draws a lot from personal experience, the ‘I’ seems to pervade the discussion and sometimes appears to obtrude against the free ?ow of his home-grown experience and rendition. Again, Johnson seems to have the high-sounding terms of his
discipline, some of which he has had the liberty to coin and which enrich the vocabulary of theatre arts. But, to the uninitiated, some of these may sound like Faustian riddle. But I was entertained by them. When I ran into the ‘dramatic-ness’ of the drama (and not its theatricalityl, I
naturally ducked when he talked about the ‘believabilism’ of a genetic colour differential.

I am not quite sure that Johnson intended any obfuscation at any point but I think some may have escaped him. As a work by an African scholar, there are very many African (Nigerian) examples. I am quite pleased with this because Euro-American texts are not likely to provide our examples
if not in contradistinction to their seeming superiority in techniques.

This book will certainly ?ll a yawning gap in theatre aesthetics and theatricality from the African point of view. I am quite pleased with Dr. Johnson’s efforts because I see in it a work that cuts across disciplinary boundaries. Theatre Arts is one of the communication arts and is rightly a sub-discipline of communication. Many of the examples and aspects of aesthetics are of general and speci?c interest to the student or scholar in communication arts.

If the film producer/director or broadcast programme director/producer is not interested in his discourse in acting, directing, make-up, music, scenery and the stage, what else would he or she be interested in? Even when he discusses lighting and scenery, it is for the same reason that the theatre artist should be interested.

This is a work whose future seems assured in the market and, before long, we could be heading for a revised edition arising from feedback from other practitioners and scholars. One other thing I enjoy in this work is readiness to be grounded as an African work preferring to draw most of its graphic and lucid examples from African / Nigerian sources. This is a work the Nigerian market has been waiting for, for a long time. It probably should have come from communication. But no matter. It is like rose, any colour will do!

Des Wilson
Professor of Communication
University of Uyo and Editor,
Journal of Aesthetics and University Media
July 2004.