Google today releases a stunning doodle to rejoice on the 84th birthday of Ola Rotimi, one of Nigeria’s leading playwrights and theatre administrators. Originally named Olawale Gladstone Emmanuel Rotimi, Ola Rotimi has been referred to as “a complete man of the theatre – an actor, director, choreographer, and clothier – who created overall performance areas, inspired by conventional architectural bureaucracy.”
Ola Rotimi turned into born on April thirteen, 1938 in Sapele, Nigeria in her own family of artists. He attended St. Cyprian’s School in Port Harcourt from 1945 to 1949, St Jude’s School, Lagos, from 1951 to 1952, and the Methodist Boys High School in Lagos. In 1959, he traveled to America to look at Boston University, wherein he obtained a BA in excellent arts.
Ola Rotimi got married to Hazel Mae Gaudreau in 1965. Throughout his profession, he wrote and directed dozens of performances and short testimonies that poignantly examined Nigeria’s ethnic traditions and history. In the Sixties, he began teaching at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) in Nigeria where he based the Ori Olokun Acting Company and Port Harcourt. Owing, in part, to political situations in Nigeria, Rotimi spent a good deal of the Nineties residing in the Caribbean and the US, in where he taught at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Ola Rotimi’s later dramas consist of The Gods Are Not to Blame (produced 1968; published 1971), a retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in imaginative verse; Kurumi and the Prodigal (produced 1969; posted as Kurumi, 1971), written for the second one Ife Festival of Arts; Ovonramwen Nogbaisi (produced 1971; published 1974), approximately the ultimate ruler of the Benin empire; and Holding Talks (1979).
Ola Rotimi turned into recognized to have a bigger-than-existence imaginative and prescient and embraced dance, music, and even mime within his productions. His performs pulled returned the curtain to unveil traditional Nigerian rituals, songs, and dances to audiences everywhere in the global. He died on August 18, 2000, at the age of sixty-two.
Google these days honors “the daddy of Nollywood” and certainly one of Nigeria’s essential dramatists, Ola Rotimi on his 84th birthday.
Who is Ola Rotimi in keeping with Encyclopedia.Com
The dramatic works of Ola Rotimi are recognized for the duration of Africa and their features made him one of the maximum full-size playwrights on that continent. His dramatic works had been accomplished in Europe and Africa and are the point of interest of study in Europe and in American universities with African studies applications.
He has additionally posted brief memories and important articles on African theater. A performed play director, Rotimi has taken many works at once to the human beings with the University of Ife Theatre, a repertory agency that performs works within the Yoruba language, Nigerian pidgin, and English.
The youngest of 3 children, Olawale, known as Ola, turned into born on April thirteen, 1938. His father, Samuel Enitan Rotimi become a steam-release engineer from the Yoruba ethnic institution of Western Nigeria, and his mother, Dorcas Oruene, become an Ijo from Nembe in Eastern Nigeria. The young boy grew up mastering 4 of the 3 hundred complete-blooded languages spoken in Nigeria, as well as English, the administrative language of the USA.
In conclusion, Rotimi attended the Methodist Boys High School in the capital city of Lagos from 1952 to 1956, at some point in which era he earned the nicknames “Shakespeare incarnate” and “the Poet” for his writing. Some of his works had been broadcast on Nigerian radio and posted in institutional magazines.
On a scholarship from the Nigerian authorities, Rotimi studied theater at Boston University, and from 1963 to 1966 he earned a Master of Fine Arts diploma in playwriting and dramatic literature at Yale University on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. His socio-political comedy Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again became chosen by Yale‘s scholar play of the year in 1966.
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