A-ARTs: From Ghana to U.K, Atanda lifts indigenous weddings

Pan-African Nuptials & Alaga Showcase at National Theatre of Ghana, Accra. Pic: c/o Producer.

By Ola Alowoloke

ACROSS diverse cultures of the world, marriages between families, sometimes involve ceremonies that expose deep customs of the people. In Africa, specifically, Nigeria, weddings are like festivals as explored in two different ethnic groups by cultural event producer, Farida Atanda.

In Nigeria, the unofficial culture calendar of the year takes off from the third quarter of the year as most events hold from September running into the period now known as ‘Detty December’. Ahead of the culture season, which is usually flooded with weddings, among other events, two of Farida’s live productions that centred on traditional marriages come into one’s focus. Though staged outside Nigeria, the two productions boost the rich culture of traditional Nigerian style weddings.

The two events of interconnected live cultural productions were conceived and led by Farida as Producer and Creative Director. In November 2023, Farida held Pan-African Royal Nuptials & Alaga Showcase, at the National Theatre of Ghana in Accra, while Igbo Nuptials: UK Edition, was presented at Atoy, Sheffield, in July, 2025. Although both productions centred on African marriage traditions, each explores a distinct cultural practice and responds to a different social environment.

The Ghana production focused on Yoruba traditional marriage and the role of the ‘Alaga’ as ceremonial leader, oral performer, mediator, and custodian of inherited knowledge. Through praise poetry, proverbs, humour, music, dance, costume, and formal exchanges between families, the production presented Yoruba nuptial tradition as a sophisticated form of live cultural performance. The UK production covered Igbo marriage customs through family introductions, symbolic gifts, traditional greetings, music, dance, and ceremonial participation. More dramatic was the bride’s symbolic search for the groom, presenting marriage as a union between families, lineages, and communities rather than between two individuals alone.

At the centre of both works is Farida’s interest in the relationship between ritual and performance, heritage and contemporary presentation, as well as cultural memory and public experience. Her intention was not simply to reproduce traditional weddings for entertainment, but to investigate how marriage ceremonies can function as living artistic archives through which oral knowledge, social values and communal histories are preserved. The productions ask whether culturally intimate rituals can be transferred into public settings without losing their meaning, and whether African traditions can travel across national and diasporic borders while retaining their distinct identity. The works also consider how live cultural production can reconnect younger generations with practices that are often transmitted through observation, participation and oral exchange rather than through written documentation.

The Pan-African Royal Nuptials & Alaga production, in Ghana proposed that Yoruba traditional marriage already possesses its own theatrical structure. The Alaga operates simultaneously as narrator, performer, cultural interpreter and ceremonial director, guiding the families and audience through a sequence of praise, humour, music, symbolic action and communal participation. By placing this tradition within the National Theatre of Ghana, Farida brought a specifically Yoruba cultural practice into a wider Pan-African environment. The significance of the production lies in its refusal to present African culture as a single, generalised identity. Against the stereotype of single African identity, the production demonstrated that Pan-African exchange can be created by giving individual tradition sufficient depth, dignity and visibility. The production positioned the Yoruba wedding not merely as a social occasion, but as an important form of oral performance and intangible cultural heritage.

Igbo Nuptials: UK Edition at Atoy, Sheffield, by Farida Atanda. Pic: c/o Producer.

On the Igbo Nuptials: UK Edition, the production extended the cultural enquiry into a British and diasporic context. For the event, the creative challenge was not only to preserve the structure and meaning of Igbo marriage customs, but also to make them accessible to audiences with different levels of cultural familiarity. The production explored how traditions are carried across borders and how they continue to shape identity, belonging, and intergenerational memory within migrant communities. For members of the African diaspora, the event offered cultural recognition and continuity; for wider British audiences, it created an accessible encounter with Igbo values of kinship, consent, hospitality, respect, and collective responsibility. The production therefore proposed that migration does not necessarily lead to cultural disappearance. It can also create new spaces in which traditions are remembered, adapted, and shared.

A critical comparative review of the two works considers how location changed the function of each production. In Accra, the Yoruba nuptial tradition was presented within a major West African cultural institution, creating dialogue across African national and cultural boundaries. In the United Kingdom, Igbo tradition became part of a multicultural British environment, where the production carried the additional responsibility of cultural translation and diaspora representation. While the Ghana production was driven by the commanding presence and oral artistry of the Alaga, the UK event placed greater emphasis on the collective roles of families, elders, and community participants. Together, the contrasting structures demonstrate Farida’s ability to recognise the different performance languages contained within African marriage traditions and to shape them into coherent public experiences.

The wider problem addressed by both productions is the gradual erosion or simplification of orally transmitted cultural knowledge. Traditional ceremonies are sometimes publicly represented through their most visually attractive elements—costume, music, dance, and celebration—while the social meanings behind those elements are overlooked. Farida’s work sought to restore context by foregrounding the relationship between ceremonial language, symbolic exchange, family participation, and communal values. In doing so, she challenged the tendency to treat African marriage traditions as spectacle alone and instead positioned them as serious cultural practices capable of sustaining identity, history, and collective memory.

Farida’s artistic achievement was expressed through her ability to transform community-based rituals into structured live productions without removing their cultural dignity. Attention may be given to the coherence of the programmes, the use of oral performance, costume, music, and participation, and the relationship created between tradition and contemporary audiences. The critique should also examine the development visible between the two productions: from presenting Yoruba heritage within a Pan-African institutional setting to interpreting Igbo heritage within the cultural life of the United Kingdom. This progression demonstrates a practice increasingly concerned not only with preservation but also with cultural translation, audience access, and the role of African heritage within international public programming.

The central critical proposition should be that these productions operate as living performance archives. They preserve culture not by freezing it in the past, but by allowing it to be performed, experienced, and understood in new places. Through the Ghana production, Farida demonstrated how a culturally specific African tradition could travel across continental borders while retaining its identity. Through the UK edition, she showed how diaspora communities can sustain ancestral practices while allowing them to participate meaningfully in contemporary British cultural life.

While Atanda’s significance lies in her ability to identify the artistic intelligence already present within African ritual and to shape it into compelling public cultural experiences, the conversation surrounding the implications of huge cost of organizing these family weddings is missing in her productions. As Atanda’s work occupies the space between ceremony and theatre, cultural preservation and creative interpretation, and community memory and international presentation, a critical observation suggests that a line should be drawn between moderate and extravagant weddings.

Line, light through digital brushings-of Oseh