Revitalising Ghana’s operatic tradition through performance-based research and artistic reconstruction: a case of ‘The Lost Fishermen’

This study details a complementary set of performance-based research strategies for revitalising ‘The Lost Fishermen’ – arguably the most popular of Saka Acquaye’s endangered folk operas. Acquaye’s folk operas, which premiered in the 1960s in Ghana as part of a global Pan-African identity consciousness through the arts, were threatened with extinction by the mid-1990s. Their endangerment was occasioned, paradoxically, by the socio-political milieu that birthed and propped them up, as well as by incomplete documentation. The article conceptualises revitalisation as a set of performance-based interventions that include learning through apprenticeship, artistic reconstruction, teaching others to perform, and documentation. Beyond its preliminary documentation potential, the performance paradigm is intended to underscore the primacy of sound and praxis in the musical arts (folk operas) as well as function as both research method and outcome. The article argues that, where the applied initiative to revitalise an endangered artwork is in response to an unfair socio-political situation, it can invalidate the natural wax-and-wane life cycle argument presented by scholars, creating the grounds for revitalisation to be undertaken as an act of social justice. Secondly, the idea of documentation as a safeguard is premised on the understanding that if an art form is never performed again, it should be by choice rather than non-availability in any documented form.