Performance Context of Storytelling Events vis-à-vis Western Civilisation and Global Influences

Abstract

Western civilisation, modernism and globalisation have created new patterns and shifts of all that were traditionally assigned to the performance context of the storytelling event. This article will expose us to recent changes of the storytelling event as far as setting and  the role of the narrator are concerned. In this wise we shall observe how the upsurge of new settings and the birth of new actors and  narrators have greatly influenced and informed the performance context of the storytelling event. These recent changes go a long way to  debunk assertions and assumptions that Western civilisation has come to kill storytelling in Africa, especially in urban and semi urban  areas. Informed by New Historicism as a sociological approach, these analyses will be founded on observations of the different channels  which the modern storytellers have to tell their stories to members of an audience resident in settings void of the fireside and the  fragrance of the mahogany and umbrella trees. The storytelling event, in the presence of a new setting, actors and audience, has  gradually taken African cultures and traditions to a global market space where the rules are now being dictated by modern forms of   communication and the internet.