The Aesthetics of "Ladeoko Festival‟ of Isona Ward in Ilesa, Nigeria

Abstract

Aesthetics focuses on new ways of seeing or perceiving the world and examines what makes something beautiful, sublime, disgusting, funny, cute, entertaining, pretentious, discordant, harmonious, boring, humorous, or tragic. The ‘Ladeoko Festival is seen in the same vein that scholars of aesthetics have contended that objects are aesthetically valuable if: they possess a special aesthetic property or exhibit a special aesthetic form; they have the capacity to convey meaning or to teach general truths; they have the capacity to produce pleasure in those who experience or appreciate them; they have the capacity to convey values or beliefs central to the cultures or traditions in which they originate, or important to the artists who made them. In another vein, if the objects have the capacity: to help bring about social or political change, to produce certain emotions we value, at least when the emotion is brought about by art rather than by life, and to produce special non-emotional experiences, such as a feeling of autonomy or the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, they are equally capable of offering aesthetic satisfaction. We see this communal festival, the ‘Ladeoko Festival’, as a paradigm of African choreo-musical performance spiced with drama, a cultural heritage festival with aesthetic and theatrical dimensions.