The Body as Text: Corporeal Performance and Postcolonial Identity in Nigerian Physical Theatre Practice

This dissertation investigates the body as a primary text of postcolonial identity negotiation in Nigerian physical theatre practice, developing an original theoretical framework that integrates corporeal performance theory with postcolonial body politics. Physical theatre, which foregrounds the body as the primary site of theatrical meaning-making through movement, gesture, and physical transformation, offers a particularly direct inscription surface for the tensions and contradictions of postcolonial identity in Nigeria. The research examines fifteen Nigerian physical theatre productions and performance art works staged between 2017 and 2024, focusing on how performers employ and transform their bodies to enact postcolonial subjectivity, challenge racial and colonial body politics, and assert African corporeal aesthetics. The dissertation employs a methodology combining phenomenological performance analysis, practitioner interviews, and critical postcolonial theory. An original theoretical contribution is the dissertation's concept of decolonial corporeality, which theorises the deliberate use of physical performance conventions derived from African movement traditions and embodied knowledge systems as an act of postcolonial resistance against the normative body aesthetics imposed by colonial theatrical training. The research concludes that Nigerian physical theatre practitioners are developing a distinctive corporeal performance vocabulary with significant implications for global performance theory. Keywords: corporeal performance, postcolonial identity, physical theatre, decolonial corporeality, Nigerian performance.