The aesthetic identities of these populist forms are constituted in part by an impulse toward group-identification and by an attendant loss of sense of self for individual participants within the communal experience of the performance event. The popular theatrical forms in question here-gospel singing, music hall, and the May dance, all of which carry associations of "populist art"-combine with ritual aspects of The Bacchae in order explicitly to heighten the play's populist thrust. In his Bacchae, Soyinka employs a wide range of "alternative " theatrical strategies, which range from traditional African ritual to contemporary Western popular performance genres. This is only the first albeit the single most significant contradiction one encounters in grappling with Soyinka's radical remaking of ancient drama. Transforming this classical text from one form of cultural phenomenon into another raises fascinating questions about plays, rites, and The Bacchae, but at the outset Soyinka has made an extravagant claim by labelling the text as Euripides' and then adding the new descriptive tag. The Politics of Ritual in WoIe Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides Robert Baker-White The title page of WoIe Soyinka's adaptation announces a contradiction: The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite.1 Euripides' Bacchae is a play, not a rite. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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