Digital Technology and the Transformation of Indigenous Yorùbá Performance for a Global Audience

This thesis examines how indigenous Yorùbá theatre and performance can be reimagined for contemporary global audiences through the integration of digital technology. Centring on Here’s What She Said to Me (HWSSTM), an autobiographical play conceived by the researcher and developed through Utopia Theatre, the study analyses how Yorùbá storytelling, ritual aesthetics, music, chant, and multigenerational narrative are reconfigured within diasporic performance contexts in the United Kingdom. In this thesis, diasporic performance practices are understood as theatre-making processes shaped by migration, cultural memory, intergenerational transmission, and the negotiation of African indigenous forms within Western institutional, technological, and aesthetic frameworks. Using ìtàn (story/history) as both a conceptual framework and analytical tool, the research explores how digital capture and livestreaming preserve cultural specificity while enabling new modes of access, circulation, and spectatorship. The thesis adopts a practice-as-research methodology, documenting the creative and dramaturgical processes underpinning the digital production of HWSSTM, including the collaborative partnership between Utopia Theatre, Pilot Theatre, and Sheffield Theatres during its socially-distanced livestreamed presentation. By examining this collaboration, the study highlights how diasporic Yorùbá performance operates across multiple sites: community-based cultural production, regional theatre institutions, and digital platforms. It argues that digital theatre can function as a living archive that sustains ancestral knowledge, supports shared authorship, and extends indigenous performance traditions beyond the limits of liveness and location. In doing so, the thesis addresses a significant gap in scholarship on digital Yorùbá theatre, demonstrating how diasporic performance practices can remain culturally grounded while engaging local, diasporic, and global audiences simultaneously.