Duke of Shomolu

  • is the fastest
  • growing
  • theatre
  • franchise
  • in Nigeria

Segun Adefila
Inhouse Director

Born in Lagos and hails from Omu Aran, Nigeria. Segun Adefila started acting and dancing as an itinerant masquerade performer in his community, especially during traditional festivals. This experience influenced his art as a performance artist with a remarkable awareness of the potency of the arts as a veritable tool for social rejuvenation.

He had an informal training in theatre with Black Image Theatre Company, Lagos Nigeria, after which he became a co-founder and artistic director of the Crown Troupe of Africa, founded in June 1996 as a Dance Laboratory to dramatize Lagos, Nigeria as a modern cosmopolis. The theatre group depends on the creative inventiveness of every member of the company to present a “reinvented” Lagos in performances. Instead of extracting sources and materials from mainly traditional practices and history, Crown Troupe investigates the social and political universe of that existence and those of the members to create a set of unique performances that rely on “recycling” of materials (as props, designs, strategies and as plots, for example in the adaptation of existing dramatic work) to regenerate ideas in order to sati-rise and comment on social practices, political excesses and cultural malpractices.

The concept of recycling underscores the notion of reinventing traditional theatrical practices that predates even the Yorùbá Travelling Theatre, especially the Alarinjo tradition; but in a way that introduces modernity as aesthetics. Crown Troupe organises the annual Eko Theatre Carnival. Adefila studied Creative Arts at the University of Lagos, Nigeria.
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