During our lectures this week we focused on two things; we watched a movie called African Arts as Theater and read an essay called The Mask, Masking, and Masquerade Arts in Africa- I am not myself.

            While watching the movie I was very interested in learning about the different animals and peoples that were made to reflect the different important images or objects in the Bwa culture.  Some of the masks that caught my eye were the crazy man and the chameleon because of there interesting significance.  The crazy man is always angry and he incorporates the audience in his dance by lashing out at the members in the audience.  The crazy man is danced in a way that makes him seem anti social.  Besides the fact that he was anti social and what seemed to be rude I thought it was interesting that he was followed by his wife in the dance.  I questioned why she danced with him at first and it made me wonder if it had anything to do with some of the information I read about in Cole’s essay about the history of women and men behind the masks?

            Cole’s essay talked about how it is thought that men were inferior to woman because of their feminine power by forming secret associations and taking control of cults.  Cole mentioned that this background may have influenced the take over of the masking by men.  The article also talks about the myths that women made mistakes in the dancing of masks and men took over because of that reason.  In theory making men more dominate over women.

            With this knowledge I learned from this essay it made me really question why the crazy man's wife was incorporated in his dance.  The video explained that the wife followed the crazy man to calm him down.  This made me think back to previous lectures where we learned that men are thought to be more powerful than women, but it also makes me think that if the woman had to follow the man around to keep him calm, then who in fact is more “powerful.”