Day Bolanle Austen-Peters held court at Westminster

For nearly two hours on January 17, 2025, the director, producer and chief executive of BAP Productions, Bolanle Austen-Peters, had an engaging conversation with Dr Lookman Sanusi at the University of Westminster, United Kingdom. The conversation was part of the Camri Africa Media Series curated by Professor Winston Mano in collaboration with Bubbles FM, owned by Sanusi. Its theme was ‘Bolanle: The State of Movies and Theatre Sectors in Contemporary Nigeria’. The time spent at the event, which began with the screening of BAP’s most recent movie, ‘Funmilayo Ransome Kuti’ was well worth it as Bolanle shared about her creative process, productions, motivations and growing Nigerian theatre, including her empowerment programmes. Here’s an excerpt from the conversation.

Birthing TerraKulture

I created Terra Culture based on the mindset of identity. Who are you? Your arts, your culture, and that’s what defined Terra. But then I looked at it from a business perspective. How do I turn arts and culture into a currency, a commodity? This was in 2003. No one considered our culture, music and arts a commodity then.

My father was confused when I said I wasn’t working as a lawyer anymore. Of course, when people don’t understand what you’re doing, some try to talk it down, and some are very cynical. So, the journey into this space was based on pure passion.

I wanted to do what would make me happy. And at that time, money wasn’t the objective. It was more about finding happiness.

Boosting arts growth

When I started, the focus was on Nigerian languages. I was trying to teach young Nigerians. I kept telling people a business opportunity was sitting there, but I didn’t plan to run a school. People came to learn  Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa, not foreign languages.

That was one aspect. Then the other element was visual arts. We were one of the forerunners in the Mydrim Gallery, Nike Art Gallery, and Omenka; many of us were pushing the visual arts agenda at that time. We used to do about 22 art exhibitions annually. That consumed us. Then we started doing art auctions as well. That was very heavy. But what we did was we created a platform for visual artists to practice. For over 15 years, we did that. Then, we also did the bookstore and book readings.

One day, I said, you know what? Why don’t we have the performing arts here? Theatre at that time had gone silent. We have a hall; let’s open it up for people to use for free. A couple of practitioners came and used it for a bit. But there were no followers, so they gave up.

But I don’t give up. I said, no, we’ll continue. One day, people will start coming. This was 2004 or so. Two, three years later, Wole Oguntokun of blessed memory… Wole Oguntokun and Segun Adefila were the two people who saved the cause. Slowly, from two people, it became 10 people. We started growing and nurturing a culture of theatre practitioners from zero followership. Then I started watching every Sunday and noticed that there were gaps. For most of us into business, it’s a problem-solving thing that turns us into entrepreneurs. I noticed that the set design was not great initially. I started noticing that costuming wasn’t great, and attendance was poor.

And then something struck me one day. Every time there was a piece of music in the theatre, there was high attendance. Nigerians may want some singing in their theatre. Perhaps they don’t want you to be talking down. The minute we had a little bit of music, people would show up. So, I told my team that theatre would thrive if we did musicals.

I assembled a team of young men I’ve seen:  Kenneth Ukphoho, Ayo Ajayi and Gbenga Yusuf. I said, guys, come on. I want to start this thing, but I’m not a director. Because I travel a lot and attend many theatrical shows, I had an idea of what I wanted to do.  I conveyed that to the people that I brought into the space. There was also Makinde Adeniran. I got all of them and showed them the picture that I had. Then I talked about the story. I said let’s do a basic story: Young boys coming into Lagos. That’s how I came about ‘Saro the Musical’. It became the first musical that we did, and it became ‘Saro the Musical 2’; the rest is history.

 So, it was identifying that there were problems in the space that led me to go into theatre. Rather than complain, I looked at things and said there must be solutions to this problem. That’s the story of where we are today in theatre in Nigeria; many production houses have come out of us.

 

Most challenging production

That’s a very difficult question because everything we do is a new project and path. If I were to hand pick out the nine or 10 musicals I’ve done, I would say that ‘Saro’ was difficult because it was a version of an idea that never existed. ‘Saro’ was difficult to the extent that it was new.

Artistically, ‘Moremi the Musical’ was challenging because I wanted to create something surreal. I wanted to make a world that was mysterious and ethereal.  ‘Moremi’ is a folklore, and I wanted to bring it to a modern audience. How would I do it differently? I used a lot of 3D mapping and stunning costumes and told the story through music. And it was so beautiful, very well-made. It was colourful, and the set design was incredible. It was challenging to the extent that I needed to do something transformative.

‘Death and the King’s Horseman’ was my most challenging, and I’ll tell you why. Everybody has done ‘Death and the King’s Horseman’, and the expectations were much. Is she going to do this right?  Professor Wole Soyinka had come to me and said BAP, I want us to direct this together. And COVID happened, and then we couldn’t. After COVID, he wasn’t available.  But I wanted to take people into a world. There was a lot of mysticism that I wanted to bring to ‘Death and the King’s Horseman’, and I was able to achieve that using music and a lot of lighting to create a world that typically we can’t see, but we know exists, a spiritual realm.

What was my challenge with ‘Fela and the Kalakuta Queens’? It is one of the most successful box office-wise. It was so successful that we did not have space. We kept showing it like 99 times before exporting it outside of Nigeria. We took it to Egypt and South Africa, and the reception everywhere we went was out of this world. What I wanted to do with that story was to show the beauty of Nigerian women. That was my motive; Fela wasn’t the focus.

The focus was these 27 beautiful girls: how can we bring their stories to life? I focused on the aesthetics, the makeup, the costume, the dance, and the girls’ sexiness.  I went for those beautiful girls, and it was lovely to watch. In terms of saleability, it was one of the most saleable I think that I have.

I scaled back because of the issues we have in our economic space. This year let’s try something different. I’m going to do a play that is going to be based on storytelling. There’s no aesthetics, no fuss. Let me see if I can hold the audience for 90 minutes. So, I went for a contemporary story, ‘Dear Kaffy’. And my approach has always been that we need the younger generation in all we do. If we cannot attract them, then you don’t have a business model that’ll fly. It was unbelievable. We kept adding shows and had to shut down because the artists were tired.

 

Consolidating contributions to Nigerian theatre with Lagos International Theatre Festival

If you look at the fact that all the different arts in Nigeria have festivals, such as food, fashion, and music, I wanted a rallying point for theatre, so we created the International Theatre Festival. Yes, it’s looking good. We had a lot of people; a lot of people believe in what we have made. That is the reason why we were able to do that in the first place. We had participants from Zimbabwe, South Africa, the US and local Nigerian companies. Everyone was very excited that this was ours, this is our thing. Let’s make it work. The idea is that how Lagos has become a hub for fashion and music, the theatrical space has to have that.  We were at Glover Hall, MUSON Centre and the University of Lagos. The intention was to start at the National Arts Theatre, but it wasn’t ready for some reason.

 

Theatre shaping Nigeria’s socio-landscape

You know what theatre does, right? We address challenging social, religious and political issues that you ordinarily cannot confront people with through theatre. So, we pass the message. Apart from that, what theatre has done in Lagos is as follows. Imagine this world where entertainment was solely music concerts. It was either that or Owambe at parties. It was fixed what you could find in Lagos. Now, you come to Lagos at Christmas and Easter, and some people pre-book. Some people have booked Easter ahead of time. And you come into TerraKulture and just shut your eyes. It could be anywhere else because all the accents are foreign, and everybody is young.

It’s become real. Apart from the entertainment, you now have a product for families. Finding grandparents, parents, children, and grandchildren at any event in Lagos is very difficult. Our tickets don’t go in one; they go in groups of 20 because people buy them for everybody in the family. And it’s one of those unique outings where you find middle class, upper middle class, politicians, diplomats, students, everybody. So that’s the entertainment and the familial bonding.

The second is the economics of it. We’re creating wealth for artists. We’re creating wealth for ourselves. And we’re also changing the perception of Nigeria’s entertainment space as sophisticated. Not just noise; intellectual- people can sit and listen to conversations.

If you look at what we have been able to do in terms of skill sets, the number of skills we have passed on. Do you know that a lot of talent visas that artists needed to get to Europe, a lot of them came through us? Because they’ll come and have a lot of material of their performance and work with us, they were able to use what they have learned through TerraKulture to move abroad to sell their skill sets. It’s truly a transformative space that we’re in. And there’s still a lot more to be done in that space.

 

Taking BAP productions to rural areas

At the heart of all of this, I’m still a businesswoman. I don’t know much about the rural areas. However, because of what we do in training young people, we expect those we train to return to the grassroots. You can’t do everything. I’m localized. A wise businessman once told me that sometimes you want to be everything to everyone but end up being nothing to everyone. So, we have focused on that one centre. Terra has survived because I have refused one million times to move. It’s a public space. Every day, we get traffic from thousands of people. So, if I try to replicate that, the standards will fall. However, we recognize that our content is limited to those in that physical space.

So, we started recording all our content. And we’re going back to revisit the past ones, to ensure that all the music in them are all originals so we can put them out there and people can watch them everywhere.  During COVID, we put Fela and the Kalakuta Queens’ on social media. In less than 24 hours, we had about 44,000 views. So, it’s something clearly that would sell.

 

Life as a movie producer

It’s tough. Let me tell you the realities of movie making. In Nigeria, you don’t have enough money when you make movies. When we were shooting ‘Collision Course’,  we had to leave the location because the guys were there. They brought instruments and surrounded us. They said you can’t shoot anymore. They felt like it was their space, and they felt violated.

The last movie I shot, ‘Wire Wire’, we were on set. We paid this guy, but sometimes, you don’t know how long it will take for you to finish. And then, he started getting frazzled. He got so worked up. At some point, he told us he had to return to his apartment. We set up for the shoot the whole day and said we had a couple more shots, but he said I needed my space.

We thought we could talk to him, calm him down, but the next thing we knew, he barged into the space and went for one of my actors. He told everyone to get out and threw all our phones out.  We see a lot; sometimes, your guys don’t do what you want.

I’ve had to fire people on two locations: designers, costumiers, and even editors. The attitude that we need to have is to expect to have problems. That’s my position. Every step, there’s going to be a lot of knots.   Just find a way of untying all the knots.

What I do is I start working with the end in sight. I never start with the first step. I tend not to look at the problem. I look at the end and say, this problem will be resolved at some point, whether I like it or not. Whatever issues or tasks come my way; I tell myself I must get it done. I will get it done.

READ ALSO: Bolanle Austen-Peters unveils 10,000-acre BAP film village in Epe