David Sanou—Artistic Choices

Creative Innovation: Artist Choices and Compromise in Burkina Faso

Innovation and updating to suit current conditions are what make masquerade contemporary. Artists make countless, often barely palpable, decisions that collectively generate unique and appealing masquerade forms. Driven to show audiences something they’ve never seen before, artists’ choices can inject fresh ideas, materials, styles, patterns, and iconographic details into existing mask genres to the point that they become something else entirely. This section brings the intellectual and creative actions of individuals to the forefront of masquerade by focusing on the ideas and decisions that have recently produced two new mask genres in and around the city of Bobo-Dioulasso. It highlights the formal qualities that distinguish them from pre-existing mask genres and identifies some of the refinements, reversals, and variances of practice that have thus far emerged as a result. It 17 demonstrates that masquerade is fundamentally dynamic not only in performance, but also as a mode of intellectual work.