Chuck Mike and the Collective Artistes (Theatre as Resistance, Ritual, and Renewal)

In the late 1980s, Lagos theatre was alive with defiance. While others sought glamour or applause, one group rehearsed revolution. They called themselves Collective Artistes, a theatre company born in 1988 under the direction of Professor Chuck Mike. Their goal was simple but bold: to use performance as a mirror, a weapon, and a way of healing.

Hakeem Shitta was there. With his camera pressed against the pulse of that decade, he captured faces, sweat, laughter, and silence: the fragile moments that made performance feel like protest. His photographs now live in the Hakeem Shitta Photo and Cultural Archive (HSPACA), a growing record of the artists who shaped Nigeria’s creative identity.

The Vision of Chuck Mike

Chuck Mike was not just a director; he was a force of nature. Born in the United States and raised between cultures, he came to Nigeria with an instinct for ensemble work and a passion for social change. In his hands, theatre became an act of renewal, part storytelling, part ritual.

When he founded Collective Artistes in Lagos, he gathered actors who believed theatre could question power and heal memory. Their performances fused African oral traditions, physical theatre, and poetic movement. A play like The King Must Dance Naked was not staged entertainment; it was a conversation about justice, shame, and redemption.

Mike later taught at Obafemi Awolowo University and the University of Ibadan, guiding generations of performers who carried his philosophy forward. His students included Segun Adefila, who went on to form Crown Troupe of Africa, and Jolade Kilanko, one of the first women to anchor the group’s radical energy. Through workshops and festivals, Mike built bridges between Lagos and global stages; from the Kennedy Center to the Royal Court Theatre.

Jolade Kilanko and the Early Ensemble

In Shitta’s black-and-white frames, Jolade Kilanko stands out like a flame. Her body language tells stories words cannot hold. She was both performer and believer, someone who saw theatre not as performance but as participation.

Her presence gave the early ensemble its texture and its heart. When she took the stage, emotion became instruction. When she spoke, silence felt sacred.

The photographs of Kilanko are among the archive’s most striking images. You can almost hear the echoes of rehearsal halls, the rhythm of collective breath before a scene, the hum of something about to change.

Biyi Bandele and the Poetry of Chaos

One of the group’s defining productions was Rain, written by Biyi Bandele. It told the story of two street sweepers trapped in a city that had forgotten them. Beneath its humor and absurdity lay something deeper: a reflection on survival, loss, and the noise of everyday life.

Staged by Collective Artistes, Rain stripped theatre to its essentials: two actors, a bare stage, and the courage to speak truth. It captured everything that defined the group: minimalism, rhythm, and resistance.

Biyi Bandele would go on to become one of Nigeria’s most important storytellers, writing novels like The Street and Burma Boy, and directing Half of a Yellow Sun and Elesin Oba for Netflix. His death in 2022 left a silence that felt personal. Yet through the archive, his voice still lingers, alive in the faces he once wrote for.

Femi Osofisan and Wole Soyinka: The Foundations of the Movement

The work of Collective Artistes stood on the shoulders of giants. Playwrights like Professor Femi Osofisan and Professor Wole Soyinka had already carved paths where art and activism met. Their plays were taught, performed, banned, and reborn.

Osofisan’s Morountodun and The Chattering and the Song shaped how younger directors viewed the stage, not as entertainment, but as education. Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel and Death and the King’s Horseman gave Nigerian theatre its global voice, proving that Yoruba metaphysics could speak to the world.

Shitta photographed both men at work and at ease, their gestures filled with purpose. His camera caught the bridge between their generation and the restless one that followed.

The Legacy of Collective Artistes

Collective Artistes changed the way Nigeria performed itself. They turned every rehearsal into a ritual, every performance into a dialogue, every audience into a witness. Their productions addressed migration, inequality, and freedom, issues that still echo across today’s stages.

Many of the company’s photographs are preserved in HSPACA: images of Chuck Mike, Jolade Kilanko, Biyi Bandele, Femi Osofisan, Wole Soyinka, and moments from Rain, The King Must Dance Naked, Morountodun, The Chattering and the Song, Death and the King’s Horseman, and more. Each photograph feels alive like a fragment of Nigeria’s cultural heartbeat.

From Crown Troupe of Africa to Theatre Emissary, their influence continues. The new generation may now use lights and sound, but the spirit remains the same: theatre as truth-telling, as memory, as rebellion.

Conclusion

Collective Artistes was never just a theatre company. It was a movement built on conviction that performance could change people before it changed policy.

Through Hakeem Shitta’s photographs, we remember what that conviction looked like: the sweat on stage floors, the quiet concentration before a cue, the laughter between comrades who knew the stakes.

This archive is not nostalgia. It is evidence that Nigeria has always had thinkers, dreamers, and rebels who spoke through performance.

The Hakeem Shitta Photo and Cultural Archive (HSPACA) keeps those voices alive, not as relics, but as guides for what art in Africa can still become.

Explore The Hakeem Shitta Photo and Cultural Archive (HSPACA) at: www.hspaca.org