Purpose of Wearing Epa Headdress in the Yoruba Epa Festival

The three-dimensional model is richly varied. Whilst the headdress is according to the globe of reality, it is not representational. It's unimportant for the figures to seem like specific individuals. As soon as a headdress is worn, the wearer's face may be disguised by cloth. The functionality of the Epa headdress is to supply a temporary residence for a spirit, and for your wearer to try and do a ritual act for ones benefit of his community. The Epa festival celebrates the chiefs, farmers, warrior, hunters, priests and women. Since Yoruba society is patrilineal, the role of women is depicted in Yoruba mythology with respect to fertility. Women play "a much more formidable role in Yoruba rituals than they do in political life of conventional society" (Delano 17).

Because with the active role of women in Yoruba rituals, the female is of crucial symbolic value in representational art. The role women play within the masking rituals consist of washing off the previous year's paint and dust that accumulated over a headdress. They then decorate the headdress with various patterns. Women also participate as guides to the masquerades. Women, of course, figure prominently in fertility motifs, as well as the Epa headdress prominently features a woman carrying a child. The Yoruba pay homage to women as it is they who give birth to men. "According towards Yoruba, the woman holds within her womb 'powers concealed'


African Art: Aesthetics and Meaning. On-line at:

www.lib.virginia.edu/clemons/RMC/exhib/93.ray.aa

A description with the art object under consideration will illustrates how it communicates the aesthetics in the Yoruba culture. The Epa mask is often a carved headdress divided into 2 parts. The dancer's head fits under the lower part, allowing the man to see from your mouth of an abstracted face; the upper part is carved a lot more realistically. During the festival, that's held every other year, the masked dancers leap onto a large, three feet high flat-topped mound. As soon as the male dancer appears at the festival, surrounded by his followers and wearing the tall, heavy headdress (the Epa headdress is between the largest of all headdresses and masks), he receives salutations, praise names and songs. The lower, abstract helmet portion hides the dancer's face, allowing him to determine from the mouth. This really is in keeping with the aesthetic significance on the art that stresses human relationships and physical exercise in general, instead of the individual.

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