In this dissertation, I examine a near-century old popular theatre genre in Ghana known as the concert party to explore how contemporary political and economic circumstances shape its relationship to the spider-man trickster of Ghanaian (specifically Akan) folklore. Since the early 18th century various writers have attempted to define Ananse's significance and in the process have attributed meanings, ranging from religious totemism to imaginative delight. My study, following recent work on the concert party, transcends the sense of Ananse as folkloric character, and as prototype of the concert party joker, to address "his" manifestation as an ethos of creativity in the art and lives of the popular theatre's practitioners. It is prompted by the 1990s collaboration between the Ghana Concert Party Union and the Ghana National Theatre (and, later, with the support of the multinational company Unilever) to revive concert party theatre in the capital of Ghana, Accra. It is the product of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and performance analysis.

I address how and to what ends contemporary concert party practitioners, in a state organized, corporate sponsored popular theatre and in a cultural economy that straddles national cultural identity construction, political democratization and market liberalization, re-present Ananse. First, I theorize Ananse as a creative but also counter-ideological ethos. Afterwards, I locate nationalist and populist historical convergences that produced the revival; chart the cultural politics of economic reform and corporate sponsorship that appropriated concert party theatre; and detail the competing interests that compelled the Union to part ways with the Theatre. Then, I explain how a play produced by one concert party group that remained with the Theatre, as well as the antics of a concert party comedian in the fray of campaign politics, manifested the counter-ideological Ananse ethos to negotiate the constraints of their political economic circumstances. Ananse emerges in this work as a multi-manifested spider (spiders, if you will) in the city—as an ethos, not simply of creativity but of a particular kind of creativity that is embodied and applied by concert party artists in their claims to space and voice in the state/corporate sponsored urban popular theatre.