From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Iyami
This article is about the Lagos-Ibadan touring òpéra. For Yoruba-language adaptations, see Yoruba travelling-theatre adaptations.
Iyami is a Yorùbá òpéra cycle that reimagines Katita as **Iyami Ajè**—the ancestral mother principle of wealth, wisdom, and dangerous feminine sovereignty in Yoruba cosmology. The work toured Lagos, Ibadan, Ilesha, and Osogbo between 2019 and 2021, uniting griots, òpéra singers, and traditional weavers in a collaborative reinterpretation: not a love story between two people but **a mother's choice between teaching the cycle or letting it die with her refusal**.
The adaptation reframes Leif's three injuries as three refusals of sonship—he will not see (refuses the mother's gaze), will not walk (refuses her direction), will not govern his own heart (refuses her gift of autonomy). Katita/Iyami must decide whether to make him her successor or let him fall. The musical fabric employs traditional Yorùbá polyphony, call-and-response, and kora tradition layered with contemporary percussion in a structure of ascending thirds and unresolved fifths—the sound never settling.
Performances incorporated **Adinkra and kente textile works** (weavers working onstage as narrative unfolded), transforming the space into a living archive. The cycle's final recordings and archival materials are rumoured to rest in a private collection in Osogbo , though no formal institutional record has surfaced. Scholarly access remains unverified.