From ethnography to performance: transforming interview narratives into artistic performative acts – The project ‘Greco’ at the Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival

Abstract

ABSTRACT The current paper presents the recontextualization process of ethnographic narratives collected during the five-year research project GRECO ‘Language and identity among Romeika speakers in Cyprus’, into a participatory performance at the Nicosia Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival 2019. The project focused on the narratives of Romeika speakers, a sub-group of Turkish Cypriots who had Greek and not Turkish as a home language. The paper focuses on the theoretical concepts of performance and ethnography to describe the way a group of researchers, students and artists engaged in a dialogic process with raw data and transformed it into a fully-fledged participatory performance. The project and the festival are described as two sites of crossings in the heavily politicized context of Cyprus, where issues of identity and language, space and belonging are contested in a constant processing of othering. The process of formulating narratives into performance text is presented through five different stages: narratives, dialogicality/agency, space/multiple contexts, embodiment, performance. The project’s outcome, an interactive performance, served to challenge the dominant discourses on the binarity of space, identity and border, both in the local context of Cyprus and in other contexts of conflict and borders.