Sites of Micro-Political Theatre

In June 2006, at the “New Plays for Europe Festival” in Wiesbaden, a performance entitled One Square Foot: the still small voice of the people represented the small island of Cyprus. In the program, Giorgos Neophytou of the Theatre Organization of Cyprus, offered a summary of the political and historical background of the island, writing of the “many deep wounds amongst the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots that have been caused by the war that don’t seem to heal.” He refers here to the war that began on July 20, 1974, when Turkish troops invaded the island and occupied 37% of the north. As a result, about 150,000 Turkish Cypriots, under pressure from Ankara, relocated to the north, and since then Cyprus has been ethnically divided. A line now separates the country and its people. This historical and political context is made yet more complex by the number of dead and disappeared on both sides, many of whom are still publicly remembered through their faded photographs on trees in city squares and in posters that line the road to the border. In addition, the number of settlers from the Turkish mainland now occupy houses and land belonging to Greek Cypriots, and many properties on the predominantly Turkish Cypriot side of the divide have been sold to people from outside Cyprus.

The One Square Foot project [see Deirdre Heddon’s article in PAJ 86] places the performer, rather than the playwright, at the heart of generating material for performance. The project was a collaboration between Echo-Arts Living Arts Center, Cyprus, and Theatre Alibi, UK.¹ Arianna Economou of Echo-Arts, Cyprus, and I have acted as co-directors for the entire project, which has been conducted in three phases, each culminating in performances of new work collaboratively authored by a number of creative artists using interdisciplinary methods. In Phase One, which took place in May 2003, site-specific performances were presented near the military border in Nicosia, Cyprus, and in the Troodos mountains. Studio performances took place in the Open Studio Season, Nicosia, and also at the Chorotheatro Studio in Nicosia. Phase Two in July 2003 staged performances both on site and at the Drama Department of Exeter University in the UK.² In Phase Three, which took place in September 2005, site-specific performances were presented on both sides of the military border in Nicosia as well as in several indoor spaces, south of the military border at the Ayios Andreas Market Theatre, and north of the border at the Arabahmet Cultural Centre.

Throughout the project, we worked together as a group of artists—Arianna Economou (choreographer and dancer), Peter Hulton (video artist and documenter), Ilker Kaptanoglu (musician and composer), Larkos Larkou (sound designer and composer), Serhat Selisik (sculptor and installation artist), Horst Weierstall (installation artist and documenter), and I (director and dramaturg)—to find a way of responding to the “many deep wounds” Neophytou addresses. In a situation dominated by the macro politics of the UN, the E.U., Greece, Turkey, the UK and the U.S., we attempted to do this by creating an artistic forum and structure in which the individual voices of ordinary people might be heard: that is, a structure that might include their stories, their experiences, their memories, beliefs and hopes, rather than those of public institutions.

This piece, then, created in the divided city of Nicosia, the last divided city in Europe, aimed towards multi-authorship and micro political action, giving space to tiny, private moments, bringing them into the public arena and allowing them to be heard, hence the title: the still small voice of the people. Video interviews were conducted with elderly people from both sides of the military border, and their stories and memories of living in a mixed community before the division were interwoven into the piece. Stories were told about those who had died in both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities; significantly, the two main performers were from the Greek and the Turkish Cypriot communities, respectively. Their autobiographical stories formed one of the main threads in the piece, as did their individual performance...