Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to examine the functions of theatre and how it is used in primary schools in Cyprus as a case study of nationalism, gender and national memory. Working around embodiment, narrative and archiving it seeks to present performance as a site but also a means of ethnographic research.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to examine the functions of theatre and how it is used in primary schools in Cyprus as a case study of nationalism, gender and national memory. Working around notions of embodiment, narrative and archiving it seeks to present performance as a site but also a means of ethnographic research. Using personal and national archives, memory and borrowed testimonies Seta seeks to expose the ways national narratives are constructed and performed through installations and performances. How can montage, text and archiving reverse and recollect normative patterns of knowledge?. This paper exists along visual re-arrangement of images and video through which it seeks to expose both the ways theatre feeds into the formation of the national subject but also the extent to which theatre itself is a means of exposing these mechanisms. Working around the thresholds of the national and the individual, the fictional and the real, language and dialect, Seta seeks to explore what remains of a nation? How does a nation imagine itself? Herself?