Savanoma: practice for an always dying world

Abstract

This thesis investigates the reclamation of national identity through embodiment, and performance by using bellydance, horror aesthetics, spiritual practices, drag and metal-music as survival strategies. Through auto-theory and auto-ethnography, Savanoma places artistic practice as a means of resistance to the colonial and assimilationist frameworks that Cypriot subjectivity is imagined through.

In the first part, Cypriotness is examined as a site of contingencies where the dominant narrative of Hellenization is juxtaposed against threats of contamination, to aid a Western erasure of the island’s Levantine cultural inheritance. As a proposition, bellydance is thought of as a methodological tool of bodily revolt, reclaiming sensuality, queerness, and Cypriot culturation. The second part highlights horror aesthetics, Cypriot folk and Chaos Magic practices as performance strategies. By requestioning darkness as a discourse that hides within it theological and racial underpinnings, what is articulated is a rethinking of grief, fear and trauma as elements of our collective crisis. Horror then is framed as vital for confronting the unstable, violent deterioration that characterizes the present. Lastly, the third part uses black metal, drag, and queer time, as the channels to bring forth the ability of femme, queer, and camp sensibilities to tackle nationalist, heteronormative, and assimilationist agendas of control.

Overall, this project claims an anti-colonial and anti-assimilationist approach to subjectivity, proposes performance as an embodiment tool to disavow normalcy, and indicates dominant narratives of national, sexual and aesthetic dispositions as frivolous, controlling and uninspired. Ultimately imagining an alternative embodiment, that celebrates being unapologetically non-white, queer, macabre and political.