Collaborative ethics: Staging trauma with care in The Suitcase: Losing Famagusta autobiographical solo performance

This self-reflective article examines The Suitcase: Losing Famagusta , an autobiographical and autoethnographic solo theatre project by British-born Cypriot researcher and theatre maker Lorna Vassiliades. It recounts her experience making it with three of her collaborators, director Pedro Rothstein, movement director Despoina Christianoudi and curator Eleni Chasioti. The Suitcase draws on childhood diaries written by Vassiliades during the Greek Military Coup and Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, as well as the original suitcase and belongings her family took when fleeing Famagusta. This article critically examines the ethical complexities of staging personal and collective trauma within a highly contested and unresolved political history. The foundation is an autoethnographic process of incorporating material from childhood diaries that were influenced by political narratives of the time, from a historically and politically informed adult positionality. Connected to this were the logistics of making the items the protagonists of the accompanying exhibition without a contested political context. The outsider non-Cypriot perspective was crucial in the process of composing the mise en scène through a geopolitical lens that has current applications.