The 9th edition of Buffer Fringe will take place on the 7th, 8th and 9th of October 2022
Since 2014, Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival, which is organized by the Home for Cooperation, promotes peacebuilding by giving space for artists to create, resist, trigger discussions, and share their unique ways of seeing.
A tapestry of vibrant artists, from Cyprus and abroad, makes up the Artist Lineup for Buffer Fringe 2022, responding to this year’s Pockets (beyond) theme. Through their unique performances and projects, artists offer suggestions on puncturing dominant notions, resisting the logic of the main frame, and offering space for thinking about difference and identity, past and present, inclusion and exclusion.
Buffer Fringe 2022 is getting ready to immerse audiences in pockets of arts and exploration with five curators and eleven artists, over three days in October and three venues across Nicosia:
DAY 1: Friday, October 7th at Rüstem Bookstore
For the first day of Buffer Fringe 2022, on Friday October 7th, Lebanese director/performer/peacebuilder Raffi Feghali is curating narratives and immersive environments within the spaces of Rüstem Bookstore. Through their works, according to Feghali, artists inform “identity and belonging, they feed on history, and constantly evolve.”
The day begins with NOBODY by ERGO Theatre [CY] a musical staged reading extracted from milestone works by Homer, Joyce and Kazantzakis. Visual performance piece Ilk: A Queer Arab Dichotomy by Berlin-based Lebanese artist Ahmad BaBa, engages with questions regarding the queer Arab Muslim identity; while Compañia Encuentro [IT/SP] present Una Guerra Entre Nosotros (A War Between Us) – a dance piece on the romantic relationship between two men, addressing themes such as love, death, and homophobia. Finally, Inal Bilsel [CY] with his live electronic music and multimedia performance, immerses audiences into a Nostalgia for the Future that never arrived.
DAY 2: Saturday, October 8th at Theatro Polis
Australian Cypriot author/dramaturg Kat Kats, Australian performance director Bryce Ives, and Cypriot theatre director Maria Varnakkidou are curating the festival’s second day, on Saturday October 8th, at NiMAC’s Theatro Polis. Here, the curatorial team is inviting us to “think inside the [black] box: a pocket of space to be or become whatever or whoever you want.”
Vasilikí Anastasiou and the sound of 20+ member female Amalgamation Choir [CY] will immerse audiences in soundscapes, primal sounds, songs, whispers and lullabies From West to East. Die Wolke Art Group [GR] will present Poetics of Space, a dancetheatre study of the subjective perception of space and the concept of intimacy; while Compagnie Inflexions [FR] will invite audiences to listen and dance to poetry and sounds in the interdisciplinary performance As We Drove Short Short Horizon-Line. Finally, ody icons [GR/CY] will present POLYDRAMA, an interdisciplinary musical performance on queerness, tradition, social fight, darkness and light, solitude and the collective.
DAY 3: Sunday, October 9th at the buffer zone / Home for Cooperation
On Buffer Fringe’s third and final day, on Sunday October 9th, Cypriot art historian Derya Ulubatli, transforms the buffer zone in the area of Home for Cooperation into a common meeting point, into “a ‘pocket’ where different artists will create new stories by collaborating with the audience and the Other”.
In STATE, interdisciplinary artist Melita Couta [CY] will create an interactive performative art installation proposing the establishment, development and ultimate failure and dissolution of a 24-hour “STATE” in the buffer zone. Video artist FO [CY] will present KI|PR|ΟΣ, a video installation divided into two paths, with two different films based on the experiences of Cypriots living in either the northern or the southern part of the island during the period of 1974-2004. And finally, Netherlands-based Programme Music will present Where Words Become Music, an interactive performance of classical music and literature, exploring the possibility of spreading a universal message beyond language.
Find out more about Buffer Fringe on www.bufferfringe.org
The Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival is a program of the Home for Cooperation project, implemented by the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research and funded by the Active Citizens Fund 2020-2024. The Festival is also supported by IMPACT (Imagining Together: Platform for Arts, Culture and Conflict Transformation), Theatro Polis, and The Home Cafe.
This year, Buffer Fringe is launching a collaboration with Sesta, a podcast on culture by Meltem Burak, and Island Talks – the island’s only trilingual podcast station.
Buffer Fringe is a proud recipient of the EFFE label 2022-2023 as a Remarkable Arts Festival!
