The Ozidi saga is performed over seven successive nights, with masquerade, drumming, dance and an audience that interjects, and it is that form rather than its length that makes it unusual. J. P. Clark-Bekederemo recorded a full performance from the narrator Okabou Ojobolo in the 1960s, transcribed it and published the Izon text with an English translation, and later filmed a performance, so the work exists in three forms that can be compared against one another. The story concerns Ozidi, born after his father, a warrior of the same name, has been murdered by the elders of his town, and raised by his grandmother Oreame, a woman of formidable power who arms him with medicine and drives him through a sequence of killings until the violence turns on him and he has to be cured of it.
The saga is not a moral tale with a hero. It is a sustained treatment of what happens when power obtained through ritual means outruns the restraint of the person holding it, and the closing movement, in which Ozidi is afflicted by smallpox and healed, reads as the correction of a man who has become dangerous to his own people. The performance also depends on the audience being present as participants rather than as spectators. Onlookers interject, correct the narrator, take up the choruses and, in the masquerade sections, are drawn into the action, so the recorded text carries interruptions and repairs that a written work would have edited away. Clark-Bekederemo kept them, which is part of why the publication is valued as a record of an event and not only as a text.