A full traditional performance of the Ozidi Saga is an extended communal event, historically staged over roughly seven days, combining narration, singing, drumming, dance and masquerade with elaborate costume, and involving substantial participation from the performer's community rather than a single reciter working alone before a passive audience. This performance character is central to how Ijaw culture understands the saga: it is an enacted ritual and social occasion as much as a narrated story.
The most extensively documented version was performed by the bard Okabou Ojobolo over multiple days in the early 1960s and was transcribed, translated and published by the Nigerian poet and playwright J. P. Clark-Bekederemo, whose edition also documents the performance's staging, music and audience participation in detail. Clark-Bekederemo's own literary work drew directly on his study of the saga, and his edition remains the primary point of access for readers and scholars outside Ijaw culture, alongside a documentary film he also produced from the same performance, which preserves aspects of the saga's staged, participatory character that a printed text alone cannot fully convey.
Because performance, music and audience participation are so central to how the saga is understood within Ijaw culture, later scholarship has treated the printed and filmed record together as complementary rather than as one superseding the other, since neither medium alone preserves the full character of a live, multi day telling.