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Fifth Issue

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The performance of the Greek Shadow Theater<br />

Honorable gentlemen, honorable ladies, mademoiselles, and our beloved children,<br />

good evening to you from here to there. Our theater tonight has a good performance. You<br />

just all sit tight and have a good time. It’s time for Karagiozis.<br />

Viewed as a conceptual framework, that comprehends artistic art (performance),<br />

expressive form (item) and aesthetic response (audience), the Karagiozis performance is<br />

rather a process than a product, an oral performing art, an interactive communicative<br />

behavior, which requires the combination of several dynamic factors, so as to relate the<br />

performative event with its natural landscape – Greek cities, villages, islands –, to trace<br />

its historical, political, economic, social and cultural connotations, and to form the link<br />

that connects the performance with real life, engaging the performance in its particular<br />

historical moment and social context.<br />

Each performance is not the mere repetition of previous ones. It is a new form of<br />

expression related to its social reality, to its codes of behavior, to its social environment.<br />

This dynamic evolving speech act constitutes a combination of constant and<br />

variable elements.<br />

To the constant elements belong the structure and the environment of the plays:<br />

set in urban areas, the comic plays of Karagiozis Theater are composed by a standard<br />

sequence of scenes, whose interaction produces the comic result:<br />

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