Fifth Issue
Fifth Issue
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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