Fifth Issue

The performance of the Greek Shadow Theater
Honorable gentlemen, honorable ladies, mademoiselles, and our beloved children,
good evening to you from here to there. Our theater tonight has a good performance. You
just all sit tight and have a good time. It’s time for Karagiozis.
Viewed as a conceptual framework, that comprehends artistic art (performance),
expressive form (item) and aesthetic response (audience), the Karagiozis performance is
rather a process than a product, an oral performing art, an interactive communicative
behavior, which requires the combination of several dynamic factors, so as to relate the
performative event with its natural landscape – Greek cities, villages, islands –, to trace
its historical, political, economic, social and cultural connotations, and to form the link
that connects the performance with real life, engaging the performance in its particular
historical moment and social context.
Each performance is not the mere repetition of previous ones. It is a new form of
expression related to its social reality, to its codes of behavior, to its social environment.
This dynamic evolving speech act constitutes a combination of constant and
variable elements.
To the constant elements belong the structure and the environment of the plays:
set in urban areas, the comic plays of Karagiozis Theater are composed by a standard
sequence of scenes, whose interaction produces the comic result:
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