The main plot involves various types of people with different costumes, manners and dialects. Some of these plots have been handed down from generation to generation. Evliya Celebi lists some of the plays which are used to this day. However some puppeteers or Ortaoyunu companies tried to create new plots or vary the old ones […]
Virtually nothing is known of popular theater under the Anatolian Turks between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. The Byzantine Emperor Manual Palaeologos II records his impression of his visit to Sultan Beyazit’s court sometime before 1407 and mentions companies of musicians, singers, dancers and actors. A very early description of a Turkish dramatic performance may […]
The Stock Characters In Karagoz (2) Drunkard and Braggart: He always uses slang and Karagoz can not understand him. He occasionally threatens Karagoz but when the latter becomes angry, the drunkard shows his cowardice and runs away. He blusters in everywhere with his armoury of weapons and lays down the law, as he sees it. […]
Turkish Music plays an important part in traditional Turkish plays called Karagoz. Turkish music as performed in these plays has acquired a characteristic of its own ands become a musical genre peculiar to old Istanbul’s urban light Turkish music. It is unthinkable to consider a Karagoz play in which Turkish music is not given performance. […]
The shadow theatre, which involves two-dimensional figures casting their shadows on a screen, had important place in Turkey as well as throughout the larger area of the Ottoman Empire. The Turks, before they came to know shadow theatre in the sixteenth century, had enjoyed a long-standing established puppet tradition. There is virtually no kind of […]
Welcome To Traditional Turkish Puppets Shadow Play Karagoz FOUR TRADITIONS OF THEATRE IN TURKEY* Theatrical art in Turkey is currently believed to have developed from the same religious, moral and educational urge to imitate human actions that accompanied its growth in other countries, particularly in ancient Greece. The puppet shadow play, which involves two-dimensional puppets […]
Regarding presentation, the Karagoz puppet theatre stage is separated from the audience by a frame holding a sheet of any white translucent material but preferably fine Egyptian cotton. It is mounted like a painters canvas, stretched taut on a frame. The size of the screen in the past was 2 m x 2.5 m; in […]
A few museums have bought my puppets, you can see that puppets below.
Shadow play for the Goethe Theater in Bad Lauchstädt in Germany. 2004: Meray Ulgen designed figures for shadow play, I made the figures and performed for the opera “Die Entführung aus dem Serail” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Konstanze and Belmonte, the main characters of the opera, lost each other, when Konstanze was abducted by pirates. […]
We can not separate the performance and the characters of the shadow theater from the social context and ethos of the Ottoman Empire in which it was generated and firmly located in its context. It was a large empire spread over three continents; Europe, Asia and Africa. Its population consisted of several nationalities, religions and […]
