Ilex Foundation Fellow
The Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC
Ilex Foundation provided support for a research project
resulting in the publication of archival material belonging to the Whitman/Rinvolucri
Greek Shadow Theater Collection, which is part of the Milman
Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard University. The collection,
compiled in Greece in the 1960s, consists of numerous recorded performances
and interviews with the artists, with priceless information about the
history of the genre; the recordings represent the only systematic corpus
for the scholar of this oral traditional genre.
The publication of one transcribed performance and one
autobiographical interview is annotated and prefaced by an extensive
introduction. The introductory essay related to aspects of the poetics
and the history of the genre discusses the influence of literacy on
the formulation of the performance. From the broad range of written
sources that have had their impact on Shadow Theater play formation,
the focus is on the influence of Western theater. For instance, the
situations that motivate the plot in plays like Karaghiozis the Doctor
can be traced back to Molière comedies. Molière
was considered by Greek playwrights of the 19th century the master of
comedy and his comedies were the biggest source of inspiration for them.
Both the translations of the oeuvre of Molière and the original
Greek comedies have found their way from the high brow productions for
elite audiences to the popular marionette shows of the late 19th century.
The loans of plots from marionette shows was a very widespread technique
among Shadow Theater puppeteers, according to their testimony.
The publication of the performance of Karaghiozis the
Doctor by Avraam reveals how this mutated Western theater material
was combined with Greek folk-tale motifs to produce a play full of surprises.
At the same time, the three variants of this comedy available in the
collection provide ample evidence to substantiate the textual flexibility
of orally composed performances, which were shaped distinctly according
to the personality of the artist and the particularities of the audience.
Last, the inclusion of the edited autobiography of Avraam, a very creative
post-WWII puppeteer, familiarizes the reader with all the phases of
an artist's formative and creative life.
Anna Stavrakopoulou initiated the ancient & modern
Greek language program at Bosphorus University (Istanbul, Turkey) in
1995-1996, and then went on to teach at Harvard for the following three
years. In 1999, she took a two-year break from academia to join the
executive team of the newly established Onassis Foundation (USA) in
New York City.
During her 2001-2002 Ilex Foundation research-and-writing
fellowship, she also divided her time as visiting faculty between the
University of Crete and Yale. During the summer of 2002, she taught
at the Harvard Olympia Summer Program, a pilot Harvard Summer School
program, which she has been instrumental in organizing. She is currently
an independent scholar based in Athens, Greece.
She holds a MA and a Ph.D in Modern Greek Studies from
Harvard University, a D.E.A. from the Universit? de Paris III-Sorbonne
Nouvelle and a BA in Medieval and Modern Greek Literature from the University
of Crete. She is the co-editor (with Gregory Nagy) of Modern Greek
Literature: Critical Essays (Routledge, 2003) and has published
a number of reviews and articles on contemporary Greek theater and literature.
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