Narrative and Performance Coexistence in Tongue Twister of Ortaoyunu

Abstract

The concepts of "narrative" and "demonstration" appear as basic concepts in textual studies. These concepts have been used by different disciplines to discuss the basic dynamics of the demonstrative and the narrative. In this article, the positioning of the narrative in the ortaoyunu, which is one of the traditional Turkish theater genres, will be examined. Ortaoyunu carries all the characteristics of a theatrical space with its fragmented and open format. The tongue twister in the plays are remarkable in terms of positioning the narra-tive in a performative show. This section is the section that includes the extraordinary elements that Kavuklu tells in order to convey her verbal mastery to the audience. For this reason, it is important to understand the coexistence of the narrative and the demonstrative in a performative structure. In the tongue twister section, which takes place before the chapters of the plays, Kavuklu's memory is told, supported by dialogues to which Pisekar reacts with surprise. At the end of all this extraordinariness, it turns out that Kavuklu is not telling about an event that happened to her, but about a dream she saw. As such, Kavuklu inserts a narrative into the performance. Here, the dream narrative is highly functional in embedding a plot-independent plot into the performance. This narrative player, which is constructed with extraordinary features; brings together the concepts of "diegesis" and "mimesis" by transforming the actor from the actor to the narrator. These features are noteworthy in that they show that the drama texts are based on both performance and narrative. Examina-tion of this unity is remarkable in terms of producing new forms on the structure of traditional theatre. In the tongue twister, the ortaoyunu scene is no longer performative and turns into a new context in which Kavuklu is the narrator. Thus, two different times and places emerge in the game. The first of these belongs to the playful and the other to the narrative. From this point of view, the middle game as a genre emerges as a genre with dynamics between the narrative and the demonstration, in which the characters of the play change within the performance. Thus, it gains a layered and renewable feature. This allows it to renew itself with the dynam-ics of both speech and display. It can be said that these features have a remarkable function in bringing the contemporary and traditional together in the structural analysis of traditional Turkish theatre. The fact that the narrative is a dream allows to push the limits of the extraordinary, depending on the talent of the narrator, and also facilitates the return from the narrative to the performance. In this study, the examples of ortaoyunu whose tongue twister were examined were selected from the texts compiled by Cevdet Kudret. The tongue twister section is accepted by the researchers as the most important part of the ortaoyunu. Since the sections in question form a narrative and are long, the examples of games that will convey the subject are summarized in the study. In terms of the limitation of the study, all game examples were not included in the study to avoid repetition.