He was approved to stay in the United States. With the help of a lawyer friend, he spent months compiling a dossier of almost 900 pages, which attested to his excellence in Karagöz back in Turkey. He applied for the “Einstein Visa,” or EB-1 reserved for experts in a particular field of study or arts practice. Eventually, he quit the pizza gig, relying on the hospitality of friends, who encouraged him to pursue puppetry full time. He remembers standing behind the counter struggling to understand customers. A light (once an oil lamp, now an electric bulb) illuminates the figures for the audience from behind the screen, casting their shadows in full color, while the puppeteer switches out characters and voices, shakes his tambourine, blows his kazoo, and sometimes uses the shadow of his own hand as part of the show.īefore launching his puppetry career in the United Sates, Hulagu’s first job as a new immigrant to Virginia was at a fast-food pizza joint. The puppeteer stands behind a white, translucent cloth screen and manipulates the figures using wooden rods. Karagöz is performed with two-dimensional puppets cut out of polished and painted animal hide. Anatolian shadow puppetry developed during the early days of the Ottoman Empire, long before the Republic of Turkey was established in 1922. The earliest record of Karagöz-meaning “black eye” in Turkish, a reference to the namesake dark-eyed puppet protagonist-dates back to the fourteenth century. Videography: Charlie Weber, Xueying ChangĮditing: Isabel Spiegel, Charlie Weber, Albert Tong, Ashley Avila You must master the language as an artist.” “In Karagöz, language is everything,” Hulagu says. His goal? To perform Karagöz, the 700-year-old art of Anatolian shadow puppetry for a Western audience. Learning a New LanguageĪs a recent immigrant to the United States, the former actor and arts journalist is going through a similarly painstaking process to learn English. Other times he read novels out loud (he particularly loved Dostoyevsky) or recorded and re-recorded himself speaking Turkish until his accent was almost imperceptible. Every day for a year after graduation, he would sit alone in his room with a wine cork between his teeth, forcing himself to clearly enunciate phrases in the national language. Instead of letting these words discourage him, Hulagu decided to give himself Turkish elocution lessons à la My Fair Lady. In Turkey, they have historically faced discrimination and even criminal charges for speaking Kurdish. With no country of their own, the Kurds are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East. “The teacher told me in front of the rest of the class that I was talented, but I would only get minor roles because of my Kurdish accent,” recalls Hulagu, now thirty-four years old, wearing round wire-frame glasses and a dangling lizard pendant earring. One by one, each graduating student was called up on stage for their end-of-term review. Ayhan Hulagu took a bow after his final performance at acting school in Istanbul, Turkey.
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