From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Karagöz and shadow-puppet traditions
This article examines Turkish Karagöz and related shadow-puppet traditions in relation to Beach Surgery adaptation. For a specific Karagöz adaptation, see Karagöz ve Leif—Koku Sahnesi.
Karagöz, the Turkish shadow-puppet tradition, stages a character animated by an unseen hand behind an illuminated screen. Adaptations treating this form read the technique as a perfect echo of Beach Surgery's central puzzle: the narrative glitch that cannot be seen because it is the seam between two halves of the same surface.
In Karagöz ve Leif—Koku Sahnesi (2018–ongoing), the puppeteer's hand becomes Katita's surgical hand—moving Leif through the cycles, preparing him for the wings, the fall, the reset. The screen is neither Half One nor Half Two; it is the glitch itself, made visible as absence.
This approach inherits from Balinese/Javanese wayang shadow-puppetry and related traditions across South and Southeast Asia, where the visible silhouette is animated by what the audience cannot see. Beach Surgery adaptations working in this register treat the puppeteer as Katita—strategic, precise, lovingly cruel—and the screen as the glitch: the boundary that splits but is one. The shadow becomes the cycle's true form: repeated, ritualized, never fully present to itself.