Mad Max Karagiozis

Annus 6047. A nowheresville in Australia. Everything is laid to waste. Water and fuel are the only remaining currency of a wretched humanity. A hopeless Mad Max drives through a world emptied of life, filled only with silence and debris. Then, his car suddenly breaks down.

Standing before him is Karagiozis, ready to repair bolts, tyres, suspensions—and lost hopes. The archetypal folk antihero tears through the boundaries of the shadow puppet theatre screen and leaps onto the vast cinematic wasteland of Mad Max. Together, they have to fight for their survival against gang crews, tyrannical warlords, and nuclear storms.

The traditional hero of shadow puppet theatre meets the post-apocalyptic desert aesthetic of cinema, juxtaposing the shadow’s corporeality against the vastness of the screen, satire against survival, and the grotesque against the epic. Mad Max and Karagiozis–each an alter ego of the other–are called to stand together on stage, with courage and humour as their weapons.

The performance transpires as a hybrid multimedia experiment: live music, blending electroacoustic and traditional sounds, intertwines with shadow theatre, all morphing into cinematic storytelling. In the end, an industrial liturgy of metal and electricity, a pulse oscillating between the traditional and the mechanical, emerges.

In this kingdom of rust, satire turns into a howl, farce meets the uncanny, and the shadow theatre is reborn into a ritual of light and noise. Karagiozis does not merely fight dystopia; he renegotiates it.

The performance is dedicated to the memory of doctor and poet Giorgis Sideris.