Чалгата като маскарад
Chalga and Masquerade

Summary/Abstract: The author examines chalga – a specific musical and cultural phenomenon, which has been always connected with the Balkan pub. In that specific context both chalga and pub are firmly connected with urban environment. They stay close to our bodily nature and not to our souls there. Thus it is found important to stress the attention on the time and space of the chalga performance, as well as on the image of its performers. The latter are the one of the woman sex-bomb and the one of the man barovets (a Bulgarian word, roughly corresponding to a successful new rich). There have also been noted some peculiarities in the texts of the songs, as well as in the media images of the chalga performers. At the level of the general assumptions the author interprets chalga in the light of Bahtin’s theory of the life-asserting nature of laughter and Propp’s idea about laughter as creating life. Thus the author concludes that chalga and masquerade have some common features in their forms, as far as their ways of experiencing the feast are concerned.

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