Commedia dell'Arte for the 21st Century

Practice and Performance in the Asia-Pacific

Corinna Di Niro, Olly Crick, Corinna Di Niro, Olly Crick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000520972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica teatrales

This book discusses the evolution of Commedia dell'Arte in the Asia-Pacific where through the process of reinvention and recreation it has emerged as a variety of hybrids and praxes, all in some ways faithful to the recreated European genre.

The contributors in this collection chart their own training in the field and document their strategies for engaging with this form of theatre. In doing so, this book examines the current thoughts, ideas, and perceptions of Commedia – a long-standing theatre genre, originating in a European-based collision between neo-classical drama and oral tradition. The contributing artists, directors, teachers, scholars and theatre-makers give insight into working styles, performance ideas, craft techniques and ways to engage an audience for whom Commedia is not part of their day-to-day culture. The volume presents case studies by current practitioners, some who have trained under known Commedia 'masters' (e.g. Lecoq, Boso, Mazzone-Clementi and Fava) and have returned to their country of origin where they have developed their performance and teaching praxis, and others (e.g. travelling from Europe to Japan, Thailand, Singapore and China) who have discovered access points to share or teach Commedia in places where it was previously not known.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in Performing arts, Italian studies, and History as well as practitioners in Commedia dell'Arte.

Part 1
In education

1 Flaminio Scala in Hong Kong

Peter Jordan

DOI: 10.4324/9781003142843-2

The chapter describes my experience in training and directing a group of graduating students from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts from late November to performance in mid-December 1997.

It is a curious irony that the first truly professional and avowedly secular theatre in Europe, which emerged on the Italian peninsula during the 16th century, is now universally known as ‘Commedia dell’Arte’, a moniker coined by the 18th-century playwright and self-appointed nemesis, Carlo Goldoni.¹ In his meta-theatrical piece, Il teatro comico (1751), he lays bare all that he – Goldoni – thought was tired, outdated, vulgar and shallow of the improvised masked theatre that had so captivated generations from all levels of society for the previous two hundred years, informing the practice and output of the likes of Shakespeare, Johnson, Molière, Marivaux, Beaumarchais, Gozzi and many others. To be fair to Goldoni, he acknowledged the genius of the early practitioners in his memoirs, recounting in enthusiastic detail his first experiences writing for Commedia dell’Arte actors, but by the middle of the 18th century, he felt the form had had its day.²

In any event, the name stuck, and we are stuck with it. Since renaming the phenomenon is not an option, more recent practitioners, such as Antonio Fava and Carlo Boso, have sought to un-ironise Goldoni’s dismissive term, emphasising the ‘professional’ implications of ‘dell’Arte’. However, some anglophone commentators appear to have overlooked the fact that ‘Commedia’ stands for theatre in general, rather than comedy in particular. The original actors performed in a variety of genres and even invented their own hybrids, but judging from the hundreds of extant scenarios, comedy was the clear favourite of the punters and perhaps also of the actors. The result of this preference is that the comic characters (Magnifico/Pantalone, il Dottore, il Capitano, Colombina, Franceschina, Arlecchino, the many Zanni et al.) are the ones that have lodged in the collective memory.

The fact that many centuries now separate us from the original companies of actors who roamed Europe enthusing audiences with their eclectic mix of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture may justify a fluid re-imagination of this form of European theatre. Yet, at least in the anglophone literature, some have evidently felt empowered to interpret the Commedia dell’Arte freely and intuitively, often with little or, at best, sporadic reference to known facts and original sources. Paradoxically, there is often an insistence on maintaining the original nomenclature for characters in tandem with an urge to set and preserve in aspic a profoundly ephemeral and innovative theatre form with bizarrely prescriptive assertions about how to perform it. Admittedly, it is not easy to capture an effervescent art and shoe-horn it into a book composed of words aimed squarely at practitioners and would-be practitioners, but several have tried (Rudlin, Grantham et al.). However, success in terms of unit sales should not indicate that such works necessarily have any meaningful authority on the subject.

The story of how the Commedia dell’Arte acquired its name is a salutary reminder – if reminder were needed – that the forerunners of the modern theatrical profession were a lot more mercurial than the rather sclerotic formulations that later generations have placed on them, presumably in an attempt to nail down their genius. The choice of expression is deliberate. Its meaning is that something has been comprehended and mastered. Yet, the act of nailing down violently prevents freedom of movement, the exact opposite of the freewheeling genius of the early professionals navigating the twin dangers of church and state, moving from town to town as virtual outlaws, following their own admirably progressive moral codes that saw women on an equal footing with men, the democratic election of leaders, and social classes intermingling in a general atmosphere of mutual respect. Their overarching purpose was to tap into and satisfy a burgeoning desire among audiences for a form of secular drama that reflected their own contemporary life experiences.

Given my scepticism about how well anyone could understand, let alone recreate, the Commedia dell’Arte, it was with some trepidation and bristling with doubts that I took up the challenge to train students from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and direct them in a graduation project. I was given two weeks to conduct classes and a further ten days to put together a performance of The Tragic Events, one of the scenarios contained in the Flaminio Scala compendium of 1611. If the distance between modern English-speaking actors and Italian late-Renaissance theatre practice is great, then the vast chasm I had to traverse in Hong Kong would surely be well-nigh impossible.

That said, I knew that the students had been trained in the Western theatrical tradition, rooted in Stanislavsky and his descendants and that the majority of plays they encountered were still, in 1997, drawn and translated from the Western canon. Furthermore, many of the participating students were also involved in a contemporaneous production of Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui [The doctor in spite of himself ] and so had some familiarity with the Commedia dell’Arte through its influence on the great French dramatist. There was, therefore, some common ground in terms of theatre vocabulary and cultural reference points, although I myself was hampered by a lack of knowledge of Chinese theatre traditions. At the time, I also spoke little Cantonese and therefore struggled to follow dialogue.

Thus, at a very early stage, I decided that the project could only have a chance of success if I took a collaborative approach allowing and relying on a less hierarchical and more ‘give-and-take’ atmosphere between us. Without realising at the time, I was in fact bringing us all closer to the original conditions of the early modern theatre that was essentially actors doing it for themselves without the overweening interventions of directors, designers and other non-performers. As this experience was a first for me – I had never directed before – as much as it was for the students, I kept a diary to chart and reflect on the process.

The first class was on 25 November 1997 and as I anticipated cultural divides to be bridged – not to mention the obvious linguistic obstacles – I opted to begin on a purely physical plane, with elementary acrobatic exercises, particularly acro-balance (e.g. ‘flag’, ‘swallow’, ‘secretary’). In my previous teaching in British universities and dedicated drama schools (Drama Centre, the former Webber Douglas Academy and Guildford School of Acting), I always included a physical warm-up and skills training in my praxis. As the classes progressed, I would give some basic mime technique, particularly fixed point and resistance, and also provided elementary training in stage fighting (coordinated action, sound effect, reaction and attention to sightlines).

In bypassing the language barrier and communicating at a more fundamental corporal level, we were able to establish a mutual rapport from the outset. The exercises also had the benefit of allowing students to become more physically intimate with each other in a neutral working context. Getting to know the weight, balance, strength and flexibility of other bodies encourages an instinctive visceral trust that is even useful when it comes to something more cerebral, like improvisation. At the same time, the classes explored stage applications for these acquired skills, along with a more generalised understanding of a limited performance space and how to move within it.

Such work helps to expand an actor’s physical range beyond purely naturalistic notions of gesture, movement and posture, encouraging them to think pictorially as much as textually. It also obliges one to keep the audience’s viewpoint in mind when, for example, putting together the illusion of a violent fight without injuring one another and thereby breaching the essential trust that is at the heart of all collective performance. Other exercises were often adaptations of games in Keith Johnstone’s (1979) seminal book, Impro. These included creating types of tableaux vivants that I would then ask the students to animate as the starting point for a group improvisation.

I also developed a simple rotating improvisation that involved students working together in pairs. Actor A enters and sits on a ‘bench’ in a public space like a park. They must engage in a solo activity (e.g. reading a book, eating, smoking, watching ducks, etc.) with no sense of being observed. Actor B enters and begins an interaction with A. A must accept whatever B offers and sustain the scene. Once this is achieved A finds a reason to leave and exits. Now B has a moment alone, engaged in an activity, until C arrives, and the process begins again. In this way, each member of the group takes part until we arrive back at A, who enters and interacts with the last actor. I encouraged each person to come in with a fresh impulse, energy or mood that contrasted with the foregoing scene. My hoped-for result was that the students could find ways to feel comfortable in a space without any need to perform or entertain, then to interact with a partner, taking whatever is given and sharing responsibility for sustaining the scene.

My next problem, as I saw it, was the dramatically effective control and use of a restricted space. The earliest depictions of the Commedia dell’Arte, particularly outdoor performances, show actors on raised wooden stages with little more than a simple curtain backdrop. Movement in such a limited and unadorned space, almost completely devoid of scenery and props, calls for a deep understanding of positioning and how it affects relationships and status onstage. In groups of five, the students were given a straightforward task to place themselves in the space in such a way that the audience could identify the power relationships between them. Typically, centre stage was reserved for the most important personage and the lowliest was usually situated far from the boss. There is of course room for interpretation and some positioning relies on context, but the general idea of status, not to mention a practical awareness of sight lines, was an important element to establish early on. It also gave me the opportunity to point out that lower-status characters often have a closer relationship with the audience and thus might find themselves further downstage when commenting directly on the action to spectators.

To a student steeped in the naturalistic tradition, such schema may seem overly prescriptive and unnatural, but I noted with some relief that the Hong Kong students not only had a strong sense of status relationships, buttressed by a culture of giving, saving and losing ‘face’ but were also instinctively aware of the symbolic meanings of positioning on stage. In the course of our regular discussions at the end of each class, it was noted that China translates as ‘central kingdom’, precisely because of the belief that it lay at the heart of civilisation in terms both of its power and culture. A similar bias has for centuries been implicit in Europe abutting the presumed central point of the earth, the Mediterranean. The purely physical use of space can thus tease out our preconceptions and cultural assumptions, with the further advantage of stressing another commonality of human experience.

The next day, I introduced some background historical context about the development of the early professional theatre: the scenarii; recurring characters based around masters, servants and lovers; improvisation; and masks. I then showed them the leather masks I had brought with me from England. These were the creation of Ninian Kinnier-Wilson, a founder member of the British Commedia troupe, Unfortunati. I asked the students to comment on what impressions each mask gave them, encouraging them to decide on the status of each one, its dominant emotion and whether the faces reminded them of particular animals. We compared the effect of the mask face-on and then in profile, noting any differences or contrasts. Then I asked for volunteers to put on individual masks, establishing a routine in which the student turns their back on the others while putting on the mask, so as to make for a clean transformation. When ready, they were asked to turn and face their audience without doing anything other than standing there and allowing the observers to react spontaneously. Once the actor had absorbed this reaction s/he was free to interact and improvise. The results were sometimes quite startling. The same mask could elicit a completely different response depending on the wearer. I asked how this was possible given that the features were unchanging. It was soon noted that not only the physique of the actor, but their general comportment and personal aura seemed to come into play. What seemed to be a restrictive covering that prevented communication via facial expression automatically found other avenues to communicate feeling and personality that engaged the whole body. An important intended result of the exercise was that the students would become more aware of the non-verbal cues that supplement and even sometimes replace spoken text.

Following on from this, the students went through a guided solo improvisation. They were asked to find a dominant and secondary emotion for the mask, which would then inform its standing posture, movements and ultimately its voice. After about 20 minutes of freely improvising by themselves, they were as...