Commedia Gillet in Stockholm, Sweden

Some Commedia Gillet video on google video.

The link to the Commedia Gillet video

Check them out at www.commediagillet.com

Commedia in Nice, France

Eric Maiolino's blog with a video of his CDA performance in Nice, France.

Click here for Eric's page

Commedia in Australia

A company based in Fremantle Western Australia specialising in Commedia dell'Arte. For over 25 years Giovanni Margio and Antonio Mazzella have been delighting Australian and international audiences performing under their stage names of Sanjiva and Giri.

GIOVANNI (SANJIVA) MARGIO: Giovanni's love of street theatre has taken him to many countries in search of perfecting the various art forms. Starting in Sicily with training in the fine arts, he migrated to Australia where he studied graphic design in Perth, and circus skills, story telling and mime, Commedia dell' Arte. As a sculptor and designer he has created many large carnival floats and theatre props, inspired by his apprenticeship in float making with Professore Giuseppe Domenici of the famous Viarreggio Carnevale. He performs regularly with Spare Parts Puppet Theatre, directs theatre productions and makes masks.

ANTONIO ( GIRI ) MAZZELLA: With numerous credits in national radio, TV and stage, Antonio is a multi talented performer with a career spanning over 25 years. After initial training in classical voice, his exploration of physical theatre led him through puppetry, street circus, improvisation, clown, mime, theatre sports, cabaret, mask, community arts and carnival parades. Antonio has directed theatre productions and created masked musical plays for schools Italian programs. He recently finished a tour of the Northern Territory where he performed solo shows, ran mask, puppetry and. drama games programs for teachers, students and people with disabilities.

Commedia in Tuxedo, New York

I like the knocking lazzo.

Commedia in Avignon, France

Commedia in Munich, Germany

Christina Gelsone & Seth Bloom

Seth Bloom is the creator and main instigator of Full Bloom Theatre; co-founder, co-director, and a performer for Split Knuckle Theatre; and the International Artistic Director for the Mobile Mini Circus for Children, headquartered in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Seth brings to his expertise his education at the London International School of Performing Arts (MFA); the Dell Arte School of Physical Theatre (Certificate); Wesleyan University (BA); the Ringling Brothers Clown College (BFA--bachelor of fun arts).

Christina Gelsone As a non-verbal clown and street performer, Christina has performed in festivals in Singapore, Albania, Scotland, Japan, Holland, France, Venezuela, Portugal, and Greece. A former member of Bond Street Theater, she has performed extensively in areas of post-conflict, including Kosovo, Serbia, Macedonia, and Afghanistan.

The pictures above were taken in May, 2007 in Liuzhou, China. I first met Christina on a corporate gig here in NYC; we did interactive entertainment together, and a few weeks later we met again on a cruise ship where we were both performing. I had heard many great things about Seth, but I didn't meet him until about a year ago before getting to know him better during the China trip.

Learn about Seth and Christina by visiting their websites:

www.fullbloomtheatre.org www.foolsacademy.com

www.bondst.org (not their website, but you'll see them there)

Stanley Allan Sherman

Stanley Allan Sherman, mask-maker, performer, teacher and playwright.

I first met Stanley at a conference in 2000 just a day or two before the passing of Carlo Mazzone-Clementi. At first glance, I was honestly unimpressed with some of Stanley's masks; they seemed very rough and Grotowski-like, not at all like the beautiful showpieces in which I had been trained. (Yes, I had much to learn...)

I changed my mind once I saw Stanley's masks in action. Just about a year ago, I asked him about his mask-making work. He told me he found his experience as an actor tremendously influential on his sculpting. He approaches each mask with various emotional states in mind, and in his heart, to infuse them into the leather, and into the final product.

Stanley is perhaps best known as the creator of the Mankind mask for the WWF (now WWE). He has a series of leather and neoprene Commedia masks for sale on his website, www.maskarts.com. Stanley also teaches Commedia and clown performance, mask making, leather clown nose making, and has been known to come to my house for a New Year's party.

Dario Fo

Artwork by Dario Fo

What can we learn from Dario Fo as Commedia performers?

His 1987 book (lecture notes, really) Manuale Minimo dell'Attore (translated by Joe Farrell, 1991, as The Tricks of the Trade) has this to say about the mask:

"What is the purpose of the mask? To magnify and simultaneously give the essence of the character. It obliges you to widen and develop your gestures, which must not be arbitrary...if you want the audience to follow you..."

"The mask, in bringing the movement of the whole body into play, imposes the need to identify the essence of a gesture, because if...a multiplicity of senseless gestures are performed, the result is to destroy the value of the original gesture itself."

My entire first semester as a freshman acting student at NYU was spent in a neutral mask. We worked to strip away our natural movement patterns, personal tics and learn to use the body, instead of the face alone to communicate the inner life of a character to the audience. John Lepiarz (Mr. Fish) said of LeCoq "he worked the neutral mask ad nauseum". His experience was of LeCoq continually pressing for "less, less". Reduce to the essence of the gesture revealing the emotional experience.

In discussing the performance of The Starving Zanni lazzo in The Tricks of the Trade, Fo describes how he will at various times freeze the body and animate only the face, allowing the audience to focus, concentrate on the face alone. He alternately opens the focus to his whole body, and mimes pots and pans on various fires around the body, opening up the stage space. These gestures are carefully chosen, yet performed in an energized sense of improvisation and abandon useful for outdoor theater. But the actor is always in control of the audience.

Think in terms of editing a film performance: wide shot, medium shot, close-up. My own CDA scripts have my little stick figure drawings all over them; perhaps a comic strip or a storyboard is a good example. The character posture comes first, then the emotional posture, then the character's playable action is boiled down to the smallest gesture: just the mouth speaking the line, perhaps a tilt of the head, perhaps a point of the finger, perhaps a cartwheel-roundoff-back-handspring. But it's specific. No wandering. No 'spaghetti' (which is, I believe, a Carlo Mazzone-Clementi term for non-specific, messy acting.)

Fo is also a strong proponent of grammelot; a mix of onomatopoeic sound effects and words. This is harder to describe in a printed text, but we see stand up comedians do it all the time: roaring dinosaurs, bodily functions, noisy neighbors and appliances all come from the mouth of a single performer. Used more imaginatively, in an 'as-if' situation, we can transfer this to commedia. Perhaps I am hit with bad news as if I had been hit in the stomach. What is a sound effect for getting hit in the stomach? What is a sound effect for the reaction of getting hit in the stomach? How can these be combined with a specific gesture that puts a reaction to another character's words into your character's body?

Grammelot is also a great way to use mime and keep it fun and noisy. Clown teacher Alan Clay likes to remind his students, "noises, noises, noises." You can mime bouncing a ball, but adding the 'boing' sound or a 'splat' sound enhances the storytelling.

The Tricks of the Trade has much more to offer; history of theatrical techniques in Greek tragedy, thoughts on the history of women in theater, specifically in comedy and clown, and finding a dialectic balance to your performance.

Another Fo book, this one by Ron Jenkins, entitled Dario Fo and Franca Rame, Artful Laughter published by Aperture books has a wonderful series of articles about Fo and Rame, and a large number of Fo's posters and illustrations, similar to those seen above.

My favorite passage is here: "An actor should treat his audience the way a fisherman handles a fish on a line. You have to maintain just the right amount of tension. If you relax you will lose them. If you pull them toward you too abruptly you can snap the line and they are lost. The trick is to bring them close to you gradually while keeping them on the hook" -Fo

Click on the title of this post for Dario Fo on Wiki

Buy these books!

Artful Laughter by Ron Jenkins

The Tricks of the Trade by Dario Fo

Ferruccio Soleri as Arlecchino

A video clip of Ferruccio Soleri as Arlecchino



Grazie sipariospazioarte (youtube) for the video