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

Tension in Commedia and Clown Theater

Just a quick thought this morning; let's begin with a weak generalization. The clown's function in circus or in most of theater is to explore and break the tension built up by acrobats performing feats of tremendous danger or actors digging their teeth into dramatic life and death moments of human drama. The clown's ability to respond to the tension in the room, play with it, belittle it, or what have you, is a major tool in the clown's arsenal for the creation of comedy.

In Clown Theater, or the Commedia, when the preponderance of characters on stage or even all of them are clown characters, who or what is building tension? I suppose there can be inherent tension in a plot, and there is absolutely a useful and wonderful tension created with an audience when the clown simply stops and exists in the space with an audience without a fourth wall of protection. But are these sustainable in the same way a high-wire act or the courtroom scene in Merchant of Venice are?

It would seem to me that in clown theater, clowns create the tension to break the tension to get the laugh, then they need to start all over again. Watching two circus acts has built up 16 minutes of tension in an audience. A clown can come out and play for 5 minutes riding that wave, if an act is well constructed. If what has come before is set-up, punch, set-up, punch, set-up, punch, how does the next clown to arrive on stage in a clown show change the energy in the room in order to provoke surprise at a gut-level?

If anyone out there has any thoughts, I'd be very interested in hearing. I'm going to continue to consider it.

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

The Illusion of Commedia

'A Party of Charlatans in an Italian Landscape' by Karel Dujardin, 1657


'Traditional' Commedia exists more as an illusion in the mind and imagination of the public theatrical consciousness than as any reality in 21st century North America. The intelligent theatrical artist will capitalize on that fact, mixing myth, fantasy, reality, gravity into a melange that will read perhaps truer to a contemporary audience than the most historically accurate performance piece we can deliver.

Arlecchino is now primarily a figure of visual art, not performance art. More people have seen engravings, paintings, ceramic figurines depicting him than will ever see a worthy performance of the character in any reader's lifetime. The visual representations have created a new mythology in the mind of our potential audience, and the theater practitioner is wise to be conscious of the new mythology and make choices that both confirm and deny the preconceptions. Confirming them gives your audience a sense of familiarity and recognition that a Renaissance audience would have had with the characters. Finding useful times to deny them is useful for surprise, alienation, and frankly, instruction. Not to encourage preachiness, but the audience should learn something about the art-form, dammit.

So we have choices to make about our visual representations based on preconceptions gleaned from figurines and diner placemats. But what of the sound of the commedia? Callot's engravings don't speak. How best to create the sound of these characters?

What about venue? Should today's representations of 'traditional' CDA be performed outdoors under the sun, or indoors in a well-equipped theater with lots of blue light and surround sound?

Pierrot is another consideration. I think Barry Grantham says it best in his book Playing Commedia: "Pierrot is a very important part of the communal psyche and there is no reason why he should not be embraced in the new Commedia. There are, however, dangers; the spirit with which he has been imbued since his inception is so powerful, so all-pervasive, that there is a chance that he can infect the other masks with a virus of melancholia quite alien to their bright natures."

As we all continue to study, practice and form our own ideas about Commedia, the Illusion of Commedia will be a consideration to any artist looking to bring his or her work to the public at large. However, it must be used intelligently to enhance our work, not to dilute our own theatrical power. Ask all of the questions, and find for your own aesthetic, your audience's aesthetic, the most interesting answers. Have fun.

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