Double - Commedia Dell'arte - Blog 8 - 25/01/16

Today, we polished off our opening scene! We began by rehearsing what we already had but we all lack energy and we weren't convincing enough as our Commedia Stock Characters. We decided that the best way to nail our characterisation was to split off into small groups and discuss our characters personalities and how they interact with others and the audience. I paired with Ollie as Pantalone and Doctor interact often in the world of Commedia! I discussed how Pantalone is very old and is a former Magnifico, he is greedy and rather stingy with his money, has a high regard for intelligence, he is incredibly gullible, and walks with a hunched back but not because of his age, but in order to protect his money sack banging over his groin.

After this we got into different groups (Lorna & James/Rhiannon, Rob and Ollie/Charlie and I) and devised a short Lazzi scene! Lazzi is an improvised comic dialogue or action commonly used in the Commedia Dell'arte. Our groups were based on which Commedia characters would typically pair with the others. Brighella is forever telling Zanni what to do, Harlequin is forever ignoring Pantalone's demands and Captain is always getting into fights against people he can't beat such as Columbina whom is known for her flirting with the doctor.

We wanted these scenes for us to include no dialogue as we wanted to improve our characters' movement. Our movement needed further characterisation so by restricting ourselves to only movement, we needed to be sure our movement fully accentuated the story we were trying to tell and our characters' motives.

This is how mine and Charlie's scene went:

• Pantalone walks to Harlequin and orders him to do something for him, but Harlequin tries to laugh him off; this results in Harlequin being hit.
• Pantalone tells him again and leaves.
• Harlequin finds some food and eats it using Commedia styled gestures.
• Pantalone spots him and approaches him, meanwhile Harlequin quickly tries to eat the last scraps of food available.
• Pantalone pulls him by the ear and tells him to leave. Harlequin looks at Pantalone surly and starts walking off and Pantalone kicks him on the butt.

When presenting this short scene, we were given the following feedback:

• Our gestures need to be more exaggerative
• We must keep our faces facing the audience as much as possible so that the audience can see our masks
• Display our emotions to the audience more than the characters we're performing with

Following this activity, we tried our opening scene out again but this time with our improved character movements. This went a great deal better than before but we made some more relevant improvements:

• When characters enter, it should be of their own accord (excl. Doctor as he's called). We decided it looked rather weird having every character enter mysteriously as they are mentioned and thought that they should be walking past in the background before they're blamed.
• We resolved issues with characters masking each other due to us all being hunched together on the stage around Harlequin's body.

Next lesson, we will actually get round to devising other smaller scenes between fewer characters.