Double - Commedia Dell'arte - Blog 12 - 12/02/16

Today in Double we made a big decision to completely ditch the whole murder mystery idea. We did this as we felt that we were going nowhere with the devising and we constantly stuck for ideas and the storyline seemed too dull. Also, the scenes we had planned seemed too forced and we felt like we had to stick to certain character combinations. With this kept in mind, we decided to split off into groups and devised new scenes for us to draw inspiration from. This seemed like a step backwards but we knew this decision was for the best as this was likely to be our last opportunity to do so.

We split off into groups (James, Rhiannon, Lorna & Ollie/Charlie, Rob and I), and began devising our scenes. With the other group they devised a scene Zanni and Columbina (James and Rhiannon) while Lorna and Ollie offered support and contributed with ideas and constructive criticism. Meanwhile, Charlie did the same while Rob and I tried to construct a scene between Captain and Pantalone.

We started off by researching the typical scenarios which occur between Pantalone and Captain but after searching we couldn't find anything. We decided to devise our own original scene instead which we would base around the characters' personality. We wanted to play on Captain's cockiness and need for power/money by demonstrating  how he reacts under pressure.

This was the outline we came up with:

• Pantalone is at a bar and Captain enters
• Captain challenges Pantalone for his money drawing his sword
• Pantalone pulls out a comically much bigger sword and Captain switches from his confident swagger to being completely afraid
• They battle; Pantalone turns away still fighting taking a sip of his drink.
• Pantalone defeats Captain

Although this seemed like such a great concept, after many attempts, we found it very difficult to perform. We will keep this idea archived for later in case we were to use it again or steal parts of it for another scene.

Next lesson we will watch the other groups performance and work on how to improve it even further.