We started the lesson by adding elastic string to our masks so that we can finally wear them when performing. This means we get more rehearsal time with our masks and we can rectify any mistakes we make involving our masks such as facing the audience. To the right is an image of my completed mask:
Following a physical and focus warm-up we began a characterisation warm up. This consisted of walking around the room like our characters, changing our movement based on given emotions for our characters to feel and greeting each other in our characters. When walking, I kept in mind how Pantalone walks based on my research; "hunchback," and "walks with hips forward." When greeting other characters I based this on how they were positioned on the status tree of Commedia Dell'arte:
- Zanni: Hostile greeting, shooing him away if he gets too close
- Columbina: Flirty greeting, dirty old man flirting with a sweet innocent girl
- Brighella: Hostile greeting, giving an order asap
- Captain: Hostile greeting, cautioning Captain before he tries anything
- Harlequin: Hostile greeting, giving an order asap
- Doctor: Friendly greeting, greeting an old friend, perhaps an insult for banter purposes
I felt these exercises were very helpful for us as they aided us in nailing our characterisation. Wearing the masks through this exercise aswell was very important as it allowed us to focus more on the task as we felt properly immersed into our characters!
After this exercise, we gathered round and shared our ideas we came up with for scenes that we could potentially take further. We had multiple ideas put across but they all featured one main focus: a few characters working together to do/achieve something but everything going wrong. From this main focus we thought about what setting we could have and we could then go more in depth about what we would have go wrong. We originally thought a wedding would be hilarious featuring Pantalone tripping over walking his daughter, 1st actress, down the aisle, Harlequin eating the wedding cake and Doctor having to improvise a speech. However, we realised we wouldn't be able to do this idea as we had already agreed that we would remove the lovers from our piece as it makes things easier as we wouldn't have to deal with costume/make-up changes.
We then thought of behind the scenes of the wedding; we could have chef's, waiters, dishwashers and an overseer. We followed through with this idea but instead of having the behind the scenes of a wedding, we figured we'd have our piece set in a restaurant. We came up with a great idea of having the audience seated in cabaret which means we could use the audience area as the restaurant floor and use the audience as our patrons. We had a constant flow of ideas which featured different ideas for things to go wrong and using the stage as our kitchen; this makes our piece rather abstract as the characters on the restaurant floor won't be able to see the characters in the kitchen but the audience will. Below is an image of our collated ideas, our staging ideas and the roles each character would take in this piece:
Pantalone and Doctor would be two patrons dining in the restaurant; I felt this would immerse the audience into the performance even more by not only having the actors interact with them but having two actors be part of them. We had an idea of having the pair as critics of the restaurant being able to make digs at the staff and criticise the food but we had an even better idea: we would have the kitchen staff think that Doctor and Pantalone are critics and they would be rushing around trying to make everything perfect (this would result in many accidents) and when Doctor and Pantalone leave, another audience member (someone who we'd discuss this with before hand: Ollie Marshall from single said he'd be happy to do it) would say that he was the critic and was appalled by their service.
Next lesson we will begin workshopping many of our ideas (left column of the image above).
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