Commedia dell'Arte, its Structure and Tradition

Antonio Fava in Conversation with John Rudlin

John Rudlin, Antonio Fava

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000296495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Commedia dell'Arte, its Structure and Tradition chronicles a series of discussions between two renowned experts in commedia dell'arte – master practitioners Antonio Fava and John Rudlin.

These discussions were recorded during three recent visits by Fava to Rudlin's rural retreat in south west France. They take in all of commedia dell'arte 's most striking and enduring elements – its masks, its scripts and scenarios, and most outstandingly, its cast of characters. Fava explores the role of each stock Commedia character and their subsequent incarnations in popular culture, as well as their roots in prominent figures of their time. The lively and wide-ranging conversations also take in methods of staging commedia dell'arte for contemporary audiences, the evolution of its gestures, and the collective nature of its theatre-making.

This is an essential book for any student or practitioner of commedia dell'arte – provocative, expansive wisdom from the modern world's foremost exponent of the craft.

1The mask

AF: As an object the commedia dell'arte mask is a false countenance made of leather. It is commonly thought that it was black, ab origine, but this is not the case: it was of natural tan colour when new, only becoming blackened with use and age. In the olden days, performing in the open air or by candle-light, it might take two or three generations of wear for a mask to blacken totally. Furthermore, the mask-makers of the time did not have the means to introduce different colours. With today's stage illumination by electricity, the darkening process is speeded up considerably, and one also needs to introduce some subtlety of tone. When I dye a mask that I have made, it is in anticipation of the hue that the leather would have adopted after 10 years or so. Incidentally, the comici dell'arte would never have requested a new mask to be made black: a lot of servants were slaves at the time, but black slaves had no place in commedia dell'arte. Ariane Mnouchkine was quite wrong to make such a supposition.¹

Figure 1.1 Grande Zanni mask^*

^*This image can be viewed in colour via the eResource link found in the preliminary pages of this edition www.routledge.com/​9780367648565 and on the book’s webpage on Routledge.com.

Furthermore, there is no evidence whatsoever for the misapprehension going round present-day mask-makers that Brighella's mask should be olive-green. Where the green supposition has come from I do not know, but it is the kind of theorisation with no historical basis in actual Commedia performance that I find unacceptable. (See Figure 1.1)

JR: I think there's been a mistranslation somewhere along the line. ‘Olivatre’ in French when referring to facial complexion would perhaps be better rendered ‘sallow’ than ‘olivaceous' in English.

AF: Even olive-brown due to the natural tanning process, but not green. I repeat, as the leather ages, with temperature and sweat, the mask passes through all the colours by which a white European face is normally known. Green is not one of them. Commedia mask-makers never made fantastical masks.

JR: In the 18th century Brighella did acquire green frogging on his costume…

AF: A green-faced Brighella is on my no-no list, and that's that.

JR: I'm interested to discover what else you are going to put on your no-no list…

AF: All in good time… It is not usually understood that the first mask to be found in commedia dell'arte was make-up, that of the infarinato, [literally ‘the enfloured one’, the white-faced fool]. His make-up was white², heavily so, made popular again in the 19th century, particularly by the French Pierrots. In the early days of playing in the street in the broad light of day, actors wanted to show a face that was not their own: that of the character, not of the actor. The white face also more readily enabled women's parts to be played by men, as was the tradition. (See Figure 1.2)

Figure 1.2 Pantalone dancing in an inn

JR: Traces of the floured face can still be found in early cinema: the Keystone Cops, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Stan Laurel, for example, Why?

AF: Because the principals needed to stand out from the crowd in both cases – the sunlit streets of the Italian carnivals and the film lots of Hollywood.

JR: And early black-and-white one and two-reelers were filmed outdoors…

AF: Yes.

JR: …Hollywood becoming the movie-making centre it did because of the exceptional quality of the light in the days before pollution. But why then did those white-faced comici dell'arte end up wearing the mask?

AF: The facial mask alone is not a sufficient disguise: the head needs to be considered as a whole: the wig or hat, facial hair, the chin below the half-mask line, the cheeks even in the case of the doctor's quarter-mask. Today there is a whole line of theatrical investigation, altogether modern, specific to our times, which is based on the presumption that all you need is the mask and that if you put it on, and little else in terms of dressing head or body – are practically naked, in fact – it will dictate to you how your body should behave. I've seen this several times on the internet as street performance being practised in the name of commedia dell'arte; it makes about as much sense as promenading naked except for a pair of shoes.

JR: No-no list?

AF: No-no list. Inevitably, each time, the mask has been that of Arlecchino; the actors, also inevitably, are young, with handsome, good-looking bodies. But to take on a mask is a commitment for life, a professional commitment. What are these youngsters going to do when they grow older?

JR: They may be latter-day disciples of Etienne Decroux who worked in just a loincloth.

AF: Ah, the tanga…. The most important disciples of Decroux are Eugenio Barba of Odin Teatr and Jerzy Grotowski who developed the idea of the corps plastique. But you can't mix near nudity with a mask on with Decroux's gestuality and Grotowski's plasticity and claim the result to be commedia dell'arte. Commedia dell'arte is much more precise, much less elastic, much less individually expressive. It is a genre which exists within specific boundaries: when we recognise those boundaries, we know where we are. Form and content coincide.

JR: In commedia dell'arte you have to work with constriction, not freedom. Pantalone's Moroccan slippers, for example, have open backs and pointed toes, obliging him to shuffle and even dance in a particular way. (See Figure 1.2)

AF: And there's also the fact that, in the expressive system of commedia dell'arte, a mask never takes its clothes off. The costume is part of the mask – in fact, the only non-masked part of the actor is his hands. These should never be brought into proximity with the mask for fear of betraying its lack of plasticity. Also, and it doesn't matter whether the actor is masked or not, I find that one must never turn one's back on the spectator or, if absolutely necessary, only rapidly: anything more than a fleeting glance at the back of the neck and the mask's identity is lost. I notice in my collection of engravings, especially those of the 17th century, of Watteau and his school in particular, that occasionally Pierrot, for example, does turn his back. (See Figure 1.3) But on stage, rather than on canvas, one learns what I call the ‘principle’ of the masks. I prefer this word to ‘laws' or ‘rules' because it is something you learn through personal experience, not as behaviour imposed from without by society's enforcers: police, priests, teachers and so on.

Figure 1.3 Pedrolino/Pierrot with back turned

Notes

1. The Théâtre du Soleil's L'age d'Or (1975) featured a North African immigrant worker in Marseilles named Abdullah. He was based on Arlecchino.

2. Probably made by using rice flour which is finer and whiter than wheatmeal and is still used by Japanese Kabuki actors today. The English Pierrot troupes used zinc oxide – highly carcinogenic...

2The personnages

JR: What do you mean by a ‘personnage’?

AF: Occasionally (for present purposes, and even though our intention is ultimately anglophone), there is a word which is better left, for clarity's sake, in a romance tongue. The masks of the commedia dell'arte are known as tipi fissi (‘fixed types'), or personaggi in Italian, but the French personnage is to my mind more readily adoptable into English.

JR: Whereas the word ‘personage’ in English signifies someone of elevated status, and ‘personality’ defines individual character, for example, one of the dramatis personae of a particular play.¹

AF: Let's stay with the French, then. Each personnage hailed from a different part of Italy and spoke in a different tongue. They can however, be grouped into families: Bergamese, Tuscan, Venetian, Bolognese, and then Neapolitan, the language of the south.

I'll begin with the northern families and the innamorati, the Lovers, since the inception of what is now called commedia dell'arte dates from their arrival.

Gli innamorati

It's important to recognise that the young lovers were not lovers, in fact, but adventurers – adventurers in love. How they were portrayed varied from company to company, although they moved from troupe to troupe as a pairing much more than other comici. They invariably spoke Tuscan since it was linguistically the most elegant, the language of the academies, and the literati. Since they acted without the mask, the question was always, how long they could go o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Prologue
• 1 The mask
• 2 The personnages
• 3 Performance location
• 4 The scenarios
• 5 Collective creation
• 6 Gestural evolution
• 7 Closed forms
• 8 Multilingualism
• 9 Anachronism
• Appendix A: The Pulcinella Saga
• Appendix B: Il Pozzo
• Appendix C: The mystical mask
• Index