The Problem of Commedia dell’Arte

Abstract

The inherent ephemerality of performance, doubly so in respect of the debated practice of improvisation within the genre, presents many issues in terms of examining Commedia's history, both in terms of how a performance unfolded before an audience, and the hypothecated abilities of its performers. I propose that a way of understanding the historical practice is through an individual actor's development of individual performance habits. Commedia was the first professional theatre in which each actor played the same character in many different plays. In doing so they acquired embodied performance mannerisms that were recycled from show to show. These may be termed performative habits.

This article focuses on 'habit' as a positive process of accruing the skills required to perform the genre's specific characteristic: the reusable 'stock character' appearing in multiple shows, with that role being based on a combination of geographical, social, economic factors and culturally embodied skills. One of the conclusions I draw is that these 'habits' required time to acquire and were done so within the context of an evolving system or method of performance skills, publicity and business practices together with the social skills required to inhabit this putative system over a significant proportion of the actor's life. An individual's al improvisso performance, within a scenario, therefore, can be seen as a conscious deployment of acquired and highly specific performance habits.

Notes

1 ‘Early in his career [Boso] became fascinated by the capacity of Commedia to create theatre that portrays and appeals to all ranks of society … theatre is a forum for a debate through story and character about how we should live together as a society. He sees Commedia dell’Arte as representing all social groups and the conflicts between them, and the Commedia actor as serving the public’s need to see these conflicts played out and resolved convincingly’ (Cottis 2015: 419).

2 Carlo Mazzone-Clementi was a Paduan born actor who ‘single-handedly brought Commedia to the United States, starting in New York in 1958’ (Towsen 2011). Eventually, he founded, with his partner Jane Hill, the Dell’Arte School of Physical Theatre. In Italy, Mazzone-Clementi worked with the artists who reinvented Commedia in the wake of the Second World War (Giorgio Strehler, Marcel Marceau, Dario Fo, Jacques Lecoq and Marcello Moretti). From 1948 to 1951, Mazzone-Clementi worked as Lecoq’s assistant with a company called the Paduan Players, for whom Amleto Sartori created masks. Under Eric Bentley’s patronage he went to America in 1958, and ran a programme of Commedia and mime classes, using a set of Sartori masks. He was also appointed Professor of Movement at the Carnegie Mellon University.

3 This dialogue was originally composed by actor Domenico Bruni (c.1600–1666), former member of the Gelosi troupe and later leader of the Confidenti troupe, and included in his book Fatiche di Comiche (Comic Labours), published in 1623. The book, as was Prologhi (1621) and Dialoghi Scenici (unpublished), consists of a collection of useful speeches and dialogues, all composed by Bruni, for inserting into improvised Commedia performances where appropriate.

4 This was one of the aphorisms associated with Decroux that was put up on the wall of The Desmond Jones School of Mime (Decroux technique), which I attended in 1986.