Is she mad, or does she joke?

ABSTRACT

Is She Mad, or Does She Joke is an ensemble performance piece I scripted based on my almost twenty-year fascination with the Countess de Castiglione and her photograph Scherzo di Follia. I directed the show with a cast of 10 student performers at Augusta University in the fall of 2021.

KEYWORDS:

• Countess de Castiglione
• Scherzo di Follia
• portrait photography
• performance
• script

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To see the video, along with other footage and photographs from the rehearsal process and show, check out @TheatreAUG on Instagram from July to November 2021.

2 Each performer had their own carte-de-visite that featured them posing as the Countess with a word like “Narcissist, Mad, or Feminist” and included details for the show. We handed them out for promotion, and the performers traded and passed them out in this scene. They are posted on the Instagram account.

3 See Figure 1 in my artist statement “The Countess holds me.”

4 This poem was included in Patricia Pace's adaptation of Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market,” which I performed in as an undergraduate. I took it from Pace's script but was able to locate a source online, p. 283 of Derek B. Scott's Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Center for Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Summer Program.