COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE

Prior Training

Before attending The Commedia School Candace had no formal training around Commedia.

The Commedia School

The Commedia unit is the final unit taught in the second year of training and it lasts a total of 6 weeks. It is important to note that the school focuses on teaching La comédie humaine (the human comedy), rather than traditional Italian Commedia Dell’arte. This is for the fact that Commedia is an art form which demands spontaneity, and spontaneity cannot be achieved if there is an over-looming predefined ‘perfect’ model that is right or wrong. As Ole Brekke exclaimed on the first day of the unit “Commedia Dell’arte is dead, long live Commedia!”. Using the archetypes from traditional Italian Commedia Dell’Arte we explore what is past the rigid and structured outline proposed by some training courses which teach the masks. Instead we focus on exploring what the mask calls for now, and who is this mask today? We heighten those life or death situations, and focus on finding the motor of each scene. Each student is allowed to explore the masks as they desire, through a series of guided improvisations. From there we are assigned a mask which we use for the creation and performance of a show.

Our commedia show focused on telling the story of a community facing gentrification. As gentrification is a huge topic in current society it was an overall theme which left much to explore. The story focused around a female Pantalone, Agonia, being the local villages last resident to own a plot of land which was highly sought after by new companies. Unwilling to give up her property, the rest of the town sets out on a plan of how to steal the land from under Agonia’s nose. This all leads to a tale of romance, betrayal, chaos, deceit, life and death. In the end we discover that no one will get the land no matter how hard they try because Agonia will turn her property into her own grave sight to ensure it can never be used for anyone else’s personal profit.

The Commedia School was invited to Tallinn, Estonia to perform as a part of Tallinn Old Town Days 2019. This included multiple performances of our production, as well as street performing. In true old fashioned Commedia style, we adapted our story to fit the current sociopolitical climate in Tallinn currently.