Happened to catch a little bit of the Leonard Lopate show today, which featured Todd Robbins and Teller (of, of course, Penn & Teller) talking about their hit Off-Broadway show Play Dead Listen to the show here:Â http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2011/feb/18/play-dead/ It’s a great listen!
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The Zanni are the class of servants that are on the bottom of the food chain– they are porters, servants, and lower class citizens who serve their masters hare-brained schemes, bungle their own hare-brained schemes, and once in a long while make out like bandits, only to have their loot pulled away from them at the last second. Zanni is […]
Read moreThis article is from the Seattle Times. Hokum Jeebs was a very well known and well respected street performer and variety entertainer. This is sad and stunning news. Suspect, 19, arrested in fatal stabbing in West Seattle Professor Hokum W. Jeebs was fatally stabbed in his West Seattle home early Wednesday. Jeebs was a gifted piano-player and vaudeville performer. A […]
Read moreCommedia Dell’Arte course. Traditional theatre to contemporary theatre March 28-April 8 and July 18-July 29, 2011 ILE organizes 2 week courses in theatre in Florence for actors to enhance their physical expression and learn the techniques of storytelling and improvisation as well as scene study analyzing the major authors together with the tradition of the Commedia Dell’Arte through Moliere, Shakespeare, […]
Read moreJust an alert to those readers who might be interested– I have a guest post blog on the New Victory’s Theatre Blog Site– the subject being the question:Â Are You Ever Too Young For the Circus? For my answer, visit the New Victory Theater Blog
Read moreIn the cosmology of Commedia, there are three classes of characters:Â The Masters (those with money, often called Il Vecchio, the Old Men)Â The Servants (the zanni) who serve the Masters; and the Lovers (the Innamorati, who we introduced yesterday) There are a couple of characters who straddle the line one way or the other, and we’ll talk about them […]
Read moreIn honor of Valentine’s day, we examine the innamorati (the lovers) The Commedia lovers were the only unmasked characters in the show. They were the plot engines behind the stories. Typically their story was what drove the father characters to war ; the zanni characters to create all kinds of crazy plots and tricks, and when all else failed, their […]
Read moreWhen you are performing as a puppet, or (for commedia) as a masked character– it’s important to remember that the mask on your face is inanimate. It is made of leather or papier mache or some other fixed material that has a fixed expression, a fixed architecture. Despite that, your character is alive, and changes emotions, sometimes at a quite […]
Read moreDuring the mid-1700’s, (over 100 years after Flamino Scala) two commedia performers/playwrights were having a feud over the future of commedia. They were both named Carlo, they were both Venetian, and they both had very different ideas about what made commedia dell’arte special and worthwhile. Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) was for getting rid of the masks and improvisatory nature of commedia […]
Read moreAt one of my alma maters (The Dell’arte School) , one of the school’s rehearsal mantras when a scene or a play isn’t working right is to rehearse it “Italian style.†By this they mean to perform the scene or the play as loud and as fast as you can, and with as much energy as you can muster.  Pedal […]
Read moreJamie Adkins began his career at the age of 13 in San Diego, where he delighted passers-by as a street performer. Later, in San Francisco, he joined the Pickle Family Circus. From the Pickle’s Jamie move to Montreal and joined Cirque Eloize, where he performed over 500 shows for them. Since 2005, Jamie has been using his charms and skills […]
Read moreSince yesterday we talked about not playing subtext while playing commedia, the question naturally arises- what should you play? Or how are you going to sustain and continue to improvise a heightened expressive character? There are several theories about the best way to play a commedia character, and basically, I subscribe to all of them. What I mean by that […]
Read moreWhen I studied at the Dell’arte school of Physical theatre, our Commedia teacher (Michael Fields) would be coaching a scene or an improvisation and then suddenly say “Ah– the Ghost of Chekhov has entered the room.” This was a short hand way of saying he meant that your performance had descended from a heightened state into naturalism or traditional acting, […]
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Flaminio Scala was an actor/manager of one of the most pre-eminent commedia companies of his time. A contemporary of Shakespeare, he was an innovator in that he actually wrote his scenarios down. Before Scala, scenarios were never written down as they were afraid of being stolen- they were the gold with which you could make hay, and what distiniguished your […]
Read moreThe clown scene is starting to pick up in DC– there’s a monthly clown cabaret that has formed under the direction of Mathew Pauli Rich Potter, and Karen Beriss. The second Monday of the month, people are encouraged to come and perform 10 minutes of clown work for audiences at 8 pm at The Shop at Fort Fringe – 607 […]
Read moreGiorgio Strehler was the founder (along with Paolo Grassi) and director of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. Some would say that he is the father of modern commedia. I don’t think I would go that far, as there were a number of disparate Italian groups working after the war that were trying to figure out how to resurrect Italian pride, […]
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