Is It A Ghost?

Is it a geisha? 

No! It’s Commedia Dell’arte! The first and second lovers to be precise. 

I realise I hardly ever get around to writing about what I actually do in school, but oh well. Today I am, for today I had the opportunity to take a few pictures of what we’re doing, and that makes posting just so much more interesting.  

A new subject of this term is Commedia Dell’arte, and we have it for four hours every Thursday.  Today we were using makeup, and while we waited for the last few people to finish their makeup, I quickly got my iPad mini out and snapped some pictures. 

Now, what is Commedia Dell’arte you might ask? I’m sure Wikipedia can help you with that. But since I’m so nice, I’ll give you a short briefing: 

Basically, it’s “comedy by the craft of improvisation”. If you go to watch a Commedia Dell’arte play, you’re going to watch a comedy improvisation. The theatre company will have already planned the plot, or the scenario, but they will not have rehearsed it and so they don’t necessarily know how to “get from” one part of the scenario to another. That is improvised then and there.

In Commedia, there’s a basic stock of characters, and mostly one actor will play the same character for the entirety of their career – the one that fits them best. The characters themselves are “types”, almost like caricatures of different society types I suppose, such as the proud master, the innocent young lovers, etc. The characters are more or less two-dimensional, predictable, and very “exaggerated”. 

 

All the characters have masks, except for the lovers, of which there are two pairs. There’re the young lovers – the 2^nd lovers, which are the innocent ones. Then there’re the 1^st lovers, who are anything and everything but innocent. These two pairs use the makeup shown in the pictures, and these two pairs were the characters we were working on for the day. We’re slowly going through all the characters, and by the end of term we’ll make a small performance.