Commedia dell'Arte

Commedia dell'Arte is a form of improvisational comedy, which began in Italy during the 16th century and spread out from there. The performers have a scenario in outline form. A Group Would  have a week or so to improvise an entire performance from stage directions. The performers write the dialog and since the performance is improvised timing requirements are greater than in regular theater. The main characters usually are Pantalone, Gratianom, Pedrolino and Arlecchino. Pantalone is a merchant of Venice and he is rich, greedy, and he's miserly. Gratiano is usually a lawyer type. Pantalone and Gratiano are old male characters, they are referred to as the "vecchi", which is Italian for old male.  Pedrolino and Arlecchino are the servants of the old men. Collectively they are known as zanni.

Seeing a commedia Dell’ Arte performance; would consist of professional actors trained to perform the art of Commedia Dell’ Arte. The staging of the set would be simple, so the audience can focus on the characters being portrayed. The actors will perform their dialogue with different props, music and dance. If the performance is traditional the focus should not be focus on the dialect but on the physical aspects of the story telling. The reason for focusing on the physical comedy is that you probably won’t be able to understand the dialect. I think this keeps the audience focused on the performance more than the subject of the play.

                                       
                                       These are some of the different traditional commedia dell'arte mask.

In this video the modern art of the clown traces its roots to the Italian Commedia dell'Arte. This is theatre based on improvisation. Even when an overall script existed at all, each performance still differed from every other.

In the beginning actors would often interact with the people watching, suiting the comedy to the audience's taste.  If people of the upper class were in the audience, the comedy tended to be smarter. On the other hand, if the audience was more of the middle or lower class the improvisations were bawdier.

   

The Zanni never does well at his job, since all he thinks about is food or sleep.  Often, he is distracted while on a mission, after hearing the name of a fruit--or after falling asleep.  Zanni seems to be stupid, poor, and slow, and therefore is the lowest character on the social scale. A modern version of the Zanni would be Homer Simpson.

Ciatations: Commedia dell'arte: a handbook for troupes By John Rudlin, Olly Crick,www.commedia-dell-arte.com, Wikipedia,The World of Theatre, by Mira Filner and Claudia Orenstein

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