Interactions with the Commedia Dell'Arte

A group of travelling actors improvising life's foibles and fancies with an ensemble of stock characters.

The origins of the Commedia Dell'Arte are obscure . The trail can be followed for about two thousand years, from the Greek mime, through Rome, Byzantium, and the Turks to Venice.

There are obvious connections with puppets and shadow theaters. During the Baroque Age , the plays of the Commedia consisted of improvisations with in the prepared outlines of an action . Some of the stock figures portrayed characters with exaggerated personalities: one was the fool, another greedy, a third a renowned wit uttering puns, riddles, and typical allusions; another still was a cunning wise fool, pretending ignorance but capable of frightening violence.

My interaction with the Commedia does not adhere to its stock characters . I have combined the ideas of a "ship of fools" with the Commedia and have added to that the King as in Shakespeare with his court of fools. Set in Shakespeare's world as exemplified by the quote " all the world's a stage," my figures pose and prance as though before the camera: one gallops on a childish hobbyhorse, going nowhere. Another, wearing the face of an owl, dangles a mouse in gleeful anticipation of a feasting. A third, more in the tradition of the Commedia, bows before an invisible audience for a performance not given, his staff betraying his duplicity. A fourth mimics a Dionysian corn dance, his belligerent beak guttering obscenities. His counterpart, an androgynous creature, shyly displays the rose he has received from an admirer. And our final wizard hopes to impress the profiled lady with his agility and transformative power. They are ourselves, actors on the stage of life, "life, too important not to be taken lightly."1 In the middle sits the king ourselves again, apart, aloof, unable to join in the buffoonery, a cross between Hamlet and Lorenzo de Medici (Michelangelo), his countenance split into sections by his staff, a double personality in a haze of indecision.

1. Eugene Ionesco, Exit the King

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