Commedia and the Actor
By Carlo Mazzone-Clementi with Jane Hill
Copyright Dell’Arte Inc., 1974
Although we can conjecture about commedia in a historical framework, we cannot know what it was like. There are no existing scripts, no photos. There are only a few paintings, a few sparse descriptions, and a horde of mostly untranslated scenarios. Yet, a great interest in commedia continues. Anyone can open the drawer marked commedia dell'arte, but, having opened it, how does one know what to choose from it? For some, commedia means a dusty reincarnation of the postures and poses of a Callot, charming in print, but deadly on the stage. The magnetic appeal of commedia, for me, has been to rediscover the magic of the performer. How he worked, what he did, and to some extent, why he did it, consciously or not. The only possible approach is an inductive one. We must begin where we are.
One can begin with the stock characters. Actually, I prefer the phrase "comic prototype." In commedia, there are three levels of characterization that build to the level of this comic prototype. The caricati are basically caricatures (the lovers, the noble father, the noble mother, etc.). They wear no masks and are essentially a part of the landscape. The macchietta or "little spot" (e.g., the funny messenger), is the equivalent of our modern "cameo" role. Then, there are the pivotal roles known as maschere, the masked characters for which commedia dell'arte is famous (Arlecchino, Pantalone, Capitano, etc.). The rules of professional etiquette for these categories are dearly defined in a manner much like burlesque. A caricato is not entitled to get big laughs. The macchietta has a bit more freedom to "warm the audience up."
The maschere were clearly the "top bananas" of their day. They are deeper in the symbolic or mythological sense because they come straight from the archetype, with an the attendant nuances and intricacies. They are distillations of the observable. Their garb and customs may change, but not their traits. We see them in historical plays and on the streets of our hometowns. We laugh because they are recognizable, and delight in watching the "known" character contend with an "unknown" situation--one that must be faced intuitively by the character and inventively by the actor. The characters have been compared to barnyard inhabitants. Hens, chicks, roosters, capons, ducks, peacocks-- all the farmyard bipeds make us laugh, their walks absurd parodies of man's own gait. Pantalone, Arlecchino, Columbina, Smeraldina, Brighella, Capitano, Dottore and the others are not identified so much by the color and cut of their costumes as by the walk, the gesture, the manner in which each uses his "feathers" to express pride, joy, anger, and sorrow, alternately swelling and drooping, preening and ruffling, as he picks his way like a strutting fowl, ever vulnerable, across the stage before the appreciative eyes of the audience.
Commedia masks are a study in contrasts: The immobile upper half is in counterpoint with the mobile lower jaw of the actor, which somehow becomes an extension of the mask itself. The half-mask of commedia marks an interesting development in the theatre. The Roman performers' masks were often little more than megaphones used mainly to project the voice. As masks evolved in the Middle Ages, they became a tool for characterization. The appearance of the half-mask of the professional commedia performer--the first time a half-mask was used theatrically--freed the voice and returned the body to prominence. Use of the half-mask allows greater physical freedom than a full mask. Made of leather, the commedia masks are light and flexible, permitting rolls, tumbles and displays of skill limited only by the capabilities of the actor wearing it. The choice of leather (i.e., anima1skin) has a psychophysical effect, which can only be understood when one has compared the wearing of a leather mask to one made of wood, paper, or plastic.* Practically, of course, a performance becomes possible at the drop of a hat, when one can take one's "makeup" from a bag, and leap on to the platform in any town square.
The commedia is earthy, fertile, alive, and ready to fly. It is "popular" theatre in terms of what it depicts and to whom it appeals. Large numbers of followers have no significance for the commedia performer. There is only one audience to please at each performance. When one plays Verona, one does not worry about the reactions of the Romans. The piece is shaped and colored by the local audience, their moods and responses. Traditionally, commedia performers played in more than thirty basic dialects. Each village produced its own dialect and was represented by its own character, an elaborate extension of the village idiot. In some cultures, the afflicted are objects of guilt or veneration, and are not suitable subjects for comedy. But to the Italians, the village fool became a point of departure for understanding mankind. And while the village fool was the object of mirth, it was mirth devoid of malice. At a single commedia performance, the major characters usually came from many different parts of Italy, bringing with them their local heritage. Each performance “on the road" was custom-tailored for a specific audience. Mass appeal was unimportant. In fact, had television existed in the Renaissance, commedia might have died an early death.
How then does one approach the study of commedia in the twentieth century?
My first approach was through the discipline of mime. Two Frenchmen have had great influence on my work: Marcel Marceau and Jacques Lecoq. I worked with both when 1 was young. Through them--and through a short period as a scholarship student at the school of Jean-Louis Barrault--l first met mime. I was fortunate enough to travel around Italy with Marceau, performing with him, responding to his creativity. Philosophically, mystically, and poetically, he was a catalyst for me. Practically, however, it was Lecoq's excellent systematized natural method that confirmed my intuition regarding mime--that it was to be the basis of all my theatrical work, and that it was to open many doors in my understanding of commedia. Both Marceau and Lecoq were obsessed by commedia. Witnessing their fascination with it, and later at the Barrault school coming into contact with more Frenchmen who were commedia enthusiasts, I felt for the first time a sense of my own national and cultural identity. Through the French, I discovered what it meant to be Italian. In their pantomime.blanche, I saw an extension of commedia, the legacy of Pedrolino (Pierrot) and Scaramouche. As the French theatre once used Italian commedia for its source and creative inspiration, so I have drawn on the teaching of Lecoq for my work in commedia.
Teaching Commedia Acting:
At the school of Jean-Louis Barrault. students are taught that the life cycle of an individual and/or an action may be broken down into four parts: 1) instinct of expansion, 2) sense of egocentrism, 3) instinct of conservation, and 4) sense of sublimation. The first natural act of expansion is to be born. The fetus, awaiting birth, is primarily a concentric creature, centered from the cerebellum to the heel, in a direct, curved line. At birth we make our initial great eccentric act. The rest of our life can, if you like, be analyzed in terms of concentric and eccentric actions. Like a human gyroscope, we move to and from our center, the spinal column. A simple action, such as putting on a jacket, is concentric to the dorsal spine; we close ourselves into the object. Removing it, the action becomes eccentric: we expand from the object, from the center, from the spine. The eccentric act is dynamic, the concentric one moves toward a static state. Action must always precede analysis. The first step predetermines the ones to follow. Having made the first eccentric motion at your birth, you can now look around. Birth is a matter of territory; identity comes later, through action. Self awareness in space and time equals presence. (Self-consciousness leads to immobility and is the enemy of presence.) From presence one can develop the ability to represent.
Characterization must begin at home: in the body. Some of us are not at home in our bodies. We must discover what that means. Therefore, the main emphasis of my work is physical self-discovery. In his book, Reflections on the Theatre, Jean-Louis Barrault speaks or the actor as constantly going "from--to." "How" is a character. Beginning where you are means realIy knowing where you are, from your heels up, and not (for the moment at least) avoiding contact with reality through flights of the imagination, philosophical excursions into existentialism, or even emotional recall.
The most simple act of going "from--to" is the RUN. That is where we start. Running is a primary physical activity. It circulates the blood, activates the heart, exercises the lungs, and drives extraneous thoughts from the mind. The motion of this act is dominated by the contact of foot and floor—inhaling, exhaling, turning, wheeling, sweating, as you follow the leader. Do you run badly? You will discover it in motion. Is your body unresponsive? Thinking about it will not help. The kinesthetic response comes only with motion. Kinesthetic response is not a product of brute energy. Paradoxically, the difficult must be easy. We must break down the RUN. Balancing on one foot. Then the other. Stretch, reach. Equilibrium: does it desert you when you depend on only that tiny pedestal, your foot? Don't try harder. Try less. Tension is the enemy of balance. And what of the foot? How does it function? Walk quickly with short steps, slower with long strides, on the heels, on the toes, the insides, the outsides. By exploring extremes of articulation we learn to extend our physical range in the same way that the singer extends vocal range. A walk develops one step at a time. The walk is the base that supports the top (eventually, the mask). In the walk we learn to, literally, under-stand the character. The nature of any tree begins at the roots. The body must adjust to the foot. There is no choice.
The first adjustment comes in the spine. But what is that? Does it move? How? To discover, we must return to a vertebrate condition. On the floor, then. Belly down. You move across the floor like a reptile. Your useless head cannot pull you. Impetus, again, from the foot, and that motion flexes the spine. I can't emphasize enough the importance to each performer of her own body; the wonders of that fulcrum; the greatest leverage ever discovered, the root. In, around. and through activities that explore the foot and spine, supporting and sustaining it all, is the BREATH. Are you a miser with your breath? Do you fight its natural cycle? Is it working with your motion, or against it?
By this time you should be warmed-up, worn-out, ready to begin "where you are." Accept this condition: You are IN THE DARK-literally. Again, we move "from--to." The character is you. We place a TARGET on the floor. Move to it in the dark. You can not compute this. It is intuitive. You and the target are one. Still IN THE DARK, with eyes fully open, there is a TUNNEL this time. Explore it. A tunnel is not a hole. Do it, don't demonstrate it. And now, IN THE DARK, you are blindfolded; there is a MAZE, There should be intuition, exploration, but also this time, selection of a course. There are obstacles. What is the kinesthetic response? (Psychology comes Later.) One does not push one's way through a maze in the dark. Perception must travel from the foot to the brain. In a TUNNEL, even in the dark, we seek visual reassurance of our experiences, if our eyes are free and open. In a MAZE, blindfolded, we have no choice but to work from our own centers outward. We must choose between immobility and action. To choose action involves overcoming fears of the unknown. An actor must be willing to take chances. With relaxation and a clear vision of the goal, we find inspiration, which is fundamental to creation. These rudimentary exercises must not be done superficially. Whether your focus is close to the body or far from it, you must be in touch at the kinesthetic level. Like the perfect swordsman or lasso thrower, you are connected to the target, a part or it. You are a dancer moving toward an always escaping image, pursuing it continuously, freshly, inspired by the pursuit to new ideas of motion. As this dancer you might be drawn into a spiritual dilemma: the immobility of perfect motion.
One cannot discuss the body in motion without relating it to the four elements:
Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. We must explore each, learning with our bodies what it means to be rooted, fluid, floating, and exploding, by experiencing each condition
through mime.
We cannot talk of commedia, or my approach to it, without discussing both mime and silent movies. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Mack Sennett, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Marie Dressler, W.C. Fields were all able to use any fuel for their creative fires. In later years, an anecdote told by a friend reminded me of these comic geniuses. When he was a young comedian, just beginning in the business, a certain "top banana" chose him to replace an actor who was ill. As the time of his routine came closer, my friend became more and more anxious and kept pressing the comic for information about what he would be expected to do. Finally, a moment before curtain time, in desperation, he asked again. The older comic looked him in the eye. "Here's what we'll do: you'll talk first, and I’ll talk next." No matter what the material, the true comedian will know how to use it!
The readiness of the performer is an important element in commedia. The actor, in addition to knowing his character intimately, must be able to accept a proposed scenario, a mere plot-and-circumstances skeleton, and create. His creation must be original, unpredictable, and balanced. At its best, commedia is a tour-de-force for the actor, limited only by his imagination, his skills, and the ability of his partners to respond, interact, and create with him spontaneously. The commedia actor never works alone. His virtuoso excursions must never proceed from his own ego. There must be a constant awareness of the whole. He must know and understand his partners, balancing and contrasting them, working together with such sensitivity and unity that we are caught up in their game before we know what has happened. Nonsense is more important than sense. No comic prototype is governed by the rational; his responses are always instinctual and must come from a deep understanding of himself as an actor, his character, and his fellow actors and their characters. They are thrown together into a wild jungle of unpredictables--the improvised situation, not in today's sense of being "unrehearsed," but in its original meaning, "all-of-a-sudden." Trust and confidence, based on real, existing skills and knowledge of one another, must be present in a commedia company. You are literally all in it together.
Balance and counterbalance with the partner cannot begin in the brain. We must start, once again, at home: the body. The elementary push-and-pull of the WALK is now explored with the partner. These counterweight exercises with a partner ("Push me/Push you, Pull me/Pull you") train you to move together--up, down, sitting, side-to-side, even flipping in the air--with a common fulcrum. Adjustments must be made for varying sizes and weights. There is never an ideal partner. There is always and only this partner of the moment. When you have learned to share physical space and contend with gravity together, you are then ready to apply the same principles to your comedy relationships. We always proceed from the nonverbal to the verbal. When we play together verbally, the same sense of balance and response must be present. Using simple, one-syllable words, or a limited list of words, or nonsense syllables, we play together, sharing and contributing to the whole. .
Only when partners have explored their relationship thoroughly in the area of physics, verbal response, and recognition are they ready to move on to characterization. Then, we must realize that you cannot be a fool to play one. The comic prototype sees nothing funny or unusual in himself. He simply is. Indeed, the reactions of his partners and the audience are the strange thing. He is normal. We play games related to this. Two characters in UNUSUAL OUTFITS are seated together at a cafeteria table. Each is certain there is nothing strange about himself. How do they respond to one another? If they are honest and create together, the results will be hilarious to us, natural to them.
Moving from work with a single partner to work with a larger group, the exercises become more complex. We learn to create for one another the "improviso" situation, to accept easily a new reality (no matter how absurd), to respond in character, honestly, inventively, and spontaneously. All advanced exercises in collective spontaneity take a spiral form basic to commedia. Commedia is juggling. Two points are never enough. It is the third point that makes things turn and move, in an engineering sense. (In this respect, commedia is the sister of the circus.) Emphasis is more on nonsense and character, rather than sense and psychology. With these basics firmly established, it is time to examine the mask and its use in commedia.
The mask hides and reveals at the same time. To work with a mask one must be aware of its implications. A mask puts one immediately on a tightrope between poetry and prose. In my classes, I work with two types of mask. The first is the metaphysical, or neutral mask which, by removing the actor's facial physiognomy, leaves the total being revealed. It is in this "persona" that the actor must discover the mystery of the mask itself, the nakedness and truth of his body behind it, the absorption or the mask into himself, and the projection of himself through the mask. When he accepts the neutral mask and is at ease in it, when he has overcome the terror of losing his face and finally accepts the head as what it is--the last vertebra--then he is ready to begin working with the character masks of commedia. He can begin to receive their messages.
These masks of character are metamorphic. Their life, too, must be discovered and united with the life and visions of the actor. When this unification is successful, magic occurs. Behind any mask lies an entity deeply connected to the personality of the performer. The actor must always bring something fresh and personal to his role. No two Pantalones should be alike. The actor must find his own unique characterization without betraying any of the characteristics of the prototype. It is in this challenge that the joy of performing commedia comes. Having found his Pantalone, the actor must then weave it into the fabric of the scenario, carefully balancing, counterbalancing, and responding to his fellow company members in a constant tension-elasticity structure. In Bergsonian terms, that is comedy. Contrast is a must.
The commedia actor has a free body with the mask as a natural extension. But to perform commedia properly, you must also have a concept of the levels of commedia style. Andare a soggetto, to go with the subject, is to accept a basic premise and, with your team, create in, around, over, under, and through it. Commedia a braccia indicates that the physical activity is measurable "at arm's length"; in other words, that the actors adapt their movements and positions precisely but spontaneously (after all, arms are different lengths!]. Commedia all'improviso or "all of a sudden" means just that: anything goes (or comes!). The concetti (concepts) are strong punch lines that can be applied at any appropriate place, to summarize, comment on or resolve a scene. And, of course, there are the lazzi or bits of comic business, perfected by the actors and taken from their bag of tricks like comedic jewels to amaze and delight us. It is wrong to think of the actors' lazzi and concetti as mere gimmicks or tricks. The beauty of them is that they grow from the character traits and attitudes. They are never cheap or arbitrary. These excursions into invention were, naturally, intended for the enjoyment of the audience. Between the actor, his partner, and the audience, there is always a bond. The aparte (aside) is a continuous channel between actor and audience. A mutual response must happen for commedia to "take off." Performing the same play before different audiences is always a totally unique experience.
This fact was brought home to me poignantly when my troupe of young commedia players, the Dell Arte Troupe, toured a production of Gozzi's The Green Cockatoo, a satirical fairy tale filled with magic and transformations--and several commedia characters. We first performed for six people in a barn in a rural area of northern California. We then took it to the Firehouse Theatre in San Francisco, where the audience, mostly young intellectuals, were delighted by the play's comments on intellectual pretensions. Our next performances were at a small theatre in Berkeley, attended mostly by college students. They responded warmly to the elements of fantasy and comic business. We then played the city parks of Berkeley, attracting young people, old people, children, and dogs. The play changed considerably, became broader, more directly involved with the audience, as the audience itself became an "improviso" element, shifting, moving, and responding.
* * * * * *
Through the ages, everyone has used commedia for his own purposes, from Moliere, who openly proclaimed, "I take my best where can find it," to Shakespeare, Brecht, and the political street theatre groups of our own time. I do not pretend to have rediscovered commedia as it was in the Renaissance. In fact, that seems to me a shallow and limiting approach to commedia. But a kind of theatre that points out our human frailties and foibles in such an honest, unpretentious way, a theatre in which actors are skillful, perceptive, inventive, united, and generous, seems to me to be much needed today. In a world gone mad, who has more to say to us than the zanies? Well, the Venetians have a proverb, “If they aren't crazy, we don't want them." And commedia, after all, is not a theatrical form, it is a way of life.
*The art of mask making in leather, lost to us since the Renaissance, was revitalized through the work and research of Amleto Sartori, a well-known Paduan sculptor (1915-1962). Although some sixteenth-century Venetian masks survive, there are no records of the techniques used to create them. Working from descriptions of certain tools, a few wooden molds and some notes on contemporary bookbinding procedures, Sartori was able to recapture a lost art. The commedia masks of Sartori are highly individualized creations, molded for the actor, expressing his concept or his character, as well as the traditional facial characteristics of the prototype. With Sartori's death in 1962 his son Donato took over his work.
(Originally published in The Drama Review, April 1974 and is also reprinted in Popular Theatre: a Sourcebook, Joel Schechter, Editor, Routledge 2003)
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