5/18: Devising a scenario
Today we devised the main details of our scenario for the class presentation. The most unusual feature of our piece is the wealth of eligible young women looking for husbands. With four innamorata, this is potentially the most love-lorn Commedia scenario in existence, however, we have a nice scenario that hasn’t taken enough liberties with ...
Second round of Commedia videos
These videos show some amazing progress over a very short period. Overall, movement and physicality are much improved over the previous effort. Moreover, dialogue began to take a central role in many of the scenes. While some scenes show some difficulty in establishing a verbal rhythm—particularly with the more difficult characters like the innamorati or ...
Video Catch-up
Chloé and Daniel were able to present last period, and the video is now available. Also, to Chloé and Daniel, you have until Monday for the video self-evaluation. In other news, we entered the second round of short scenes, which we will view next time. The follow-up to that activity will be to script out ...
Commedia Videos
Well, we’ve finally ended our run of Commedia workshops, and we have begun rehearsing in earnest. In today’s class we took a few scene outlines and rehearsed them into full scenes between two masks. Out of several choices, the following groups formed: Prema and Sarah portrayed Isabella and La Signora discussing possibilities for the daughter’s ...
The Lovers, Pedrolino, and some old grading
Round two of the physical workshops today. Leyla introduced the innamorati and Kelly walked us through Pedrolino and the infarinato. I spent more time on the sidelines today, so that I can be sure to take some assessment notes and get some pictures and video. It is definitely interesting watching these different roles develop as ...
Pantalone Workshop
Daniel delivered his Commedia workshop on Pantalone this morning, and it was an excellent way to start the student-led presentations. I don’t want to recapitulate the entire workshop, but, for those of you working on your own, I wanted to mention again a few of today’s strengths: Physical: after a brief set of slides covering ...
Using the Scenario in your Commedia workshop
Zach started us off with his research presentation on Physical Mise-en-scéne in Commedia. He covered the topic well as it relates to Commedia in general, but a reminder to everyone in the coming days: you must also relate your information to the assigned scenario. Staying with our metaphor—and, indeed, the reality of our situation—we need ...
Commedia masks
Today we broke out the masks. We began with a sorting exercise. With all the masks piled at one end of the room, the students began to divide them up by physical characteristics. By the end of the process, there were a lot of masks in the wrong place, a Pantalone in with the Zanni, ...
Commedia and the RI
Today was the Commedia introduction, and I’m still sore. We went over Zanni movement—cribbing shamelessly from Antonio Fava—and ended with some basic lazzi. I introduced the basic Zanni walks. I got over-excited and introduced the batocio, but luckily no one was injured. Tomorrow we’ll bring in the masks and see how that adds to the ...
Show day
Today we had dress rehearsals for this afternoon’s productions, and although we ran a little into the passing period, everything worked fairly smoothly. Given that we had a lot of overlap in the group choices—two basing their work on Stella Adler, and two groups performing the same scene, I was pleased with the amount of ...