Meanwhile Back in Venice: A & C at the Biennale, part two

[post 178]

No, not Abbott & Costello, but Allora and Calzadilla. Yes, we are finally leaving the world of commedia, but not the world of Venice. Earlier this summer I reported on A & C's work, this year's unusual U.S. entry to the Venice Biennale arts festival, which runs through November 27th. In that early post, I didn't have any video to show from Venice. Now I do, plus this dissenting review from the NY Times.

The Times reviewer said it "definitely makes you think about American presumption and military and financial might, as well as nationalism and its various expressions" and that it is "unlike almost anything else at the Biennale" but that she "didn't much like it."  Why? Because "their efforts tend to lack artistic paradox, nuance or form — the things that allow viewers to think for themselves. Instead they offer an angry, sophomoric Conceptualism that borders on the tyrannical and that in many ways mimics the kinds of forces they criticize."

Read the whole Times review here. Other reviews tended to be far more positive, such as this article from L Magazine or this piece in The Daily.

Here's a video interview with the artists with some performance footage.




More footage, no narrative, from Vernissage TV.




A performance of Body in Flight:

There are other videos on YouTube from the Biennale, mostly clips shot by tourists; just search for "Allora and Calzadilla & Venice."

Not having seen this, far be it from me to pass judgment. Would I have actually liked it? Maybe yes, maybe no. As intrigued as I might be by the use of acrobatics in a fresh context, I often find performances concocted by visual artists to be pretentious and over-rated. But would I go see this? Of course!

Guest Post by Hillary De Piano: Adapting Gozzi's "Love of Three Oranges"

[post 177]

I'm always on the lookout for news about Carlo Gozzi for reasons that will soon become obvious. When I saw John's post where he lamented the fact that there was no public domain English version of The Love of Three Oranges for him to post and share with you, I had to jump in. I have one of the more popular modern English versions of Three Oranges and, while it's not public domain, my publisher actually has 90% of the play online for you to read at your leisure. It's really only missing the last scene or so.

So, if you wanted to read an English version of this commedia classic, you are welcome to check it out here: http://www.playscripts.com/playview.php3?playid=2276

But while I'm here, I thought I'd share with you a few quick facts about what is probably Carlo Gozzi's best know play.
• Carlo Gozzi's L'amore delle tre melarance was published in 1761. It's 2011. That means that The Love of Three Oranges is celebrating its 250th anniversary this year! (As is Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star, randomly enough.)
• Gozzi's original scenario was itself based off a (horrifyingly racist) fairy tale by Giambattista Basile which was itself based off of local folklore.
• The Sergei Prokofiev opera, The Love for Three Oranges? With the very famous march? That was also based off Gozzi's play.

Commedia enthusiasts will be happy to know that The Love of Three Oranges continues to be very popular with high schools, thereby introducing a whole new generation to the material! Thank you to John for letting me stop by the blog and please feel free to read and pass along the preview link for The Love of Three Oranges. If you ever want to ask me anything or just say Hi, I'm online at HillaryDePiano.com and I'm also on Twitter as @HillaryDePiano.
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Thank you, Hillary!  Here are a few more links... —jt
• My original Gozzi post
• Adam Gertsacov: Giants of Commedia—Gozzi vs. Goldoni
• Gozzi's memoirs in French
• A book in Italian about Gozzi and commedia

Complete Books: More Commedia (in italiano)

[post 174]

La commedia dell'arte è nata in Italia nel XVI secolo e rimasta popolare sino al XVIII secolo. Non si trattava di un genere di rappresentazione teatrale, bensì di una diversa modalità di produzione degli spettacoli. Le rappresentazioni non erano basate su testi scritti ma dei canovacci detti anche scenari, i primi tempi erano tenute all'aperto con una scenografia fatta di pochi oggetti. Le compagnie erano composte da dieci persone: otto uomini e due donne. All'estero era conosciuta come "Commedia italiana."

Pretty impressive, eh? Like I know me some Italian! Okay, so what if I just copied that from the commedia entry on the Italian Wikipedia to impress those folks who only read the first paragraph? You know, superficial people, not like you second-paragraph types. The truth is that one of the regrets of my life is never having found the time to learn Italian. Some of my blog readers, however, did find the time to learn Italian, especially the ones who grew up in Italy, and since commedia dell'arte also grew up in Italy, there are, not surprisingly, Italian commedia books that I figure are worth including here. Of course I haven't read them, so you couldn't prove it by me, but here are four that may be of interest; if not, remember they were free!


Carlo Gozzi e la Commedia Dell Arte by Ernesto Masi (1890)
You'll find more about Gozzi in my two previous posts. This one is all of 25 pages long, whereas the one that follows on Goldoni, apparently in the same series (see below), is 151 pages.

Carlo Gozzi e La Commedia Dell Arte



Il Goldoni e la Commedia dell'Arte by Alfonso Aloi (1883)
Il Goldoni e La Commedia Dell Arte



Le Maschere Italiane Nella Commedia dell'Arte e Nel Teatro di Goldoni by Elvira Ferretti (1904)
This appears to be more about the masked characters than about the actual physical masks.

Le Maschere Italiane Nella Commedia Dell



Scenari Inediti della Commedia Dell'Arte
As most of you know, commedia performers improvised around specific scenarios, and the most famous of these is the 1611 collection attributed to Flaminio Scala. The following work, which translates as Unpublished Scenarios of the Commedia Dell'Arte, is not contemporaneous, but rather from 1880, and was collected by one Adolfo Bartoli, who
I am assuming to be the very same scholar of Italian literature that you can read about here.

Scenari Inediti Della Commedia Dell Arte


You can purchase the English translation of the Flaminio Scala scenario collection here.

You can read some scenarios used by the modern-day commedia troupe, I Sebastiani, by clicking here.

Ciao!

Complete Books: More Commedia (in English)

[post 172]

We finally finish our saga of public domain books in English about the commedia dell'arte with these two offerings.

Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi
Count Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806) was, like Carlo Goldoni, a prominent eighteenth-century Venetian playwright who sought to improve upon what he saw as a declining commedia dell'arte through his own scripts. He was, however, a bitter rival of Goldoni, who he delighted in attacking in print. His most famous play, The Love of Three Oranges (1761), is a satirical fairy tale perhaps best known by way of Sergey Prokofiev's popular opera adaptation; likewise, Gozzi's Turandot became the basis for a Puccini opera of the same name. In the twentieth centrury, innovative Russian revolutionary director Vsevolod Meyerhold turned to commedia, and specifically to Gozzi, for inspiration, mounting a production of Love of Three Oranges and editing a provocative theatre journal that he named "The Love of Three Oranges." In 1996, Julie Taymor, of Lion King fame and Spiderman infamy, made a splash with her highly visual production of Gozzi's The Green Bird.

Although I have yet to find a public domain translation of Gozzi's plays into English, I do have his memoirs (1797) for you, which the Encyclopædia  Britannica describes as "vivid, if immodest."

The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi

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The History of the Harlequinade by Maurice Sand
Once upon a time, the early 1800s to be exact, there lived a prominent French novelist and celebrity by the name of George Sand, who had many scandalous affairs with both men and women, including Prosper Mérimée, Marie Dorval, Alfred de Musset and, most famously, Frédéric Chopin. The funny thing about George was that he was a she. No, not a transsexual or transvestite, just a dynamic woman and staunch feminist who used George Sand as a pen name, presumably so her works would be treated more seriously, just like that other George, the female author of Silas Marner, "George Eliot."

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"The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women." — George Sand

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All of which has nothing to do with commedia dell'arte, except that at the age of 20, long before her fame, George Sand married a baron and gave birth to Maurice Sand.  Sand mère soon ditched the boring baron and ran off, two kids in tow, to do her Lady Gaga thing. Sand fils grew up in a heady artistic milieu and not surprisingly became a successful novelist and illustrator in his own right, studying under the French romantic artist, Eugène Delacroix. And finally to our point: he also wrote and illustrated one of the earliest (1860) and most encyclopedic commedia histories, Masques et Bouffons.

I'll supply the original French text in a future post; meanwhile here's the 1915 English translation, published under the misleading title The History of the Harlequinade. Misleading because the harlequinade was actually a very specific segment in 19th-century English pantomime (read more here), whereas Sand's book traces the evolution of the commedia stock characters over the centuries and in different cultures, one chapter for each character.

First a few of the exquisite illustrations by Sand from the original French work; I'm not so sure the color plates in the English version are his. After that, the complete English translation in two volumes.

Pantalon

Le Docteur

Stenterello

Scapin

Volume 1:
historyofharlequ01



Volume Two:


historyofharlequ02

More "Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters"

[post 171]

As is often the case, since writing my post on Carlo Goldoni last week — read that post first! — I have stumbled upon a bunch of new stuff that I would have included had I been as wise and knowledgeable then as I am now. The new (to me) material is on Giorgio's Strehler's famous production of Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters. My first stumble was via an Adam Gertsacov post about Strehler on his clownlink.com blog, which led me along a virtual path to two NY Times articles and five more videos.

When this legendary production played Lincoln Center (NYC) in 2005 — I didn't see it because I was in Italy! — the Times first did this preview article about the acclaimed Arlecchino, Ferruccio Soleri, hailing him as "the last great Arlecchino."

Here's an excerpt:

The title character does not require intense interior exploration. "Arlecchino isn't Hamlet," Mr. Soleri said. "You can study his psychology in very little time; the rest is doing it well." Wearing a mask — a specially crafted leather visor that looks like a cross between a cat and a monkey — means that emotion must be expressed through voice and gestures. The role requires a great deal of physical exertion. So Mr. Soleri, who turns a trim 75 this year, warms up for an hour before each performance. "At my age you're in trouble if you don't do some stretching," he said. Arlecchino's physical antics are so rambunctious that the actor goes through three heavy felt patchwork costumes during each performance, one per act. "It's the sweat," he admitted, wringing out an invisible costume with his hands... The sense of madcap impulsiveness onstage is actually very much structured, though, and improvised moments are few.

You can read the whole preview article here.

Once the show opened, the Times posted its mostly favorable review.

Again, an excerpt:

The production's stature as an ambassador for Italian culture across the decades would seem to suggest that audiences are in for an evening of great cultural significance. Fat chance. Yes, theater historians can note the ways in which the production hews to tradition, including the use of masks for the comic male characters and the presence of an actual slapstick — two pieces of wood that are struck together for the sound or comic effect. It also uses a by-now familiar meta-theatrical frame: Ezio Frigerio's set, recreating the feel of an old village square, allows us to watch the actors chat and idle when they jump off the cramped wooden platform that supplies the playing space...

But anyone who has seen a Saturday morning television cartoon, an Abbott and Costello movie or a sex farce will recognize the comic techniques here. Commedia dell'arte simply mines humor from human folly by exaggerating behavior and manipulating language, and that recipe has never gone out of style...

As an actor, Mr. Soleri, now 75 — well past the age of advanced acrobatics, you would think — must be an inspiration to his colleagues. His nimble performance as a servant who sows confusion when he takes on two employers is a continual delight. A set piece in which the starved Arlecchino makes a meal of a fly raised peals of joyous disgust from the children in the audience. And the gymnastic scene in which Arlecchino sprints back and forth to serve his masters their dinners simultaneously is a marvel of cleanly choreographed farce and a fine feat of juggling, too....

Audiences who don't understand Italian may get more pleasure by consulting the program's synopsis before each act begins, to focus on the actors as much as possible. Or maybe ignore the supertitles for one of the play's three acts: the second one, with its long stretches of pure physical comedy, would be a natural choice....
Adding some kind of variety to the evening is probably a good idea. At three full hours, with two intermissions, this is a very generous immersion in pure buffoonery, even if it is the kind of buffoonery that inspired the term. Strehler's "Arlecchino" may be hallowed by years of acclaim, but the actual experience of watching it could be compared to sitting through a three-hour director's cut of a Hollywood comedy rated PG-13.

You can read the whole review here.

And now for the five more video clips. They still don't necessarily give us a clear sense of the whole production, and video of stage work is always a bit flat, but it's a start....

This first one, apparently made for television, is from 1954, so we can assume we are watching Marcello Moretti in the role. Spoiler alert: it's in Italian without subtitles and we're not seeing much in the way of physical comedy in this particular segment.




Fast forward to 1994 and a sweetly evocative slideshow / video featuring Ferruccio Soleri.



Also from 1994:




A lecture-demo (in Italian) by Soleri:




And, last but not least, a fast-paced highlight reel (not sure what year) with a glimpse right at the end of the "juggling" sequence mentioned in the Times.



Finally, you can view an excellent slide show of moments from the Strehler production here.

Complete Books: Carlo Goldoni (4!)

[post 169]

Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793) was the Molière of Italy, the comic playwright who drew upon the traditions of the commedia dell'arte while creating tightly scripted plays. The best known of these is A Servant of Two Masters, a popular choice of modern theatre companies wanting to do a commedia-style show without actually working in improvisational mode.

When first written for the actor Antonio Sacco in 1743, the play had large sections open for improvisation. The complete script we know today came ten years later. Goldoni had come to see himself as a reformer, a writer who could add depth to the commedia's stereotypical stock characters and subtlety to the dialogue, now totally written rather than semi-improvised. In other words, he was a "commedia playwright," as oxymoronic as that may sound.

The servant with the two masters was Truffaldino, a commedia "zanni" similar to Arlecchino (Harlequin). Giorgio Strehler's landmark 20th-century production at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano in fact transformed Truffaldino into Arlecchino and retitled the piece Arlecchino, Servitore di Due Padroni. It's been in the Picolo repertoire since 1947 — that's ten years more than Ionesco's The Bald Soprano has been running in Paris! — and in all that time Arlecchino (photos above) has only been played by two actors, Marcello Moretti and Ferruccio Soleri.

Here's a Picolo video about Goldoni and the production:



Or you can read this introduction to the production from the Picolo program:

Staged for the first time in 1947 by Giorgio Strehler, Harlequin, Servant of Two Masters has become, over the course of the years, the Piccolo Teatro’s worldwide ambassador.
Like a phoenix rising from its ashes, this show is a challenge to the primarily ephemeral nature of theatre, without however being a museum piece.
On the contrary, the image that Giorgio Strehler has often used to define his Harlequin is that of a “living organism”, almost by definition requiring continuous evolution, change, and re-readings that, with the passing of time, have lead to the production of 11 versions which bear witness to the transformation of a custom, put to the test innovations in playwriting, and tell of the evolution of a director and a theatre. A true example of “memory in action”.
Harlequin is therefore to be considered as one of the founding productions in the history of the Piccolo, a kind of “pre-text” on which to recreate a tradition which favors the art of the actor, his virtuosity, and, as Strehler often maintained “the pleasure of acting” and “the pleasure of being”.In this sense Harlequin, in continuous evolution, expresses a kind of “auroral” phase of the theatre, understood and treasured by audiences from all around the world.

Update: Have come across a lot more material on the play. Simply go back to the future and you'll find it all at post 171.

Here is the complete text of the play in English translation.

The Servant of Two Masters


Next up are Goldoni's memoirs, which apparently are far from being 100% accurate, but then who's counting?

Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni


A Goldoni biography H.C. Chatfield-Taylor:

GoldoniBio


And finally, for the true Goldoni scholar — there's got to be one of you out there — one more book, Goldoni & the Venice of His Time by none other than Joseph Kennard, author of Masks & Marionettes, which you'll find two posts ago.

Kennard-Goldoni

A reminder that these .pdf documents can all be enlarged, read, downloaded, searched, and printed using the handy-dandy buttons at the bottom of each Scribd window.

Links:
• You can find part one of a documentary (in Italian) about the Picolo Teatro di Milano here.
• More plays by Goldoni at the Gutenberg Project or at Google Books.
• See the sidebar for a chronological list of all complete books available on this site.

Not Exactly Physical Comedy: Allora & Calzadilla at the Venice Biennale

[post 147]

The Venice Biennale is a bi-annual world fair of art, complete with national pavilions, long lines, and manufactured hoopla.  The U.S. pavilion went up in 1930 and has usually housed big-name artists, starting with Edward Hopper that initial year.  But this time around, instead of sending an established solo artist, our government has chosen to have us represented by two less known collaborative artists who are centered not stateside but rather in Puerto Rico — Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. And for apparently the first time ever, the visual artists are also performance artists.  I haven't seen their work, but what interests me about them is their whimsical humor and physicality, in this case involving a troupe of former Olympic gymnasts in their piece.

Here's the beginning of the preview that appeared in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago:

On a nondescript street in Long Island City, Queens, is a mysterious gold-painted door with a drawing of a colorful tent and a sign that reads “Circus Warehouse.” Inside is a cavernous space with a flying trapeze, gymnastic rings and ropes, ballet bars and piles of thick practice mats. It was here on a recent spring morning that about a dozen people were gathered around two pairs of strangely familiar objects: identical models of airline business-class seats, impeccably fashioned in wood.... The group watched as Sadie Wilhelmi, a young professional dancer and gymnast, bent her body in graceful movements over a seat: wrapping herself around the tray table, draping her body along the edge of the seats, limbs splayed, forming a perfect split, and finally alighting on the divider, a leg gracefully extending high in the air — Brancusi’s “Bird in Space” sculpture come to life. The routine lasted 17 minutes, far longer than the three-minute routines typical of professional gymnasts.


Sounds promising! You can read the whole article here.

The exhibit has since opened in Venice and the first two reviews I've read were thumbs up. The critic for The Daily Beast wrote that Allora & Calzadilla were "presenting some of the best art I've seen at any Biennale."

Click here for the entire Daily Beast review.

The reviewer for the London Guardian was likewise enthusiastic: "This year, the spectacle that is wowing the crowds is the huge upturned tank outside the American pavilion."

Click here for the entire Guardian review.

I haven't yet seen any video from Venice of the gymnasts in action, but I'm hoping some will surface soon. (If anyone finds a clip, now or down the road, please let me know.) Meanwhile, I thought you might find this video of an Allora and Calzadilla piano piece interesting.



You can find variations of this on YouTube.

I know it's not the same thing, but it did remind me of this Hanlon Brothers bit from the 19th century:

So in conclusion: not exactly physical comedy, not exactly sure what it all looks like, but intriguing nonetheless.

The Three Rebertis — Comedy Acrobatics (1966)

[post 089]

Here's another strong comedy acrobatic act, which you already saw a short segment of if you read my post on Charlie Rivel. That's the Three Rebertis doing the "little bridge." Thanks to Nicanor Cancellieri for sending me this one, which comes originally from Raffaele De Ritis, who I finally got to meet in Barcelona, and whose blogs, Novelties & Wonders and Storia del Circo, are well worth your time. Raffaele is also one of the brains behind the Circopedia web site, the internet's best English-language resource for circus history.

The clip is from a 1966 Hollywood Palace television variety show, which is a good source for a lot of physical comedy performance. Like a lot of these acts, the sequences alternate between straight acrobatic tricks and some real nice comedy bits. I especially liked the mock combat segment, with echoes of the theme music to the Batman tv show, which had had its network premiere just nine months before then and was all the rage.

Click here or on the image below to go to the video.

The Barios at the London Hippodrome

[post 076]

Presenting the Barios Trio!

The Barios, whose heyday was the 60s and 70s, claimed a proud clown lineage, that of the Meschi Italian clown brothers, better known as Dario & Bario, one of the most highly regarded European clown teams of the entre-deux-guerres era. Dario Meschi (1880–1962) played the elegant whitfeace clown to the auguste of his brother Manrico, known as Bario (1888–1974).

Bario's two sons, Freddy (1922–1988) and Nello (1918–2000), joined forces with Freddy's wife, Henny Sosman (born 1923), to form the Bario trio, sometimes referred to as the Junior Barios, whose photo and videos you see below. Henny likewise hailed from European clown royalty, as she was the daughter of the auguste Martin Sosman and cousin of clown Pipo Sosman (Gustave Joseph Sosman). Tony Bario (died 2007), son of Freddy & Henny, was an accomplished musician and conducted the Cirque d'Hiver orchestra.


The brothers in the trio act both work as augustes, with Henny playing it straight, though her function is more that of a ringmaster than of a whiteface clown. This musical clown entrée is from a television circus taped at the London Hippodrome in 1966, and has a fair amount of physical business.




The Barios did lots of television. Here's a tv clip with the brothers in tuxedos. This one was on YouTube but disappeared. I snatched it from DailyMotion.com in case it was in danger of vanishing from there as well. Haven't managed to lose the little ads at the bottom without cropping the video... well, at least not yet.






Update (2-26-10): I totally forgot I had this circus clip of the Barios performing their trick car act in Stockholm and preserved on a 1990 French television special, Piste de Clowns.