First commedia intensive

We spent all day with Marcello today: three and a half hours of physical drills, then some lecturing on history and the traditions of the different Masks, and finally another hour or so of some character-specific physical work.

I think people tend to associate large gestures with commedia dell'arte, but actually precision is the byword of the physical work. The principle at work is essentially the William Strunk rule: it's not that you shouldn't gesture, but that every gesture must tell. That is, you must know the physical and emotional states that drive it, and it must have a clear beginning and end. Uncertain, ungrounded, or unspecific gesturing dissipates the character. As Marcello explained, when you're working with a mask, it can become an expressionless face if the expression of the body is unclear.

But the gesture of commedia is a lot bigger, in that it originated in outdoor performance, and if you're pointing with your right hand the line of the action might extend all the way to your left toes. (I think a good actor, regardless of the tradition in which he's working, understands every gesture with his whole body, even if it only shows in the slight twitch of a shoulder. But in commedia that entire understanding shows, so it has to be clear and precise, and that means your muscles and your lungs have to be up to it.)

So we did a lot of drills that felt like nothing so much as barre work--isolating muscle groups, playing with posture and breath and balance. (Marcello--demonstrating the difference between a 1500s Arlecchino and a 1700s Arlecchino--explained that late commedia did in fact become quite balletic, when it was popular in France.) A balance drill, for example, might involve a sort of clown arabesque that crumples by degrees and then all at once regains its original form:

Or you might have to switch back and forth between two different styles of running, both with a lot of side-to-side motion, but each with a different posture and degree of limb tension:

The breath work reminded me a bit of my first retreat with Molly Lyons, when we worked extensively with the connection between the emotional impulse and the breath. Many actors pause just after inhaling, and use that pause as a sort of emotional stop. Not pausing can open the door to all sorts of interesting emotions, and it lets you plunge into the line before you feel quite ready to speak--you don't want to feel too safe, in scene work. Today, though, we prolonged the pause, timed it to a gesture, played with it. Of course, meeting the physical and vocal demands of commedia involves great discipline of breath. Marcello had us "draw" with three breaths--using one breath to draw the sea, the next to draw a boat, and the third to fill the sail with air.

We repeated the drawing a number of times, envisioning different nautical conditions to play with pacing and speed and force.

Then there was a lot of work with space objects--breaking down our interactions with nonexistent things into discrete, repeatable gestures. Echoes of the mime workshop I took years ago, when we discussed "clicking" onto objects as we picked them up and "unclicking" when we put them down. This is a bit more involved and stylized, but that's fine. It's important for characters--especially the zanni--to be able to enter immense flights of fancy and to make those fantasies concretely real onstage.

Marcello doesn't really speak English. We have translators for the lectures, but often don't need them; as he notes, a really good commedia performer can be understood regardless of language.

So. Two weeks I've been here. I can feel some of the changes in my body already--daily yoga will do that.

And. In the same two weeks I've been out of the country, its entire midsection has flooded, one of my favorite artists has died, this Palin character has been thrust on the public, and the banks have collapsed. What the hell, people? I trusted you to keep things in okay shape while I was gone.

San Fabiano

This afternoon, having just heard about the death of David Foster Wallace, I went for a run/hike in San Fabiano, the area just outside Arezzo that is home to the villa. It's mostly farmland--grapes and olives on old, old estates--and the terrain is somewhere between hills and mountain foothills.

I got high up into the hills above the villa, on narrow dirt roads. At one point the ground under my feet was strangely reflective, and I realized that among the stones and pebbles were a bunch of old tiles. I have no clue what they were from: an ancient mosaic? a more recent renovation?

Meanwhile a storm was rolling into the valley.

The trees in the foreground are an olive grove. Far in the background on the left you can see the Arezzo Duomo--the high cathedral spire--and on the right you can see the villa, the yellow building a little closer.

I hiked most of the way out--getting to know the terrain--and ran back. Got well and properly rained on, and it felt fantastic.

Have I sorted out how I feel about DFW's death? Not even close. DFW was the inspiration, after all, for my first published essay, and--as much as I have heroes--one of mine. And though it isn't the same as losing a friend, it's hard to read his essays without feeling as though you've gotten to know him.

There has been far too much death this year. I know that as a clown I must deal with death routinely, and help other people laugh at it, but boy, that's a hard lesson sometimes.

In which Tuscany makes a strong argument for the existence of Eden

It's been raining on and off since yesterday afternoon. Here that means the skies go all painterly.

Joe said recently that I seemed to be living in an artist's utopia, and I think that's pretty much right. The walls echo with music. If you want to try something--whether it's a scene or a new song--you can find someone talented to help you out. The very colors and flavors and language of Italy seem purposely designed to stimulate the creative impulse.

I went to a little art supply store this afternoon for a sketch pad, and of course I wound up buying some watercolor pencils. It's just a little different, buying art supplies here. The paint labeled siena (one n in Italian) means something more when you're only an hour or two away from Siena and the colors of Italian earth surround you in the streets and the walls of the city.

As I was paying I noticed the jars of powdered pigments on the shelves behind the counter. If color has a Platonic ideal, it is there, in that brilliance. I mentioned the pigments and the owner got very excited. They were for frescoes, he explained. He still mixed them in the traditional way. They did not always perfectly match the ancient colors, but they were as close as anyone can get today. And then he took me through the store and showed me all the different ways one can use classical pigments, how you can actually feel the difference in weight between a tube of oil paint made with synthetic pigments and a tube of the same size made with the old minerals, and so on. And my God, a little bottle of pure cobalt, bluer than any blue you've ever seen, seeming to emanate light--!

I left feeling a direct kinship to the Renaissance, in an entirely new way, as if all those artists were still around me, breathing the rainy air, asking their immortal questions.

On my way back home I stopped at the city's medieval wall and decided to climb up to take a look. A fellow student commented this afternoon that you can't turn around here without discovering another beautiful view, and yeah, he's right:



There's plenty I need to write about the week's classes, about a fantastic seminar on clown and clowns, about everything we're doing and learning, but in due time. Sometimes you just need to let yourself be knocked down by beauty.

Ragazzoccio

When I announced I was going to Italy, lots of friends seemed to expect me to come home toting an Italian boyfriend, regardless of how my actual American boyfriend might feel about that.

Here's the perfect compromise: an Italian boyfriend for Little Girl, the Gibson I left at home. I call him Ragazzoccio. (It's only fair to assume that she, like I, would fall for a bad boy.)


I'm very happy to be able to play again.

In other news, I got the name of our quarter wrong when I described the joust. It's Porta Crucifera, not Crucifizione. (I wouldn't mention it except it seems like the kind of thing that could get you beat up.)

And classes have started. You can now tell which students are in the theater program because we all grimace before we sit down. We've been using our thigh muscles a lot in movement class. But it's wonderful: a combination of yoga and Feldenkrais and acrobatics for two hours, first thing every morning. I'm trying to figure out how I can maintain this kind of rigor when I get back to the States. Because it's the sort of thing I've always wanted from my theatrical life.

Giostra

Wow, Arezzo takes its jousting seriously. I thought it was going to be sort of Ren Faire-ish, but instead everyone was displaying their team colors, fights broke out, and we heard an endless series of chants about the promiscuity of the girls of the rival quarter. (The city is divided into quarters, and each quarter has a jousting team. The Accademia is in the quarter of the Crucifizione, whose heraldry flies on all the neighborhood lampposts.)

So, everything got started with processions and drumming and trumpets...


...and we crowded into a piazza, with people peering out of upstairs windows just as they'd do on a rooftop in Wrigleyville...




...and then the medieval color guard performed a really quite impressive routine involving a lot of precision tossing and catching of banners.



(What the pictures can't show: the trumpets suddenly going from processional fanfares into the theme from Pirates of the Carribean.)

Then another procession, involving knights in full armor and absurdly exaggerated headpieces that must have been painfully heavy--eighteen-inch bronze eagles perched atop their helmets and so on. (These pictures also show the net separating the jousters from the bleacher crowd; I'm not sure whether it was for our protection or theirs.)



Then, the jousting, which proved pretty much impossible to photograph. Each team sends two riders to charge at a statue that represents a Saracen. The Saracen is equipped with a target, a swinging lead mace-style weight, and a whip. And once the lance hits the target, the Saracen spins around very fast. The riders are (I think) awarded points based on the accuracy of their hit, whether the whip or the weight hits them, and whether their lance splinters on impact (which counts double). There's much cheering and speculation about the score. The spectators up in the surrounding buildings hold up their fingers to show the groundlings what they think the score will be. And a trumpet fanfare before the loudspeaker announces "Punti: Cinque" or whatever.

Crucifizione's archrivals, San Andrea, won. I have heard that they're despised because they're the rich privileged neighborhood. Also that there's some sort of communist-fascist rivalry there, although I no longer remember which quarter was which. I do know that in our quarter they are hated enough that one of the Crucifizione supporters wore a sticker--the sort of thing that had been printed and mass-produced--that read Bianco Verde Bastardo. (The San Andrea colors are white and green.)

So we trooped home, defeated, but still, in one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.



And now the villa is full of the sounds of the music students singing and running through virtuosic piano pieces, and it's time to read about the history of commedia dell'arte. Tomorrow morning we start Feldenkrais, acrobatics, and voice.

Damn the mosquitos! Full speed ahead!

First serious discussion of the academic curriculum today. Oh, WOW. Acrobatics, Feldenkrais, commedia with Marcello Bartolli, voice, the aesthetics/philosophy course...and this is before the mask-making workshop and of course clown. I am so impatient for classes to begin.

This weekend, there will be jousting.

Learned a bit more about the villa: It was built in 1560, and it originally served as the summer home of a bishop. The children of Cosimo de Medici came here to study with said bishop.

There really will be jousting this weekend. Arezzo has a big medieval festival.

It's also apparently possible to find places in Arezzo where the Decameron takes place--notably the famous well. I'll have to make a Field Guide post on the Decameron while I'm here, then.

It's been very interesting to discover the reputation of Chicago theater. Both the faculty members I've talked to have been quick to praise Chicago theater, and to say that the work in Chicago these days seems more interesting and vital than what's in New York.

The truism also holds that Chicago is the biggest small town in the world. Even here, it turns out, I'm running into friends of Chicago theater people. A fellow staffer did his undergrad work with Sean Graney, for example. So there goes any lingering illusion of escapism.

And yes, this place is idyllic and gorgeous, but OH MY GOD THE MOSQUITOS. I am covered in red welts. The windows, being Renaissance windows, have no screens. I may regret saying this when the fresh figs are a distant memory and we're all shivering on our eight daily hours of state-rationed heat, but as far as the bugs are concerned winter can't come soon enough. All in all it's still a small quibble. But when you are hot and itchy and reeking of apparently ornamental bug spray, you tend to lose your sense of proportion.

Life at the villa

This is the view from the villa's lending library: the vineyard immediately adjacent. We have a few vines and a fig tree on the premises, and apparently you can walk to one of the neighboring vineyards with an empty jug and have them fill it with table chianti.

The city center is a short hike away, down a steep one-lane road along which cars hurtle at terrific speeds despite the numerous blind driveways and side streets. You turn right at the aqueduct, and walk a ways more to the scala mobile, a series of escalators--why not?--that help you up the hill towards a high medieval wall. Apart from the aqueducts and the medieval walls and the Duomo, there are aspects of the landscape that remind me of Las Cruces, especially in this heat: the ground tends to be dry and rocky, with tufts of scrub grass rather than an even green cover, and sometimes you glimpse a tiny lizard scurrying out of the way.

Got my first glimpse of the week-by-week curriculum today (classes start next week, after everyone has settled in). It looks like we'll have daily movement and voice work for the first month, which is fantastic. Less clown than I was hoping for--some classes are of necessity based on the schedules of performers who teach when they can--but at least the clown will be all day, every day, while it lasts.

Anyone who goes to Italy should document the food, so I should mention the fantastic spicy mushroom-tomato ragout I had last night at a bruschetteria. For free. They left out a number of primi piatti--toasted bread, foccaccia, squares of puff-pastry panini with prosciutto and mozzarella, beets, a pineapple-ham salad, mortadella, deviled eggs--and people sat out in the plaza and chatted and snacked over their beer and wine. It's a very nice way to eat.

Home, for the next four months

I'm installed in my room in Tuscany. I'm too tired, hungry, and jet-lagged to write more. It's going to be a race: whether I can finish dinner before I fall asleep. But I'm here.

addio, addio

In the terminal at O'Hare. Packing four months' worth of stuff into a single duffel bag is a grueling experience. I think I was pretty disciplined (certainly compared to the way I used to pack in college), but still, four months is four months, and the bag was, predictably, over the weight limit. Once I picked it up it was clear it would be a bad idea to try to carry my guitar too. So I said goodbye to Little Girl this morning too. There's a campus guitar for general use (I am skeptical of its quality and availability, but we shall see), and I can always try to find a cheap guitar in Arezzo.

I have a stopover in Frankfurt, so all the boarding announcements are in English and German. Disconcerting. The process of studying Italian has already made some German bubble back up to the surface. God knows what language I'll be speaking when I get to Arezzo.