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.