Commedia dell'Arte - Project! Final Reflection
I have two fingers between the door and the wall, peeking through the small rim, waiting for the lights to dim. Adrenaline is racing in my blood, even though we have just finished rehearsing the skit for the umpteenth time. I hear Shohei, Naho and Resa exchanging whispers of excitement and anticipation behind my back while I try to recognize the different voices in the audience.
"I love this part of theatre! I just love performing!" squeals Naho.
October the 7th was our first and last performance of Capitano's Chest. To my surprise (as we have terrible time-management skills), we weren't as rushed and under the time pressure as we were for either Wayang Kulit or Absence. The story was developed and finished, and though we had some last-minute tweaks, it was pretty much complete.
Challenges that we faced within the last two hours of the performance were the lack of energy in our characters and the incorporation of lazzis. In addition, I personally had a challenge of using the appropriate voice register to portray Arlecchino. We had the lazzis decided on, yet they lacked energy and didn't flow well enough. Rehearsing them didn't seem to improve the lazzis because we knew our mistakes, but improving just seemed to require a whole new level of theatre that we didn't know enough about.
Perhaps if we had done more proper research and youtubed more videos on other actors acting the parts of our characters, we would have had a better physical representation of the characters and would be able to mimic their actions. I tried to get the IBDP theatre class to watch the video from my previous post to get them re-inspired and understand the characters better (once again, I really recommend this video to anyone studying Commedia, though the interpretation of Arlecchino and Brighella was different from what we learned).
If we were to re-take this unit again, or perhaps for future IBDP theatre students, I would really recommend watching more skits and lazzis to understand Commedia. While reading text is also a very valuable source of information, it's difficult to really understand the physicality of it without having seen it.
We're not professionals, barely even amateurs, and at least on my behalf, I think I tried very hard in making the lazzis work. There were some rough moments in rehearsals that definitely required some "oiling" to allow better flow, but once we performed it, the audience's response in laughter was the oil. This brings me to my second point: perhaps we need to rehearse with smaller audiences first before performing to the general audience. It seems our theatre class doesn't function well unless we're put under the actual pressure provided by an audience, and so therefore we might want to perform to one or two other teachers first (English teachers or other Drama teachers) before opening up to the audience. That way, we'll have more motivation and more diverse feedback, even if it may not be professional.
Another challenge we faced was make-up. Naturally, the four of us with masks had little problems with this, but Naho (Isabella) and Resa (Columbina), the two female roles, faced last-minute make up stress. To a great extent, it was my fault because I had assumed that the theatre department would have white make-up base (at my old school, I had learned it was a basic foundation to all theatre make-up), yet I was wrong. Though Naho and Resa were able to add incredible amounts of blush and red lipstick and moles, they missed the white foundation like the one below:
After the performance, I was super exhausted and super happy. Thank you Commedia Dell'Arte and IBDP Theatre students for reminding me about the awesomeness behind theatre's stresses :)
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