What was the historiography of Il mondo nuovo, a fresco painted in 1791 by Giandomenico Tiepolo? How did its title emerge? Giandomenico likely found the inspiration for his subject in popular ...entertainment on Venice's Piazzetta. The houselike structure in the fresco's middle ground-a peep show-had been labeled il mondo nuovo by the eighteenth-century playwright Carlo Goldoni. Yet the fresco was not named until after 1906. Art historian Pompeo Molmenti introduced the Goldoni-inspired title, his efforts seconded by Corrado Ricci, a powerful art administrator. Both were steeped in the "politics of nostalgia," associated with the Italian Aesthetic movement.
This thesis encompasses the process of discovering the character Pantalone de’ Bisognosi in Carlo Goldoni’s, The Servant of Two Masters, performed at Regent University. The introduction offers a ...summary of foreseen challenges that I expect to approach in portraying Pantalone and strategies for overcoming them. Chapter one will consist of a compilation of the research behind the play and character. Chapter two will cover textual analysis of the script, the controlling and counter idea of the play, and spine phrases of all main characters. Chapter three offers character analysis on Pantalone de’ Bisognosi, and techniques and exercises applied to work through the foreseen challenges presented in chapter one. Chapter four records personal reflections of the rehearsal process and performances of The Servant of Two Masters. Chapter five concludes with discoveries and insights of my work playing the role of Pantalone de’ Bisognosi. The appendices contain the playbill, concluding with production stills from this show.
This dissertation explores representations of the cook and the deliveryman— il cuoco e lo zanaiuolo—in Renaissance Italian comedy (1509–1560). The figure of the cook is well established in ancient ...comedy and in Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae (The Learned Banqueters), and centuries later several playwrights, including Ludovico Ariosto, Agnolo Firenzuola, Alessandro Piccolomini, Giovan Battista Gelli, and Giovanni Maria Cecchi, feature cooks and novel food purveyors in their comedies. In a rapidly changing Early Modern society, culinary professionals provide crucial insight into the sustenance of households in urban centers, mediating how communities interact with their foods. As members of the working class, cooks and deliverymen offer a unique perspective on social dynamics of the period, different from that offered by political and religious courts. Comedies that include these professionals rely, in part, on previous canons to characterize the figures, yet they do so in conversation with contemporary settings and everyday realities of Early Modern Italy. As cooks reappear on the stage throughout the sixteenth century, typified roles establish them as a Renaissance version of the classical stock character. The development of the novel deliveryman as a member of the cast, instead, suggests an increasingly diverse number of professions in Italian city centers and a consequential push towards innovative representations of a more inclusive world in Early Modern theater.
This dissertation examines the multiple definitions of “Commedia dell’Arte” in historiography and contemporary performance, analyzing potentials and problematics behind attempts to understand ...“historical” Commedia dell’Arte and to (re)construct contemporary Commedia using what Franklin J. Hildy calls an “applied theater history” approach. Employing archival historiography, literary analysis, art historical techniques, practical dramaturgy, Practice-as-Research, and qualitative research, I describe different realities of Commedia dell’Arte performance from history and contemporary practice, including ways in which “mistakes” or “appropriations” in the form have become included within its present identities. Chapter One describes the status of the field, problems, and approaches to identifying what Commedia dell’Arte “is” today based upon autoethnography and interview material from contemporary practitioners, whose competing approaches inform the ongoing conversation. Chapter Two traces the history of the form known as “Commedia dell’Arte” from its origins to contemporary pedagogy with special attention given to appropriations, evolutions, distortions, and efforts at reproduction. In Chapter Three, I narrow the focus to a specific case-study—a recent production of the classic scenario Il Cavadente (The Tooth-Puller) from the Commedia dell’Arte repertoire—with special attention to the problematics of translating, interpreting, and reconstructing historical sources as dramatic literary content. Chapter Four describes an art-historical approach to assessing, analyzing, and utilizing iconography from Commedia dell’Arte’s history, while Chapter Five describes a specific attempt to design the visual world for a contemporary production of The Tooth-Puller with reference to competing goals of faithfulness to the tradition and availability for artistic innovation. Chapter Six employs Practice-as-Research (and what I advocate as Research-as-Practice) to embody reimagined characters based on the Commedia archive. Chapter Seven utilizes participant interviews and audience surveys to reflect upon Ole Miss Theatre & Film’s production of The Tooth-Puller, the final (though always fluid) script of which is included as Appendix A. This concluding chapter also reflects, through the voices of contemporary teachers and practitioners, on the nature of Commedia dell’Arte and its place in current actor training and theatrical innovation. While the field of Commedia practitioners today is divided between those who prescribe an “authentic” system for “historical” Commedia and those who freely declare that “Commedia doesn’t exist” in any knowable form, this dissertation models a middle way of interacting faithfully and rigorously with extant data from the past in order to freely create a continuation of the Commedia tradition for the future.
This dissertation is a study of the comic intermezzo's literary origins and musical practice in the years before Pergolesi's La serva padrona (1733). It begins with a chronological examination of ...Italian comic plays and operas written between 1660 and 1723. During these years comic playwrights adopted a style of writing speech from the improvised theatre which makes use of what Richard Andrews (1993) refers to as “elastic gags.” This style of comedy flourished under Medici patronage in Florence in the last decades of the seventeenth century and then spread to Venice, Rome and Naples during the first years of the intermezzo's development. It is a style of comedy shared with the plays of Molière, and other contemporaneous French authors. This dissertation examines several scenes based on French works which have previously not been identified as having earlier sources. The decision to adapt these earlier sources for the intermezzo did not occur in a vacuum. The practice of comedy in the intermezzo was conditioned by the artistic, social and political climate of Italy. This study investigates the relationship between intermezzos and the milieus which produced them. The success of some intermezzos, like Il marito giocatore (1719), resulted from a combination of their artistic merit and their broad social appeal, while others, like Albino e Plautilla (1723), were musically adept but remained obscure because their humour was specific to the world they satirized. Both intermezzos are indebted to earlier French sources. Many others which are metatheatrical in nature draw on contemporary debates about opera. A final section examines selected arias from the intermezzo repertory using incongruity theory. Comic theory makes clear that the intermezzo's musical language was not a new development. Just as librettists drew on earlier written traditions to form the literary text of the intermezzo, composers drew on existing musical practices to create humour. The intermezzo was therefore not naively comic—a portrait of the genre which is all too common—but rather a repertory which was thoroughly enmeshed within contemporary artistic practice and a wider social and cultural world.
This thesis serves as a record for the process of designing and delivering both costumes and masks for the production of The Basilisk of Barnagasso, produced by The George Washington University at ...the Dorothy Marvin Betts Theatre in Washington, D.C., opening October 15 th, 2015 and closing on October 18th, 2015. The production was directed by Toby Mulford, the present Artistic Director of Faction of Fools. Set and lights were designed by Carl Gudenius, sound was designed by Celeste Harrison, Wendy Dubner served as properties master, and the production was stage managed by Samantha Gonzalez. The masks were created under the supervision of Tara Cariaso, co-founder of Waxing Moon Masks. This thesis also discusses the history and traditions of Commedia Dell’Arte while considering the challenges of producing Commedia for a modern audience.
Elements of the following argument clearly apply to theatrical productions more generally: all theater is ephemeral and to some extent collaborative, and the published version of a play as attributed ...to a particular dramatist is necessarily a "perfected" and purely textual version that, by definition, cannot entirely capture certain physical or transitory elements of a production.7 However, the specific practices of the Comédie-Italienne, rooted in an oral and collective culture that was dying out in other areas of literature by the mid-eighteenth century, make it a particularly extreme example of this phenomenon. ... its magnifying effects allow us a clearer view of the problems it creates.
Although adaptations of media are ubiquitous in our society, little attention is paid by the general public as to why these adaptations have come into being. Because of this, this thesis seeks to ...understand what can be learned about an adaptor’s beliefs and ideals through a close analysis of the changes made between the source text and the adaptation. By examining Robert Caisley’s Tartuffe, Yaël Farber’s Mies Julie, and Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors, alongside their respective source texts Moliere’s Tartuffe, Strindberg’s Miss Julie, and Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, a connection is found between the adaptor’s changes and their intentions, especially in respect to their intended audience.
This thesis encompasses my process as an actor performing the role of Silvio in The Servant of Two Masters in the Main Stage theater at Regent University. This process was under the direction and ...rewritten adaptation of Dr. Michael Kirkland. My process focused on three obstacles that I planned on arising during my production. In chapter one I focus on the genre of Commedia dell'arte, and relevant commentary. Chapter two is the genre, my controlling and counter ideas, my structural progression, and objective spine phrases of each character in the show. Chapter three is a character analysis with a biography, backstory, practical aesthetic plan, and a prepared physicality regimen. Chapter four is comprised of journal entries during the rehearsal and performance process. In the end, there is a conclusion to my process, work cited, an appendix of the adjudicator's commentary, and an appendix of the brochure.
The invisibility of Italian contemporary women directors in Italy and abroad is symptomatic of how Italian theatre is studied in the Anglophone academy and the concerning gender inequality and ...misogyny widespread in Italy during the Berlusconi Era (1994-2011). This dissertation looks at this grossly understudied aspect of Italian theatre by examining the role that Sicilian director Emma Dante (b. 1967), her company Sud Costa Occidentale, and her works played in the 1994-2011 Italian theatre landscape. This study reads her staging of female bodies, her theatrical works as a whole, and her directorial persona for attitudes towards women in the context of Sicilian and Italian culture. It analyzes the individual stories told in Dante’s La trilogia della famiglia siciliana (The Trilogy of the Sicilian Family, 2001-2004), Cani di Bancata (Market Dogs, 2006), and Trilogia degli occhiali (The Eyeglasses Trilogy, 2011) as vehicles to denounce the symbolic and systemic violence targeting and oppressing Italian women. Although primarily based on text and performance analysis, feminist and body theory also undergird the explorations undertaken in this study. This work is historiographically guided and rooted in contemporary Italian cultural studies, as it reconstructs the context in which Dante’s plays were written.Chapter 1 provides the historical, sociological, and cultural background necessary to frame to rest of the dissertation. Chapter 2 presents the lower-class Sicilian women in La trilogia della famiglia siciliana as doubly marginalized by their gender and socio-economic status. It explores how the financial disparity between the sexes, the gender roles, and the violence perpetuated against women depicted in the Trilogy point at gender issues such as economic inequality, Catholic Church-backed ideas predicating the submission of women to men, and gendered killings.Chapter 3 paints mafia realities as controlled by both regional and national power dynamics regulated by laws of silence and behavior, and strengthened by the corruption and complicity of governmental and religious institutions. It then dissects the female imagery in Cani di bancata, depicting southern Italian women living in mafia-controlled regions as perennially subordinated to men and marginalized within mafia organizations, where they are idealized by male fantasies and relegated to traditional gender roles.Chapter 4 discusses Trilogia degli occhiali focusing on Ballarini. It portrays the last play of the Trilogy as questioning gendered ageism through an investigation of the representation of old age and the presence/absence of older women’s bodies in the media, the structure of the play itself, and the actors’ performances of age and the aging process.Beyond summarizing the arguments made in preceding chapters and outlining future research, Chapter 5 looks at Dante’s public persona as continuing her questioning of gender inequality, gender roles, and mediatized gendered bodies. Finally, translations of the seven plays analyzed and a list of works directed by Dante are provided in the appendix. In addition to assisting with textual analysis, these translations offer scripts that could be used by Anglophone scholars for future research on Italian theatre and by English language theatre companies to stage Dante’s works.
