Commedia Dell' Arte - Final Performancs

This week, we had our Commedia Dell’ Arte performance. It was our first production as a class and very important for us, for two reasons; first of all, it was the first time for most of us to perform with a character that you have researched on and learned, and was a great practice of our improvisation skills. The second reason is because of the situation in our class which I’ll write on later.

This week was very intense because we changed a lot of scenes before the play itself. Although Commedia Dell’ Arte is improvisation and based a lot on “accepting the offer” as Steve said, when you practice a play so many times, you have some gags that become constant and just go on with the play. Therefore, during the rehearsals period, we have found a lot of things that we wanted to changed within almost every rehearsal. It was very intense because some people felt like they don’t know what to do, there were so many changes and you have to change your character according to these changes.
I thought so as well in the beginning, but than I figured out that it is wrong.
Steve told us that when you ‘live’ your character, you know what to do, and I came to know that it is true. When you are doing a good research on your character you feel free to act like it, whenever you need to. In the beginning I also felt very nervous to improvise but than I learned two important skills that really helped me:
First, accept the offer, just move on. Before I improvised I always used to get scared, even in front of the class because of a lot of reasons, if it is a comedy- that it won’t be funny, or interesting, or I’ll mix up the English. But I learned that when you just relax, and come to the stage without any preparation or thoughts, and you let yourself to adopt yourself into the new situation, the improvisation is much better.
The second thing I’ve learned was not to be scared of reacting. When you accept the offer, you also need to know how to create new situations and ‘back up’ your partner.

After we came up with the final scenes, we made the scenario shown above.
Then we moved to the next part, which was making costumes. I looked at the research which I made on Arrlechino, my character, and I saw that he has colorful triangles on his outfit. I decided to change it a little bit to a form that I will like more. Instead of making a long outfit I decided to divide it into two. First, a black shirt with a lot of colorful triangles- that was on purpose to show the happy and un-even side of his personality. I wore white blank Thai pants because for me, they present freedom, and this is how I wanted to present my character- free, hyper, happy, and jumpy.

The production came and we were all very excited. We sat up the stage in a Proscenium Arch form and we covered the stage with red curtains.
The show began. It was very intense because I didn’t really feel like I am using the skills that I’ve learned during the classes because I was too nervous. I looked at the audience all the time, and didn’t really reply to my partners, but I did improve it on our second performance in Sha Tin International College. Than I felt more relaxed and free to talk and jump and act.

When I am looking at it now, I think that I might have done better work if I wouldn’t think about what I am doing all the time. Being aware of yourself on stage is good, but it gets to this point when you get so nervous that you forget about all the useful skills that you’ve learned and just get panicked. An example for that, is when in the scene when Flavio (man, played by a girl) and Arrlechino (me) I got confused and called Falvio as a she. It didn’t happen in the second time we played, because I did not concentrate on myself all the time- I did listen to my partners and I felt like we are actually making a conversation.

In conclusion, I think that Commedia Dell’ Arte was a very important part of our theatre experience because a lot of people are used to theatre which is done by ‘reciting lines’ and not by really acting like your character and reacting to situations like it. I think that it is necessary to start a theatre journey with this form of theatre, because it makes you to deal with the fear of improvising (which is always scary, at least for me) and more than that, being spontaneous! Accepting the offer, being a good partner and know when to back him up. These are skills that I will try to adopt with in my next productions.