Performance at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival
One of my pleasures is visiting the Bristol Renaissance Faire - not only for the chain mail bikinis, but also for the occasional efforts towards authenticity by artisans and performers. You don’t get to hear madrigals too much, or listen to strolling lutenists, or see real busking jugglers working a crowd with wooden balls and leather clubs.
However, an even bigger treat happened this last weekend, when I got to see i Arroganti performing the Commedia dell’Arte at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. I’m a longtime fan of commedia, and if you like Loony Tunes or the Marx Brothers or A Fish Called Wanda then you would be, too (especially the latter-it’s almost exactly a commedia farce set in modern times).
The original commedia was improv comedy loosely structured around a plot line with some set bits called “lazzi” that the performers could insert at any given time. For example, a lazzi of Arlecchino and his girlfriend, Ruffiana, would be to suddenly wax eloquent about how much they loved each other, using somewhat questionable descriptions: “I love you like the flies love rotting meat…” It was also unusual for the fact that it was interactive, often directing corpo de masquere (the blow of the mask) towards the audience, letting them in on the jokes.
i Arroganti had it all. Their timing was impeccable, the characters were as over-the-top and shameless as they were supposed to be, and the masks…oh, the masks. A good commedia mask has a life of its own. You don’t “put on” the mask, you become the mask. And I talked with Ernesto, the director afterwards, specifically to admire the fine maskwork (of which you can see an example above, from Jorge Añón of Mascared.com.
He writes of his masks:
“We are aware that masks have been present in the noblest and in the most despicable events of human civilization , in the most beautiful and in the most terrible ones. They have been with us at our loving dances and the expiating ones , at births , initiation rites , wars , parties and funerals.”
And at the funniest. A quick look at YouTube gives a fine example:
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