Commedia dell'arte (6)

We began this lesson with a focus exercise (to engage ourselves and to ensure we were all concentrating) and a physical warm up (to avoid injuries and aches when performing our character's movements). After we had completed our warm ups we performed the scenes that we created at the end of last lesson. I thought James and Rhiannon's scene was very clever as it was very comical and definitely showed the relationship between the two characters. Their scene basically consisted of the two of them blowing kisses at each other but it was very comical as they found different ways of doing this including miming a bow and arrow, a basketball, a football and a bowling ball. They used Gromalot noises to signal when they sent and when they received the kiss. Lewis and Ollie's scene was also extremely clever as they were discussing how they were going to kill Harlequin. They didn't use Gromalot and instead used actual words to ensure that the audience understood what was happening. They maintained their characters stance and voice throughout and also portrayed their characteristics throughout (such as Pantalone's obsession with money). However, we did suggest that Ollie could have rambled more, as we learned from our research that the Doctor will constantly go off on a tangent about really random things.

After we had watched each other's scene we decided to devise our first scene. We knew what we wanted this scene to consist of so decided to improvise it, stop and adjust when we thought we needed to and then carried on. Our opening scene is as follows:
-   Harlequin centre stage - dead. Zanni SL is asleep.
-   Brighella walks in and finds Harlequin. Thinks he's asleep then realises he's dead.
-   Brighella calls Doctor on. Doctor does diagnosis.
-   Pantalone walks on and blames Brighella.
-   Brighella blames Il Capitano, who enters then blames Columbina.
-   Columbina enters and blames Zanni.
-   Zanni enters and prods Harlequin. Brig is angry. Zanni blames Columbina.
-   Everyone points at different people. The pointing swaps.
-   Il Capitano is certain that it is Doctor and Pantalone.

The picture on the left shows the positioning of the characters and who they are blaming. The second set of blames are the reverse of the first set, apart from for Zanni who is trying to point at everyone (as he doesn't really know what is going on so is copying everyone else).

After establishing this scene we decided what we wanted to do with the piece. We had already decided that we wanted every character to have a scene to explain to the audience why they wanted to kill Harlequin, but I came up with the idea of each having a scene where they are about to kill Harlequin and stopping just before Harlequin looks like he is about to die. We could then go back to these scenes and repeat the section just before he is about to die and then continue them to show that he in fact didn't die in these scenarios (apart from the scene where he does actually die). Ollie then came up with the idea of getting all of these scenes to link and to be happening at the same time, so Harlequin is just walking through these scenes from one section to another narrowly getting away with his life. Next lesson, we shall run our opening scene again and all devise our scenes explaining why we want to kill Harlequin.