Commedia Research Tasks

 Commedia

What are the cultural influences of Commedia?

When it comes to the stories, props and masks they were created in a sexually suggestive way. This was done through masks with phallus-like noses and art that showed the use of prop swords with rounded edges.

In the 16th century, Italy was in the middle of their renaissance which lead to Lavish artworks, Clothing and lifestyles that were big parts of the lives of many of the people in Italy at the time. When it comes to Commedia, we can reflect the colourful costumes and masks to the current lives of the people of Italy of the time. Along with this many of the stories told where from classic literary works of the period which were refereed to as Commedia Erudita - Literary Drama.

These may be told to be the origins of Commedia, however there are many that believed that it had a different origin. This was that Commedia developed as traveling performers such as bards and jugglers from Europe at the time came to play in markets and other highly populated areas whilst also being performers in things like festivals.

What did a traditional commedia performance look like?

In a traditional commedia performance it would normally consist of 12 performers who were trained specialists in the certain characters that they would play. When it came to the nature of the performance it was a performance that was mainly done in an improvised manner which meant there were no directors or playwrights. Although it was mainly done in this improvised manner, there were still little pieces of script that some of the actors had with each other that they could use whenever during the performance. Typically these would be around three pages long, But have no dialogue written onto them. But whilst the shows were improvised meaning storylines and dialogues were different in each performance, The cast of actors would have outlines of the stories and directions in which they wanted to take the piece.

Adding on to this, Due to most of the characters wearing masks during the performance this meant that they were limited in what they were able to say, So their movements and mannerisms of movements would communicate not only what they wanted to say, but also the character that they were. Along with this, it was of common practice for Commedia performances to make the audience feel like they were apart of the piece instead of someone just watching a play, which helped gain the attention of the audience.