Day One

Day one

On our first day of our Commedia workshop we learnt a bit about Commedia dell’arte itself so that we can build on the knowledge we already have. After a meet and greet with the teacher Graham we then did a warm up. The reason we needed to do a warm up for C

ommedia was because the theatrics element contains a lot of physical theater and movement. If you didn’t warm up you could possibly strain or injure yourself.

Once we had finished that, we got started with learning who different characters were and what they were about. We started off with the Zanni they are quite odd creatures. In social status they would be quite low. They would usually be a servant who worked for someone of a higher class like a captain. They have disgusting habits and traits like eating garbage or mice. Also, the only thing that is usually on their minds is food, sleep and sex. The class were taught the Zanni stance (chest out, one foot firmly on the floor and the other slightly bent with the heel leaning on the planted foot and arms slightly bent, which makes you look a bit broad) and the Zanni large step and three step which is very similar to the ‘ministry of silly walks’ form Monty Python.

We also learnt the Captain walks. The mountain walk (looks a bit like that high knee round and out football warm up slowed down) and the muscle walk (where it looks like they are showing off their muscles). Captains are very much the epitome of ‘All Talk’ when it comes to the actuall situation they run from it. For example if they were to fight another captain. Also their run looks like a Buzz Lightyear cartoon style run where only the bottom of their legs are doing the movement. They also might stumble and trip when trying to impress someone, but they would also try to brush it off like nothing happened. We were also told that is we were to run away or fall over in any character we had to remember to keep eye contact with the audience to make them feel like they are involved.