"VIAGGIO D'UN ATTORE NELLA COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE"
(JOURNEY OF AN ACTOR INTO THE COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE)
by Claudia Contin
(37 pages: from 27 to 63 - dimensions cm 21x29,5 with graphic illustrations)

From the preamble: "Letter for Claudia Contin" of Prof. Laura Mariani.

From the preamble: "Letter for Claudia Contin" of Prof. Laura Mariani.
"What is the reference genre of Journey of an actor into the Commedia dell'Arte by Claudia Contin? It is undoubtedly an historical-theoretical essay, well-documented (with an ample notes apparatus) and guided by a solid line of thought, and it also has the power of the work demonstrations (those which actors and actresses of the Odin theatret have "accustomed" us to): here the written words are so concrete and precise as to provoke visions also to those who are not familiar with the stage. Those who read, see. (…)
In the text the parts written in the first person, the reflections and the descriptions mingle with sentences by masters and parts of interviews to artists without a break; the result is a writing with a strong subjective mark but at the same time with more than one voice, thus corresponding to the peculiar nature of the theatrical knowledge which proceeds by collectively and sometimes anonymously produced accumulations without cancelling the clarity of certain individual marks. It's the writing of an actress, limpid and dense, in which the thought becomes word without detaching itself from the body and which - as scenic language - aims at provoking experiences, at transmitting energies, at pointing out elements of non-conventionality. The text tells a mental journey - through the traces of the Commedia dell'Arte and grotesque archetypes - and a physical journey whose protagonist is the body with its ability to move elsewhere, to become someone else: towards Harlequin (…)
Drawing a "character map of the body", a minute work is done, a slow training aimed at constructing an "abnormal body" entirely covered by a mask. The actress gets into Harlequin's psychophysical world, builds up his gait and his rhythms and so ends up by assuming his point of view on reality and character.
The "shifted visibility", the accentuated expressiveness, the rhythmical contextualization, provoke - in the hall - new trajectories, new manners of looking; while the reader is guided into the workshop of mysteries where the body humbly breaks up and intelligently reconstructs itself and Harlequin's extra-quotidian body is born.
Why Harlequin? In Ferruccio Merisi's opinion "the work of analytical construction of an apparently male character, done by an actress, represented a verification of the pertinence and of the coherence of the physical mask". (…) Claudia Contin reaffirmed this line (…) She looks for the bodies, before their sexual differentiation. (…).
Also the male stock comic characters "of the excess" go beyond their sex, offering the actors an analogous creative horizon; By virtue of this analogy, we can assume that the actresses themselves were those who stimulated in the comic line-ups the transformation of the artifice into artistic invention, looking for imbalances in what seemed known and codified, defying the unknown starting from the theatrical science of technical details. "The character of Harlequin is free from everything, even from himself", there are for him "a thousand futures": this is what attracts Claudia Contin. This journey, undertaken by the actress not to reconstruct but to reinvent her Commedia dell'Arte, finishes with a question on the theatrical language in general and with a landing: on one hand passionate researches, uses of the body which evoke animal kinship and the transformation processes of the matter - up to its decomposition -, daring journeys in the heart of the second Millennium and in the Far East, on the other the "anchorage" to the theatre group.
This way, between belonging and nomadism, we go along a feminine path to which theatre offers solid sides and infinite possibilities of experimentation.

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