Commedia dell'arte

Oct 07 2011 2
Commedia dell'arte Podcast artwork

Commedia dell'arte came out of Venice in the 1600s. It was a popular form of street theatre based on improvised scenarios between stock characters based on universal types of masters, servants and lovers. This collection features video about the world of commedia and offers video workshops that look at the key attributes of the craft.

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The World of Commedia

Oct 07 2011 9 mins  
This film is an introduction to the world of commedia dell'arte. Learn about all of the stock characters in commedia, the masked and the unmasked, their status, their physical shapes and their characters. This film was made from a two day workshop with young actors held at the National Theatre with Didi Hopkins from Commediaworks.

Commedia character shapes

Oct 07 2011 5 mins  
In this film Didi Hopkins of commediaworks takes a workshop of young actors through the different stock character shapes and explains the importance of these differing physicalities.

Physicalising emotion

Oct 07 2011 3 mins  
This film looks at ways of physicalising the primary emotions: joy, grief, fear, anger, surprise, love, laughter and how to use this in a performance rather than 'acting'.

The language of commedia

Oct 07 2011 2 mins  
Commedia companies toured outside of Italy, to France and Spain, and so Gromalot evolved, a nonsensical babble speak that carried the truthful emotional intention of a character. This language meant that audiences were able to understand the action on the stage and enabled commedia dell'arte to become an international type of theatre.

Commedia overview

Oct 07 2011 2 mins  
A short film giving an overview of the history of Commedia dell'arte. In this film Didi Hopkins from commediaworks describes the influence of commedia dell'arte on modern theatre and other dramatic formats such as film and television.