Harlequin on the Moon Commedia Dellarte and the Visual Arts
Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia dell' Arte and the Visual Arts.
Transport in the Clowns
A lush illustrated history resurrects commedia
Harlequin, Pierrot, Columbina and the other characters of the commedia dell'arte were born in the grit of medieval markets, street fairs, carnivals and burlesque puppet shows. Every bit the centuries passed, their ferocious comedy was gradually refined so that information technology became tame enough for patrons of the Renaissance nobility and bland plenty to inspire the kind of insipid modern picture books for children that give clowns a bad proper noun. Lynne Lawner'due south extraordinary volume Harlequin on the Moon rescues commedia from the picturesque purgatory of romantic fantasy and restores its characters to the lascivious, sensual, grotesque, cruel, cool and dangerously political terrain where they have always thrived.
Lawner has accomplished this welcome resurrection by presenting the creatures of commedia in the full glory of their visual history. She has assembled a fascinating collection of sketches, engravings, paintings and photographs that put Harlequin and his compatriots in the kaleidoscopic context imagined by artists from Giandomenico Tiepolo and Jacques Callot to Edward Hopper and Julie Taymor.
Lawner's lushly illustrated book is full of images that invite the reader to reassess the meaning of theatrical clowning on almost every folio. Her choices are inspired and her captions are full of delightful details. Instead of writing a traditional book of theatre history or theory, Lawner has put together a text that brings commedia to life in a construction that is analogous to its performance. Sometimes the flashy illustrations overwhelm the narrative, like a strutting Columbina. At other times factual details elicit a silent gasp of astonishment, similar the entertaining monologues of the doddering Dottore. And for variety of tone, Lawner includes excerpts from historic documents that provide useful background information, like the expository asides of Truffaldino breaking the 4th wall to let the audience in on things that happened before the play began.
Free from the castrating influence of well-intentioned historians, the uncensored Harlequin performs cunnilingus on Marie Antoinette in an anonymous 18th-century engraving that depicts the queen'southward look-akin acrobatically spread-eagled in a higher place the clown's head. Pulcinella grips an blueblood in a stranglehold as a physician removes a cataract from the man'southward center with a fork in Thomas Patch's caricature of a Florentine oculist. Il Capitano taunts his adversary with bare buttocks while a pair of zanni (the commedia'south comic servants) give an enema to a donkey in a 17th-century Bolognese painting. The laws of gender, logic and biology are shattered in a French artist's depiction of Pierrot breast-feeding an baby while Harlequin gives nascency to a breed of babies that hatch from eggs equally he sits on them. A 1910 photo of Vaslav Nijinsky dancing the role of Harlequin suggests the sensuality that acquired a scandal at the Ballet Russe; the bad-boy smirk on his slyly tilted face is echoed in an extract from his diary: "I am a clown of God."
Like a ribald commedia performance, Lawner's book is full of comic lazzi, concrete bits of highly theatrical deportment invented by the actors to enliven their performance. The volume'southward best illustrations capture these lazzi on the page in a fashion that gives the illusion of comedy coming to life. A 17th-century engraving of a linen store shows Harlequin caught between ii conversations. The right one-half of his trunk, costumed as a adult female, tries to keep one customer at bay while the left one-half of his body, dressed as a man, gestures forcefully to a customer on the other side of the store. The farce of the clown'south predicament leaps off the page. The "servant of ii masters" becomes the master of two sexes before our eyes.
Lawner's writing clarifies the political likewise as the artistic dimension of Harlequin's heritage. Commedia characters and the actors who played them were oft seen equally subversive. Servants who were smarter than their masters defied the rules of conventional society in ways that threatened politicians who wanted to preserve the status quo. During the 16th-century reign of Henry Two, the French Parliament issued a decree forbidding the performance of an Italian commedia troupe. In a 1574 periodical excerpted by Lawner, Pierre de 50'Estoile laments that the ban was not permanent: "By the get-go of September, by express wish of the King and corresponding to the abuse of the historic period, the 'Gelosi' have been permitted to take the stage again, thus bringing honor on the heads of actors, buffoons, whores and pederasts."
The prejudice of conservatives like l'Estoile might be one of the reasons that the legacy of commedia has been homogenized equally information technology came downwards through the ages. Dario Fo, a modernistic-twenty-four hour period Harlequin whose political clowning won him the Nobel prize, cautions against trusting standard textbooks that merits to define commedia dell'arte. Lawner quotes Fo, and takes his advice in the execution of her book, providing skillfully selected documentation that lets each reader reinvent the meaning of the art form. Harlequin on the Moon shows the characters of commedia with all their contradictions, warts and unpredictability. Instead of perpetuating stereotypes, Lawner presents these complex clowns as they were imagined by equally complex artists in the context of their different historical eras. By the terminate of the volume Harlequin has become a character who seems both historical and contemporary, a figure from whom we have learned to expect the unexpected. Nosotros have the 19th-century illustration of his trip to the moon equally readily equally we accept his wry assessment on returning that things up there are "pretty much the aforementioned as they are downward here."
Ron Jenkins, a professor of theatre at Emerson College, translates the plays of Dario Fo and conducts cantankerous-cultural investigations of comic performance.
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| Championship Annotation: | Review |
|---|---|
| Writer: | Jenkins, Ron |
| Publication: | American Theatre |
| Article Type: | Volume Review |
| Date: | Jan 1, 1999 |
| Words: | 937 |
| Previous Article: | Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. |
| Next Commodity: | Violet. |
| Topics: | Books Book reviews |
Source: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Harlequin+on+the+Moon:+Commedia+dell%27+Arte+and+the+Visual+Arts.-a053567292
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