Beginning Commedia dell'arte

After presenting my monologue on monday and after watching other presentations which i found some to be very powerful, we began to work on our new unit: Commedia dell'arte. My initial reaction was that it was very childish but after we talked a bit about it, i realized that, yes it was "childish" and but it was childish because through being like that many important characteristics about humans and human relationships can be highlighted. I also learnt that it was very relevant to movies, as you know i like film a lot, so i began drawing lines between much of what we learned about the character Zanni and characters in movies. When we were told to act like Zanni it took us a while to get into the character without feeling foolish, but after a while we started to pick up on how fun it was to play this character. In the first class we weren't able to do very good Zanni characters, but in the second class which we repeated much of what was done in the first we understood more and were able to do better. It wasnt until the Lovers that I really felt more comfortable with the character. The activity was to be "in love" with love and having a more concrete way of acting and being less scandolous than the Zanni we were able to pick it up. Acting like a Lover the goal was much more clear and the way in which we could get to it also, it was all about loving another person and since we have already seen this represented so many times in the media and in everyday life we understood how to do it. It was all about wanting to seduce and since that is automatically funny, one doesn't have to try so hard for it to be funny so it comes out much more natural. We ended up working very well as a class, when everyone felt like they were doing a good job everything worked better.