Comic and Catalan?: The "Commedia dell’Arte" in Catalonia in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

• Autores: David George
• Localización: Acting Funny on the Catalan Stage / coord. por John London, Gabriel Sansano i Belso, 2022, ISBN 978-1-78707-322-7, págs. 45-62
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The commedia dell'arte began life as a comic genre in Renaissance Italy.

    However, once the itinerant Italian troupes took their commedia shows to other European countries in the late sixteenth century, the genre began to evolve. The changes were especially marked in France, where it meta- morphosed into other artistic forms, in particular painting and poetry, and was refined by artists. Pierrot became a favourite figure of French Symbolist poets, and, unsurprisingly, of Catalan modernistes. Nevertheless, the popular, comic, satirical, and often irreverent aspects of the original were never lost, becoming a potent image for early twentieth-century Modernist writers and artists.

    If the commedia was a multi-faceted, multi-generic, international phenomenon, to what extent can it be categorized as either purely comic, or Catalan? To attempt to answer this question, this chapter analyses a variety of versions of commedia in Catalonia in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. After mention of Adrià Gual (including his collaboration with Salvador Dali), the work of two Catalan dramatists comes under the spotlight: Apel·les Mestres (1854-1936) and Joan Brossa (1919-98). The chapter also considers the ways the educational properties of the commedia dell'arte have been exploited by teachers and students at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona.