Message for the Commedia dell'Arte Day 2011

[Every year a notable person involved with Commedia dell’Arte dedicates a message to the celebration of the tradition. The message is translated into all the languages in which the day is celebrated, read during events, published in newspapers, and transmitted via radio and television.]

The Mask-Object as an Essential Element of Historical Commedia dell’Arte and of the Modern Theatrical Companies that Pass On its Forms and Teachings

Prof. Roberto Tessari

Around 1545, in Italy, the first companies of professional actors in modern, Western history put on stage comedies involving the presence of figures called “masks” (the Zanni, the Merchant, the Doctor, the Captain, etc.), so-called because the face of an actor who plays them is covered by the mask-object

For the first and only time in history - since the prestigious cases of classical Greek and Latin theatre - a long-lasting model of theatre (roughly two centuries) was realized in the West that was founded systematically upon the actor’s usage of the mask.

The new masks employed by professional comic actors spring from a skillful admixture created between the anthropological-ritual dimension of the use of masks (above all those belonging to carnivalesque ceremonies or to different fertility rituals), the sixteenth-century studies of physiognomy, and the theatrical exigencies of performance by actors (which induces the definition—entirely unknown within the larger typology of masks—of the half mask: meant to cover only the top part of the face).

Folkloric traditions and references to anthropological-religious functions of the ancient mask, together with the dictates of physiognomy, make the mask-object a product that demands exceptional qualities of invention, of design, and of sculpture. Theatrical exigencies determine other characteristics of the mask: the selection of the leather (adapted to perspiration) as the material for fabrication, the definition of the contours and the treatment of the surfaces in relation to the possibilities for stage lighting in order to bring out the different potential “expressions” of the mask, etc.

The enormous fortune of this “theatre of masks,” before audiences of every level, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, provokes the multiplication of artisan laboratories specializing exclusively in the production of masks for the stage. The concentration of these laboratories was carried on in the territory of Modena, which, during the course of the seventeenth century will lead to the attribution of the masks as Modenese faces.

After the end of the historical arc of the Commedia dell’Arte, the fragility of the materials employed and an inveterate lack of attention towards everything that happened to be involved in the ephemeral theatre led to the almost total loss of the theatrical masks. Of those that are fortunately preserved, there remain only two or three of the zanniesque masks and wooden matrices from which they were realized.

The craft of making masks in leather—destined to revive upon the stage the Commedia dell’Arte protagonists that were lost toward the end of the eighteenth century—was reborn in the work of Amleto Sartori, who was called in 1947 to collaborate with Giorgio Strehler on the first realization of the highly celebrated Arlecchino, The Servant of Two Masters, which was destined to spread through its ongoing re-stagings the fame of the Commedia dell’Arte to every corner of the world.

Commedia dell’Arte companies are the only active depositories in the West of the tradition of the mask use in theatrical performance. They are the only ones that have fed and continue to feed a modern production of theatrical masks that gives rise to artists and artisans specialized in this difficult craft and to the continuation of their activities both inside and outside of these very companies.

The majority of Commedia dell’Arte companies, in addition to producing and distributing shows that renew the tradition of the historic art form, also raise public awareness about and create laboratories for not only acting, but also the design and construction of theatrical masks.

Thanks to the production and the usage of the masks, Commedia dell’Arte companies perpetuate and promulgate a particular sector of the actor’s craft, one that is neither cultivated nor proposed by other institutions: the specialized art of acting with the mask.