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Darn That Dream:
The Ups and Downs of Commedia dell’Arte

by Rolf Hughes

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Outside theatre walls, Pierrot and Harlequin became established icons in the advertising for such 1920s alcohol brands as Vincenzo, Dionis, Sauvion’s Brandy, and Otard’s Cognac, while even soft drinks from the period (Chocolat Poulain, Feltoe & Smith’s “delicious health-giving” lime juice cordial, and others) traded on the often winsome “glamour” of commedia iconography. Painters, sculptors, book illustrators, poster designers and, not least, fashion designers and creators of haute couture were drawn to Commedia archetypes; we find Commedia patterns, lines and figures inspiring the work of such fashion designers as Elsa Schiaparelli and Yves Saint Laurent, and, more recently, Christian Dior by John Galliano, Vivienne Westwood, Miu Miu, and Viktor & Rolf, to name but a few.

In recent accounts of Commedia dell’Arte, most notably Green and Swan’s The Triumph of Pierrot (a work occasionally straining at its seams, which nonetheless offers a valuable overview of Commedia dell’Arte’s influence between 1890–1930), and also theorists and practitioners such as John Rudlin, Antonio Fava and Dario Fo, Commedia’s influence has touched such a broad range of cultural figures and forms that it has clearly become deeply ingrained within our contemporary mind-set. A list of Commedia’s ancestors, indifferent to distinctions between “high” or “low” cultural categories (and ignoring, for the sake of convenience, the degree of influence involved), would probably include Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso (whose painting for Cocteau’s ballet Parade “modernised” Commedia iconography by adding a black boxer, a Spanish guitarist, a cowboy and cowgirl to the regular Harlequin troupe), Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, the Keystone Cops, the Marx Brothers, Irish, Jewish and Italian humour (refracted through the cauldron of vaudeville), the circus, carnival, the fairground booth and freak show, pantomime, music hall, silent movies, the puppet show (spanning marionettes, Punch and Judy, the Muppets, and the caricatures of Spitting Image), drag queens, Samuel Beckett’s entropic clowns, cartoons (the animated slapstick of Loony Tunes, Tom and Jerry and even the characterisations of The Simpsons), The Rocky Horror Show , Andrew Lloyd Weber’s operas, alongside “serious” movies such as Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) – in the movie that was to prove his last, Heath Ledger’s Pierrot is particularly poignant – Glam Rock, the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village, the androgyny, cruelty or sexual ambiguity of innumerable rock stars such as David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Freddie Mercury, Marilyn Manson, Grace Jones, Annie Lennox, and Madonna ... Such examples typically use, according to Green and Swan, “the language of violence and sexual challenge and blend quite disparate elements by means of exaggerated style.”

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Masks
by Georg Diez

Masks are not an excuse for excess. No-one should say, whoops, I don’t know how that happened, I simply went to this fancy dress party and had a drink and woke up in the bed of this person I’ve never seen before. It’s not that simple. Masks are mirrors.

Take Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut, for example, where the masked ball causes a confusion in Tom Cruise he can’t even justify to himself as something that strange women had visited upon him – he simply can’t claim that everything he experienced in the shadow of the mask said nothing about his own desires. It’s just the same with all the mistaken-identity operas of Mozart, where disguises and seduction go hand-in-hand, and hardly anyone is actually reluctant to do what he or she does. On the contrary – masks liberate us from what we are, and bring us closer to what we’d like to be.

So masks conceal less than they reveal. Masks are enablers. Masks help the ego into fancy dress so we can take it for a walk more easily. Masks introduce a touch of the archaic into modernity. They confront orderly society with the disconcerting potency of tribal cultures. Or at any rate, that is the idealised attitude of the West. Masks promise origins or the primeval forest. They take us back to a time before we had constraints. They are exotic, erotic, fetishistic. That’s probably why they frighten children.

But masks are supposed to be funny, cheerful, exhilarating. They’re supposed to help us celebrate, and to create atmosphere. But it’s not so simple. And that’s not because robbers are masked, or executioners, or torturers – or all the other things that populate the nightmares of our civilisation. It’s due to the nature of masks themselves, which, because they deny the subjective element, create the kind of uniformity that alarms. In the Commedia dell’Arte it’s called typology, e.g. Brighella is always the cunning, wily servant, Harlequin the friendly simpleton, Pantalone the valetudinarian merchant, and Dottore the pompous academic with the white ruff. It was left to Carlo Goldoni to liberate the characters from the constraints of their typology, as the first step towards modernity. Masks as relics of this pre-modern time intoxicate partly with the freedom that lies in concealment, and yet they alarm us precisely with this same existential self-denial. The ego which is taken for a walk can easily get lost.

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Franz Anton Bustelli
Alfred Ziffer in conversation with Ronald Jones

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RJ: Do you remember the moment you first saw a Bustelli figure?
AZ: I saw his Virgin Mary (1756) in a photograph, but didn’t know the scale – this was the moment! Afterwards I learned that it was only 20 cm (8 inches) high, and not at all a sculpture, though it looked as if it were from a church. It was this experience that opened the door to my fascination.

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RJ: This brings us to the Commedia dell’Arte itself, a renowned entertainment. When the Commedia is on stage, its lifeblood is the hand gesture.
AZ: In the archives, the figures are listed as “Stukh Pantomin Figuren” (stucco pantomime figures) – pantomime, without words.

RJ: And you think Bustelli seized on this subject because he understood he could communicate these naughty or witty stories silently?
AZ: Yes. He must have been very well trained in these gestures, whether he learned them from a book or saw them on stage. On stage, remember, the movements are performed very quickly. He had to study them and repeat them in order to recreate them for his figures. We don’t know if Bustelli’s lovers, Isabella and Octavio, actually performed these gestures on stage, but it doesn’t really matter because he combined them in a perfect way, so that they make sense. He really used the gestures to tell the story.

RJ: And then of course the Commedia dell’Arte, and each of the character’s personalities, was a perfect medium for him.
AZ: We see the gestures in earlier pieces but here he brings them to perfection. We know the Nouveau Théâtre Italien appeared in Munich; it developed from the Commedia dell’Arte, but was a more elegant theatre. And you see these figurines are elegant, so they are not comparable with the Harlequins by Kaendler, who are making crude jokes and grimacing as they laugh.

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RJ: Could we look at Bustelli’s Isabella and Octavio, and ask you to talk us through their hand gestures?
AZ: Isabella and Octavio are a very good example of the language of the hands, of gesture. Her right hand, forming an O, means amore, “I will love you.” But her left hand, with the fingers straight, says “Slowly, not now, maybe later.” As Octavio is shy, he uses the classical gesture adoro, “I send you a kiss,” putting his fingers on his lips and throwing her a kiss. Also, his body is twisted around, which indicates that he obviously doesn’t know how to behave he’s so full of love, though not very bold. He’s shy, very shy. These two really play very well together.

RJ: So in fact she’s being more assertive than he is in this exchange?
AZ: Well, she’s already engaged and knows it. She says: “I love you, but let us wait and see what happens. I’m engaged already, and my lover is very jealous.” At this moment on to the stage comes Capitano Spavento, who is indeed very jealous, his hand on his hat meaning “I’m very, very impatient.” From the other side of the stage Leda, her girlfriend, enters and holds up her hand saying “Please be quiet, peace.” This is one of the first moments of the comedy.

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Software as a Readymade and the Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg’s Archives of Memory
by Tan Lin

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Nymphenburg’s geo-system, what I have called a database of moods and architectures, comes together in a place known for its poetic, even magical, qualities: Nördliches Schlossrondell No. 8 in the Nymphenburg Palace complex, which was constructed in 1664 as the summer residence of Elector Ferdinand. This fairy-tale factory in a real-life palace is sited in a 200-acre estate comprising gardens and park lands and surrounded by lakes, temples, bathing houses, hunting lodges, tea houses, pavilions and even a faux ruin, the Magdalenenklause. The geographical and physical site of the Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg is inseparable from, and is also a reaction against, mass production techniques, corporate branding, and rapid distribution of goods in a global marketplace.

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As an information system, Nymphenburg constitutes a highly personal, physical memory of porcelain objects, a kind of multi-media poem that functions as a working archive and database and as a system for the distillation and production of moods more generally. Or to put it more simply, the play between metadata objects and finished pieces at Nymphenburg results in what Matthew Kirschenbaum calls a “relative or just-in-time dimension of materiality...” which can be regarded as a kind of materialised poetry. Nymphenburg is a factory engineered within a fairy tale, but it might be more accurate to call it a factory that produces a fairy tale complete with all its attendant documentation.

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Craft, knitting, pottery, zines, blogs, Indie rock, electronic scrapbooking, Flarf poetries can usefully be considered the present generation’s version of “handmade software,” remnants of the ostensibly dematerialised information systems that package our lives with banal pervasiveness: spread sheets, operating systems, caller ID, RSS feeds, disabled right clicking, packet sniffers, visual memory ID systems, metadata containers, controlled vocabularies, search parameters and algorithms. Despite the corporate and bureaucratic structures with which this data is affiliated, in the last few years it has become harder and harder to regard data “housed” on a computer as dematerialised, i.e. as the ghostly flickering of floating signifiers or nascent mythos of a virtual kingdom like Broderbund’s Myst, an enchanted virtual world where a player can “zip” from one location to another in bodiless teleportation reminiscent of a cartoon-propelled voyage. The Myst era of virtual realities and its ambient glitch soundtrack, or the cyber gloves of the Mondo 2000 era now seem quaint fantasy playgrounds in comparison to the offices or desktops structured by the volumetric expansion of personal data, the day-to-day grind and schedule grids filled in via Blackberry. Such empty grids, reminiscent of empty cartoon boxes, now function as William Burrough’s The Man once did, a kind of closed-captioning for our unspoken lives, the space where a work-optimised response box crosses materially into our daily existence.

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In the Manufactory
by Thomas Barnthäler

A waterwheel pounds away with a steady rhythm. It drives a huge belt system that spans the site and links drive wheels that even grace the façades of the workshops. A stream murmurs quietly. High up in the tall, stately trees, the leaves rustle in the wind. Here at the Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg, not far from the Wittelsbach royal palace, everything seems in motion. And yet one thing has stood still – time.

Behind the walls of the Nördliches Schlossrondell, someone has stopped the clock. Elsewhere they may dream of visions of the future, digital precision or mechanical efficiency. Here, the focus is on other things: craftsmanship and aesthetic flights that only work by hand can achieve. “Better is relative,” says chief modeller Anton Hörl. “What we are proud of is the flair, the human factor. A pile of our plates is irregular. And though our Commedia figures are all the same, none of them is really the same as any other.”

The original models of the Commedia dell’Arte figurines were created well over two hundred and fifty years ago by Rococo sculptor Franz Anton Bustelli, from Ticino in Switzerland. They are still made here just as they were in the past, and now the sixteen characters have had new outfits designed for them by some of today’s finest couture designers. They submitted their designs on paper – and a lot of water poured through the mill wheel and many hands went about their work tirelessly before the designs reappeared on Capitano Spavento, Leda, the scoundrelly Mezzetino, and all the others.

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