GUEST PERFORMANCE: Gli Abitanti di Arlecchinia

“The Inhabitants of Arlecchinia” is a fabulous story, fascinating and always new. Many viewers choose to watch more than once. Under the appearances of a comic conference, there is a fascinating spectacle that never dies, with at times, the taste of a curious and amused scientific demonstration. To bring it on stage is the generosity, the strength and the finesse of an extraordinary performer: Claudia Contin Arlecchino. (review by Benvenuto Cuminetti – 2015). The colorful and turbulent world of the characters of the Commedia dell’Arte (and perhaps of life) as no one has ever told anyone, more and more imitated and less and less achieved, based as it is on the originality of an exclusive intuition. Conducted with precision and plenty of historical and iconographic information, this fable-show-demonstration is a time of fun, yet deep cultural and anthropological acquisition.

A journey through the secrets of the work of an actor and together a recon between the “drawings” of bodies, between the gestures and the intentions of the main classical Commedia dell’Arte masks: each character a physical mask, each mask a series of postures and movements, rhythms and behaviors, that is a particular contraction and dilation of the body until it becomes the visible arise of archetypal characters. In this sarabande spoken and acted, rhythmically punctuated by the “dance” of the masks, it is possible to meet the history and life of the various characters: the Zanni servants, concrete and ingenious; a greedy, tart and tragicomic moving Old Pantalone; a drooping, captivating, “genuinely” ignorant Doctor; a fresh snappy, chirping and wagging Servetta; hysterical and mawkish Amorosi; the arrogant and fragile Captains of fortune and so on…