Workshop Commedia dell’Arte and Physical Theater with live music
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by Francesca Sarah Toich (performing artist specialized in Commedia dell’Arte) Daniela Marcozzi (physical theater artists) and Luigi De Cicco (musician, composer and theater artist).
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Marcozzi contemporary theater is pleased to present a research-based mask and Commedia dell'Arte workshop.
The three artists will work together with participants to discover a different approach and use of the mask, starting with Commedia dell'Arte and exploring how the body can itself be transformed into a mask.
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The workshop is based on an intense physical training that prepares participants to enter the codes of the Commedia through choral, individual improvisations and with music.
One of the central points of Commedia dell'Arte is to be able to listen to the impulses of others and turn them into actions on stage, with one's own body and voice.
The mask allows a pure approach to research, as by wearing it one enters another reality, where gestures and sounds are not realistic but closer to abstraction. Many Commedia dell'Arte masks are inspired by animals, and so is the gesturality of each character.
During the workshops Francesca aims to help participants discover the different possibilities that masked theater can offer an actor: based on one's own body and vocal quality, everyone can find their own mask and their own space in the group.
Francesca has been practicing Commedia dell'Arte for more than 20 years. After learning it from Venetian masters, she developed her own method of research and experimentation through the art of the mask. Specialized in physical theater, voice and dance she sees Commedia dell'Arte as a vehicle for discovering new interpretive possibilities and new research paths.
Knowing how to transform one's body into a mask is central to her work. That is why her training is based on methods very close to dance and improvisation skills determined by the moment and by the intense group work.
During the workshop we will discover together everyone's affinities with the mask and how to build a choral improvisational work, based on ancient plot and modern languages.
The performers will bring the mask to life, on a physical, rhythmic, intentional and poetic level, and through the interplay with live music.
Daniela Marcozzi will propose to the group exercises of physical theater to tap into one’s level of energy, to establish a constructive relation with the partners and to work different dynamics of “give and take”. The performative disciplines Daniela mostly refers to derive from the research of Grotowski (as transmitted by Peter Rose) and her personal experience in dance, physical theater and music.
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Live Music by Luigi De Cicco
The role of music in this workshop is to allow the actions of the characters to be concrete and spontaneous at the same time, such as it must have been in the original performances generally held in crowded open places.
In those contexts the musician ensured immediate visibility as well as a grammar that the comedians could play to their advantage, either as an improvisational cue or to accentuate certain gestures or jokes of the 'lazzi' (plot lines of Commedia dell’Arte).
Drums, wind instruments (flute, ciaramella) string (mini harp, guitar) and hybrids (Mandolinette) could be used so as to have a spectrum of sound that characterizes each character, tracing the role of the mask.
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BIO OF THE ARTISTS
Francesca Sarah Toich
Francesca Sarah Toich is an artist living and working in Paris. Specialized in Italian literature, she was honored as the best young interpreter of the Divine Comedy, winning the Lauro Dantesco in Ravenna. She graduated at the Institute of International Commedia dell'Arte in Padua and at Ca' Foscari with a specialized thesis on Commedia dell'Arte. She regularly collaborates with institutions and theater companies to perform in Italy and abroad. She recently performed Goldoni's L'Uomo di Mondo at the Pushkin Museum and the GITIS Conservatory in Moscow, and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice on tour twice in the United States.
She has lectured on Commedia dell'Arte at Yale and Montclair universities. Her performances have been presented performances at Tokyo Wonder Site (Tokyo), the Venice Biennale, and Centre Pompidou - IRCAM (Paris). In 2021 she began a theater and writing collaboration with the Berlin-based company Marcozzi Contemporary Theatre with which he organizes workshops and performances based on Commedia dell'Arte.
She has lent her voice to numerous films, documentaries, art installations and radio plays (especially for RAI radio Italia). She is the author of plays, short stories and novels in Italian, including the tragedy Diotallevi, winner of the Goldoni Opera Prima award. She is a film critic for Mondoserie.it.
In Paris she works regularly as an actress and author for the audiovisual production studio Studio Minuit, which in 2022 published in audio format her latest climate fiction novel entitled Ad Bestias.
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Luigi De Cicco
Luis was born in Benevento and began to be passionate about music playing the piano, and then dedicated himself to classical guitar.
Self-taught, he graduated in Modern Literature in Naples with a thesis on Cesare Pavese. In the same year he decided to suspend his university studies to dedicate himself completely to music. He participated in various clinics in Italy where he met Jim Hall, Pat Martino, Frank Vignola, Joscho Stephan. In the meantime he continued to cultivate his passion for writing and drawing, which influenced his artistic vision and took him away from jazz to rediscover primitive, popular music - its sense of hypnosis and ancient ecstasy present in all cultures. In Berlin he took part in Daniela Marcozzi's theatre trainings before writing the music for numerous physical theatre and dance shows, sometimes even creating drawings based on work sessions. At the centre of the study is the human being, his language, his mythological background. He actively collaborates with numerous bands, both live and studio (Erin K, Caboose, Neuquèn Groove, Luftmensch Collective), and composes music for performing arts and soundtracks for documentaries.
He collects folk instruments from all over the world and loves reading books, watching old Spaghetti western movies, cooking, singing, getting lost in the cities and always returning to the countryside.
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