ABSTRACT
Why you should want to form a commedia dell’arte company is entirely up to you, but we hope it has something to do with rejecting the primacy of television in favour of live interaction with an audience, a love of masks and physical comedy, and the desire to work within a collective, actorcentred structure. The touchstone of any organisational structure for a Commedia troupe is whether or not it gives the actors freedom to create ‘within the scene’, in the rehearsal room and on stage, rather than to recreate someone else’s agenda, whether historical, political, or sellable. The specifics of Commedia style and content, as your troupe plays them, should have a major affect on the way your company is organised. The paradigm, of course, is as follows: a collective of actors all specialising in one Mask apiece, formed as an equal and mutual society with no one person, whether it be director or employer, assuming overall command in either artistic or financial matters. Whether that ever happened, even in the heyday of the big companies is certainly debatable, as we have seen earlier in this book. In the smaller, unpatronised troupes it seems to have been the norm, however, and what we attempt to address now is how something close to that ideal can be applied today as a viable working method.
