ABSTRACT
At a certain point in your training programme you should feel that if you don’t perform you will burst. It’s time to start rehearsing or the group will go off the boil – there’s only so much that you can learn without an audience. Somebody has written a scenario: how to go about rehearsing it? At this point you need to forgive us for having used the word ‘improvisation’ rather imprecisely so far. There was not anything like as much improvisation in a traditional commedia dell’arte performance as the modern predilection for ‘impro’ might lead us to suppose. In commedia dell’arte all’ improvviso nearly all the elements used were ‘stock’ and simply applied as needed to different scenarios. At its worst, this must have resulted in the deadliest of deadly theatre, the equivalent of painting by numbers. Part 1 of this book relates the stories of some of the best. Here is a short glossary of some of the indici (indications) that they might have used to mark up a scenario for performance, in the same way that ‘allegro’, ‘pizzicato’, etc. are written in a musical score.
