Project Description




“Angels and Devils”

Budapest, 6-7 October 2018

Commedia dell’Arte has its roots in the tradition of medieval buffoons and acrobats. On the occasion of festivals or carnivals they enlivened the courts and public squares, thus becoming a multicolored set of different people coming from all social conditions.

On small stages and on counters used for the market, the buffoons gave a show.

In the beginning they were alone, there were no companies. Every “buffoon-actor” was only on stage and talked about the needs of the audience, to become their expression in a continuous confrontation with everyday reality, composing popular elements and animals such as hunger, the toil of living, the struggle for survival, the lack of freedom, elements that underlie the Commedia dell’Arte.

All these elements composed the engine for the work of this Commedia dell’Arte workshop: the clash between angels and devils. In fact, the masks contain a human and a diabolical part.

They take up an ancient tradition made up of pagan elements of different popular cultures, where fights against devils were represented to exorcise fear (for example carnival or rites of passage to winter).

The mask is therefore a legacy of ancient forms and rites typical of popular tradition, it is an element that unites the earth and the afterlife, life and death.

The work includes a training phase, then a physical work of discovering the animality of the mask and the relationship between masked and unmasked (angels and demons).

Finally we added stories and folk tales to the explored mask (fixed type), with the aim of creating short monologues that arise from the individual work of each participant in the workshop.

Language: Italian and Hungarian.

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