Commedia dell’Arte – Old Traditions – New Horizons?

By Demis Quadri
Locarno, 2016
Dimitri Academy Theatre – Armando Dadò publisher

Format: 17 x 24 cm, 136 pages, with b/w and color illustrations
ISNB: 978-88-8281-436-6

The comedy of art has always provoked very different reactions, but never leaves indifference. Throughout the history of this artistic phenomenon, the reworking of patterns now fossilized has alternated with new ideas on making theater, the seduction of the holders of power to religious condemnations, the fascination of a myth with a romantic flavour and philological reconstruction.

Even today, the debate is heated: how can we preserve an important tradition without making it a museum exhibit? How can techniques and concepts now secular contribute to a renewal of the theater today?

The symposium Commedia dell'Arte: old traditions - new horizons? intended to propose a journey around a multiform reality: chasing Harlequin and the fate of his mask in German soil, retracing the migrations of Impersonator and Amphitryon in theatrical history, reflecting on the experience of a builder of wooden masks, questioning the actuality or the out-of-actuality of the Zannesca tradition, trying to revive some almost archetypal characters and exploring the horizons of the Neo Commedia dell'Arte.