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| | Theatre is alive and well and living in Italy!
Posted on 07/13/2006 by Spike
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So, getting to Italy was an adventure in itself. Mountains, construction, misdirections, a faux-UV that doesn't like us, or the road... But we arrived in Certaldo just in time to miss our first performance!
So we walked around the festival site instead, and what we saw blew my little WMU theatre mind. This festival where we are working, it is extraordinary. There are performers everywhere in this ancient and tall village, and it is exactly how I imagined the minstrel shows and traveling pageants of yore.
In my textbooks it said that this form of theatre died out in the Ren., but here it is, LIVING in front of me, and the people are engrossed. The spectacle is practically medieval and phenomenal in its ancient roots. This sounds so hokey, and the melodrama of this blog blushes in mere comparison to the pageant performance, where actors donned stilts, masks, gigantic wings, got caught in spiderwebs, battled with flaming swords and fireworks, which sometimes shoot into the audience, all to the soundtrack of Dracula and a woman pleading for her life. Culture shock: nobody seems to mind when dangerous things happen around them or to them. In America, fighting with fireworks 3 feet from an audience would never in a million years fly.
The cynic in me however, found that the most enjoyable part of the performance was when the "angel of darkness got caught in a tree," as Luna so eloquently put it. Watching the actor struggle for her life in what was clearly a mishap as she frantically jerked her stilted body to unhook her trapped wing from the tangles of the cut-out tree before one of the tree lanterns sent her and her gigantic bat costume ablaze was fascinating. And hilarious. Horribly, horribly hilarious. |
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