Commedia dell’Arte masks today: Old forms and new commedia

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Abstract Commedia masks have achieved iconic status in some theatrical circles, though recent interviews undertaken for my ongoing Ph.D. thesis reveal that contemporary teleological practice relates to the purpose to which each individual re-creator conceives commedia, and not necessarily to the historical model. A commedia mask is identified as always being a specific role or stock type. These stock types, or ‘tipi fissi’ (fixed types), are, however, recreations or re-imaginings of the original Renaissance masks, and yet the purpose to which they are being put is, self-evidently, contemporary and performative. Using these historical masks, other than in the sense of Brechtian historicization, to make contemporaneously engaged theatre falls short due to a mismatch between contemporary and historical culture. Out of this mismatch arises then, the questions of who or what the masks represent today, and how new types can develop? Historical scholarship tended to focus on the individual mask, but I currently propose that contemporary Commedia dell’Arte masks be considered primarily as an ensemble or ‘set’, rather than as a collection of individuals. The performed function of this interdependent grouping is to comically communicate to an audience activity within the ‘set’, with the ‘set’ being defined as a purposed reflection of a society. This allows the genre to progress into areas of comically directed social and gender interrogation, promoting evolution within the mask set, rather than accepting the constraints imposed by their use as a mirror of Renaissance society to mirror our own. This analysis presents a theoretical framework to aid ongoing contemporary explorations into the form, purpose and design of the genre’s masks. In this article I employ three terms to describe the genre: ‘Commedia dell’Arte’ to describe the historical form, Guilia Filacanapas’s neologism ‘Neo-Commedia’ to describe the genre’s recreations since 1945 and ‘Commedia’ to include both or indicate the genre.