Saturday, June 30, 2018

Travelogue 810 – June 30
Assumption into Heaven
Part Five


After my theatre trip to Venice, I have been contemplating the old Commedia dell’Arte, Venice’s contribution to Renaissance theatre, and finding the power of the masks and the types engaging. At a time when politics is caricature, when Hollywood has retreated into a dark hole of digital reality, when dramatic fiction can’t sell without death and violence, I find particular relevance to theatre as cartoon.

The relationship between stories and reality has always been a tense one, governed by a fragile and unstable boundary. A story has to be fantastical and real in the same moment. Meaning, no matter how imaginative, it must be ‘believable’. Somehow that mandate allows for Dada and ballet and the Dark Knight. But theatre finds itself in an awkward balancing act. Film, with so much more capacity to capture reality, strays further into CGI fantasy, while theatre, an art form patently artificial – confined to one stage and one ‘take’ – has to be convincing to be taken seriously.

The Commedia dell’Arte made no effort to be realistic. In the sixteenth century, it didn’t matter too much. Two centuries later, as a cultish feeling for rationalism swept Europe, silly walks and masks were in questionable taste.

One critic was the great Venetian playwright and librettist, Carlo Goldoni. He was no stranger to the Commedia dell’Arte. He wrote comic plays, and so he wrote in the tradition. But he quickly tired of the conventions. He spoke for the new turn of mind that wanted faces and characters that were more familiar.

If the Renaissance art form represented a world of wealthy merchants and country peasants meeting in markets and busy squares, Enlightenment era audiences preferred to see themselves, the new bourgeoisie, meeting in drawing rooms and salons. The humour could be more that of manners than of slapstick; the bungled romances played out with words more than stunts.

Goldoni infuriated the traditionalists of the Granelleschi Society, particularly one Carlo Gozzi, who published cruel satirical verses about him. In 1762, Goldoni left Italy. He was fed up with the quarrel and frustrated with the resistance to new forms. He moved to France and never returned home again. He was successful in Paris. He was appointed to a position in the king’s court and made director of the Theatre Italien.

If you’re looking for a moral to the story of Goldoni and Gozzi, you won’t find much satisfaction. Gozzi was no Salieri, and in fact was successful and admired in Venice. Adapting a fairy tale to the stage, largely just to taunt Goldoni – he even wrote a parody of his rival into the play, -- Gozzi stumbled on a formula for great popularity. His series of fairy tales for the stage went a long way to reviving the Commedia dell’Arte, and earned acclaim outside Italy. Goethe himself staged one of the plays. Purists would argue that Gozzi had in fact strayed from Commedia dell’Arte tradition as much as Goldoni. His sin was in providing scripts. The Commedia dell’Arte was an improvisational form.

And so we see the clash between two eras in the arc and decline of the Commedia dell’Arte. What was it about the first age that appreciated the masks and stylized choreography? It has a lot to do with the stage itself. The Commedia dell’Arte was an outdoor sport, played to the crowds at the markets. Eighteenth-century theatre was very much an indoor sport, and thus allowed for some refinement.

But I wonder if there are conclusions to be made about values. The Renaissance saw the West’s first shift toward humanism and the value of the individual over the type. But it took centuries to filter down to the foundations of society. The day-to-day experience in the streets of Europe would resemble the Middle Ages for some time. And the steady medieval belief in types had plenty of momentum.

I have had many occasions to wonder whether we aren’t well into the swing back into the love of types over people. It wouldn’t take much to see the trend in the conduct of our governing classes. Are there signs in philosophy and the arts, too, where the change began in the early Renaissance?

Sunday, June 24, 2018

Travelogue 809 – June 24
I’ll Touch the Ceiling


‘I’m growing up! I’m growing up!’ Baby shouts. She’s just woken, and it’s the first thing she has to say. She’s suddenly wide awake, and she’s celebrating her glorious future. She sits up and looks me in the eye. ‘I’ll touch the ceiling,’ she announces. She reaches up happily toward the ceiling.

It’s Sunday, day of slow starts. We stayed up late last night; we’re getting up late. I remember vaguely that I had a lot to accomplish today, but I’m reluctant to call up what exactly it was. I’m occupied with trying to sit myself up in bed, then with getting going. ‘Yes, darling,’ I say. ‘You will touch the ceiling.’ Meanwhile, my ambitions are restricted to reaching toes to the floor.

After a few false starts, I do get myself out the door. On the bike path, there’s a boy weaving back and forth on his bike as he struggles up the hill of the bridge. He has his sister on the back of the bike. I pass them, careful to give them a wide girth. They pass me on the subsequent downhill. We meet again at the light. They are arguing, bickering and laughing. They disagree about which is their way. ‘Die kant,’ the girl insists. The boy is dismissive. He mocks her. The light changes, and he charges ahead, in his own direction.

I pass the old church on the Beukelsdijk. It’s so quiet, though it’s Sunday, the holy day. The only sign of faith has been Baby’s zealous pronouncement: all is good. I will grow up!

Last week, we were attending a service at the Bath Abbey. Baby and her little sister were none too reverent. Even when the choir was offering beautiful song, they were indifferent. This meant extra duty for Papa. We occupied ourselves with toured, tripping over the well-worn black stones in the floor, many of them grave markers. We examined the lovely baptismal font. We looked at grave monuments. I wondered about the lives behind the names.

I reflected on how the Greek Hades had been explained to me once upon a time, as a place where our shades dwelled until the last people who remembered us had passed … or had forgotten us. The ancient world’s devotion to glory and fame served a pragmatic purpose. As I suppose the expensive grave marker did for our nearer ancestors. Did some shade flicker back into life as I read his or her monument?

There was one rather large monument dedicated to a US Senator who died in Bath in 1804. This was William Bingham, merchant, mentor to Hamilton, and delegate to the Continental Congress during deliberations over the new Constitution. His mounted guard escorted Washington through Pennsylvania on his way to assume the presidency. It might be unfair to revive his spirit during such a dark time for American democracy. It would be just one more form of torture for a disembodied shade waiting for eternity.

We are far from Trump Tower here, under the graceful fan vaulting of Bath Abbey, looking up at the high stained glass of the western facade, artwork dating back to the end of the nineteenth century and stories to the Old Testament.

The girls are profoundly uninterested by the service. Some of the congregation give us indulgent smiles. Some are annoyed. I decide we will have to conduct our own worship outside. Here’s what babies do to honour God. They run back and forth across the flagstones of the small square under the south wall the abbey, chasing pigeons. The breeze is chilly, and the square isn’t too crowded. Most benches are unoccupied. An occasional tour group crosses, stops under the abbey for a lecture in Spanish or Japanese. The babies have eyes only for the birds.

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Travelogue 808 – June 21
Hesitant Light


It’s the beginning of summer and the longest day. Our windows are full of light, many hours running. We are blessed with good exposure to the sun in our flat, collecting its light in the morning on one side and in the afternoon on the other.

For Baby’s birthday party, we took down our heavy winter curtains. In their place, we put up window film, the kind held to the window by static electricity. This is a common Dutch look, open windows obstructed only by bands of the patterned film.

Menna chose a pebble pattern for the film, which I’ve discovered has an interesting effect at night. It captures the light of street lamps in intriguing star patterns. A lamp becomes like a child’s drawing of the sun, with long rays radiating from the centre. The rays are static. They don’t shimmer or change. It has a hypnotising effect when you can’t sleep. Why would light radiating more or less equally across space be collected into these rays? And what explains the precise placement of these rays? No doubt there is a set of formulae to explain how light is concentrated into rays by the lens. Who practices this kind of whimsical science? It seems like something a nineteenth-century aristocrat would have done in idle hours.

Yesterday, Baby and I walked to the market. We were stalled on our way by a series of storefront windows filled with prints of huge pictures or solid colours. Baby admired her reflection cast into the various colours behind the plate glass. ‘My blue face!’ she shouted. ‘My red face!’ I was envious of her innocent pleasure. I found it hard to disengage the critical mind. The power of explanation was so overpowering, it blocked the obvious visual effect.

The days around the advent of summer have been disappointing throwbacks to early spring, cloudy and cool. While missing the sun’s warmth, I do confess to a fondness for the light on days like this, scudding clouds above and the sharp seasonal angles to the sun. Everywhere has its light. Ethiopian sun, unimpeded and varying its angle little throughout the year, has its spirit. But I enjoy the playfulness of the light here.

We were in England recently, and the skies were performing similar tricks, sun dodging clouds to throw its glinting light onto the brilliant spring greens of the ivies and trees and hedges.

We did discover a few hours of uninterrupted sunshine to take a family walk alongside the Kennet & Avon Canal, counting the locks and admiring the many gardens. It was the weekend, and families were out in numbers. Some took to their canal boats. They waited patiently in the locks, waiting for the water, turning the cranks on the sluice gates themselves. Baby dashed ahead and then dawdled, fascinated by the sparkle of the water, by the bees, by the shining leaves.

Sunday, June 10, 2018

Travelogue 807 – June 10
Assumption into Heaven
Part Four


I was in mid-meditation about Zanni, wasn’t I? Zanni were characters in the Renaissance Commedia dell’Arte, characters with long noses and an awkward gait. They demonstrated an amusing mix of cunning and naivete and simple avarice. They were country folk, often from the mountains around Bergamo, working for rich families in the big city. They were good foils for Pantalone, the lascivious old merchant.

The Zan was a type, and such a fertile type that he quickly sub-divided into multiple characters. One of them was wily Harlequin. It wasn’t unusual, during the two centuries of Commedia dell’Arte’s popularity in Europe, that an actor proved so charismatic that his or her creation became a stock character that endured afterward. Examples would have to include the creator of Harlequin, Tristano Martinelli.

Martinelli was one of the theatre royalty in Europe, a living proof of Goncourt’s claim that the artist had unusual opportunity in the age of aristocrats. As an actor could never threaten a duke, the two could be friendly, as Martinelli was with the Duke of Manta, Ferdinando Gonzaga. The Duke declared Harlequin the supervisor of events in the city-state. All performers were to apply to him for permits … and pay him the appropriate fees. Martinelli had these sorts of relationships with the high and mighty all over Europe. King Louis XIII held one of his children at christening.

This didn’t always make him popular among other actors. They seemed to resent most the sudden primacy of Harlequin on the stage. Traditionally, the Zanni were supporting characters, and leading roles were the lovers and Pantalone, who was the controlling father of the female lead.

Important adversaries of Martinelli’s were the Florentine theatrical family, the Andreini, owners and stars of the famous theatre company, I Gelosi. This family produced great characters of its own. Most interesting might be two of the wives, the women who married father and son, Francesco and Giambattista. The youngest was Virginia Ramponi, who created the character Florinda, la prima donna innamorata and star of a popular play of the same name, written by her husband. Her greatest moment came when she was cast in the title role of an opera by Monteverdi, ‘L’Arianna’. The only piece that has survived is a lament that was sung by Virginia, and it survived because her performance made it popular enough to publish separately.

Eclipsing all the women on stage during her day was Virginia’s mother-in-law, Isabella Andreini. She joined the Gelosi when she was fourteen, and quickly established herself with her wit and improvisational skills. Later in life, she performed her own piece before King Henry IV of France, the famous ‘Pazzia d’Isabella’, in which she showcased her skill as actor and linguist, quickly cycling through multiple personas onstage in a fit of madness. Isabella was also a recognized poet and scholar, participating in literary societies and publishing a collection of sonnets acclaimed by many respected (male) poets of the day. Isabella died giving birth to her eighth child, and she was mourned all over Europe. ‘Isabella’ survived as a stock character in the Commedia dell’Arte.