Drama students complete Commedia Dell’arte workshop
Posted on February 21, 2020
On Wednesday 19 February, 45 Year 11 Macleans College Drama students completed a Commedia Dell’arte workshop.
Commedia is a theatre form of Italian comedy of the 16th to 18th centuries improvised from standardised situations and stock characters. Highly skilled and physical as a performance art, it forms the basis of all modern day comedy entertainment.
The workshop was led by Lisa Brickell, a Commedia specialist who trained at the Jacques Lecoq Theatre school in Paris after completing her Master’s degree in Drama at Auckland University. She specialized in Clowning and Mask Work with Giovanni Fusetti at the Kiklos Theatre school in Italy. She has performed extensively in New Zealand, Italy, Japan, France, Brazil and England; and taught at Unitec, MIT, Auckland, Waikato and Brighton Universities.
The students were challenged and inspired to push themselves physically to create the comedic characters, and much fun and learning was had by all to prepare them for their Term One Performance Assessments.