Theatre Forms
Don Juan draws on many different theatre techniques in its style. Read more about some of them below. Once you've learnt more about each form/technique, have a group discussion with your class about examples you saw of each form in practice in Don Juan.
COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE
Commedia is a form of theatre which flourished in Italy in the 16th century, characterized by travelling troupes of masked performers playing familiar stock characters. A form of comedy very much involved with the base passions — hunger, greed, lust, etc — a commedia show would consist of tightly rehearsed comic routines (lazzi) and semi-improvised sketches or scenes. The figures and scenarios of Commedia — mistaken identities, servants with domineering masters, young wives and old husbands, cowardly generals, frustrated lovers — are still very much with us in art and literature. The spirit, and sometimes the form, of Commedia can be seen in the farces of Moliere and Shakespeare’s early comedies, such as A Comedy of Errors. (Read more)
MUSIC HALL
Music Hall (and it’s American analogue, vaudeville) became a feature of Victorian society as the booming population created higher demand for popular entertainment. With drinking and smoking banned in “legitimate” theatres, tavern owners would often annex adjoining buildings to create “music halls”, where working class people (mostly men) could drink, smoke and enjoy “low” comedies and acts that reflected their lives. A typical show might include six to eight short acts, including dancing, singing, circus, magic or a one-act play. Acts could often be quite bawdy, and eventually Burlesque developed as an offshoot as Music Hall morphed into the more family oriented Variety shows. When cinema became popular, some accomplished music hall and vaudeville performers were able to make the jump to screen, and so a hint of what this form used to be can be seen in the works of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Shaw & Lee.
“PHYSICAL THEATRE”
A catch-all term that somehow manages to scoop up artists as disparate as Peter Brook, Etienne Decroux, Pina Bausch, Complicite, Tadashi Suzuki and Anne Bogart, to name just a few. Though the term may have outlived its usefulness, it does point towards a general will amongst independent theatre companies since the 1960s to expand their theatrical vocabulary beyond the dominant fourth wall naturalism. For some, this meant excavating the more embodied and codified theatre forms of the past such as the masked forms of Commedia or Ancient Greek theatre. For others it entailed looking to other disciplines such as dance, or even to other cultures for new modes of performance. Traits of “physical theatre” could include transformative use of props, stylised movement, clowning, puppetry, or any style of performance where the audience gleans as much (or more) meaning from the performers’ bodies and movement as from the scripted dialogue.
OTHER FORMS FROM BEYOND THE THEATRE
A Slightly Isolated Dog frequently draws inspiration from other events that successfully bring people together to celebrate and have a good time. Examples include:
Karaoke
Music gigs
House parties.
