PORDENONELEGGE PRIMAVERA POESIA 2018 REVIEW

Wednesday, March 21, 2018 10.00 am, Foyer of the Teatro Verdi in Pordenone (Italy) The Ancestors of Harlequin in Italian and French poetry from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance Little poetry lesson with readings by Claudia Contin Arlecchino Music and screenings curated by Luca Fantinutti

PRESENTATION There is a funny and frightening "Alichino" in the XXI canto of Dante's Inferno. In France a Hellequin appears in the poem Roman de Fauvel. Certainly the presence of Boccaccio's grotesque is not lacking, nor is the spring spirit in Zephyr's return of Petrarch, ending with the refined Renaissance that will compete with the comedy of the heirs of the storytellers and minstrels. And at the dawn of the seventeenth century the Italian comedians are recognized as poets and playwrights of value.

CONTENT OF THE EVENT The verses to read and comment, in the simplest and most amusing way possible to involve the students, come from important documents of Italian history and literature and its interchanges across the Alps. Just like Italian jesters and comedians were constantly traveling from many Italian courts to the court of Paris, so happened to the poetry of those centuries. Between poetry and music the aesthetics of the funny and the goliardic had already reached in the second of the thirteenth century truly enchanting artistic peaks, like the verses of Cecco Angiolieri, considered as the most refined caricatural form of the Dolce stil novo. At the beginning of the fourteenth century even Dante described in the XXI canto of his Inferno a nice Alichino along with nine other funny devils, the forerunners of the funny characters of the future Renaissance Comedy with Masks. At the same time in France the character of Hellequin, another archetypal name of Arlecchino, was described in the famous poem Roman de Fauvel, in "octosyllabic" verses with a pressing rhythm, designed for the noisy original procession full of masked men of the charivarios, forerunners of all our masked European carnivals. Boccaccio himself, who later chose the name of "Divina" for the Comedy of Maestro Dante, was able to follow with his novels and his poetics the grotesque images that the Middle Ages was leaving as a legacy to Humanism. And even Petrarch, considered the founder of Humanism, leaves us the extraordinary bucolic example in the sonnet Zefiro returns, then set music and developed in the form of a frottola by the Renaissance musician Bartolomeo Tromboncino (1470-1535). The Renaissance comedians, worthy heirs of storytellers and jesters minstrels, often devoted themselves to funny acting in verse, and we also have the gem of a multilingual sonnet left us by that polyglot storyteller who was the first Theatrical Harlequin Tristano Martinelli from Mantua (1557-1630). At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Italian comedians were now playwrights and poets of themselves; some of them were recognized as true poets, like the great comedian Isabella Andreini.

CLAUDIA CONTIN ARLECCHINO, known throughout the world as the first woman to interpret since 1987 the male role of one of the most famous Masks, she is also the author of texts and essays published and translated into four languages. Expert in Commedia dell'Arte and in construction of professional leather masks, she is also a "Maestro" required in Italy and abroad for the professional training of actors. Since 1990 she is co-founder and didactic director of the "Scuola Sperimentale dell'Attore" together with the director Ferruccio Merisi. Since 1997 she is the co-artistic director of the international festival "L'Arlecchino Errante". Starting in 2007 she founded the "Porto Arlecchino" laboratory, where she collaborates with artists and artisans together with the multimedia manager Luca Fantinutti.