Carlo Mazzone-Clementi

Carlo Mazzone-Clementi
Mazzone-Clementi with a commedia dell'arte mask
Born	12 December 1920
Died	5 November 2000 (aged 79) San Francisco, California, United States
Occupations	Theatre founder, actor and tutor

Carlo Alessandro Luigi Mazzone-Clementi (12 December 1920 – 5 November 2000) was an Italian-born actor, director, teacher and theatre founder whose work helped revive and spread commedia dell'arte in the United States. He worked with Marcel Marceau, Jacques Lecoq, Dario Fo and Franca Rame in postwar European theatre before beginning to present mime and commedia workshops in the United States in 1958. He co-founded Dell'Arte with Jane Hill in 1971 and later co-founded the Commedia School in Copenhagen with Ole Brekke.

Biography

Mazzone-Clementi first gained attention in Italy in 1947, when he worked alongside Marcel Marceau on the mime's first tour outside Paris. From 1948 to 1951, he assisted Jacques Lecoq while Lecoq taught and directed the Players of Padua University. He joined the Teatro Nazionale d'Arte Italiano in 1953, and in 1954 worked at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano with Dario Fo and Franca Rame.

While Mazzone-Clementi was performing with Piccolo Teatro and teaching in Rome, American theatre scholar and director Eric Bentley came to Italy to direct the Padua Players in the first Italian production of a work by Bertolt Brecht. With Bentley's patronage, Mazzone-Clementi toured the United States in 1958, conducting workshops in mime and commedia and introducing the leather masks of Amleto Sartori to American performers. He subsequently taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Brandeis University, the University of California, Berkeley, the American Conservatory Theater and other institutions.

In 1958, Mazzone-Clementi played the rooster in a New York production of Sean O'Casey's Cock-A-Doodle Dandy at the Carnegie Hall Playhouse. The New Yorker noted his appearance and performance in the role. Mazzone-Clementi later recalled that while warming up for the production he fell through ironwork at Carnegie Hall and injured cartilage in both knees. He finished the production but, after being told that surgery might either improve or worsen the injuries, chose to concentrate more heavily on teaching commedia.

In 1965, Mazzone-Clementi taught mime classes in the workshop program of the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center. He was known as Carlo Mazzone until 1965 and thereafter used the name Carlo Mazzone-Clementi. Clementi was the name of his mother and his grandfather, Girolamo Clementi, who was versed in the work of Paduan playwright and forerunner of commedia dell'arte Angelo Beolco, known as "Ruzzante".

Mazzone-Clementi and his wife Jane Hill founded Dell'Arte in Berkeley in 1971 as a training organization based in European physical-theatre traditions. In the early 1970s they moved to Northern California, where Hill joined the faculty at College of the Redwoods. Together they created the Grand Comedy Festival at Qual-a-wa-loo, and Mazzone-Clementi served as its artistic director for six years. The festival's 1973 inaugural season, themed "Shakespeare on Broadway", presented the musicals Kiss Me, Kate and The Boys from Syracuse, based on The Taming of the Shrew and The Comedy of Errors, respectively.

In 1974, the couple purchased the Odd Fellows Hall in Blue Lake, California. Dell'Arte's school opened there in 1975 as the Dell'Arte School of Mime and Comedy, later renamed the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre. In 1976, Mazzone-Clementi, Joan Schirle and Jon'Paul Cook founded the Dell'Arte Company; its first tour followed in 1977. In March 1974, The Drama Review published Mazzone-Clementi's article "Commedia and the Actor".

In 1978, Mazzone-Clementi and Ole Brekke co-founded the Commedia School in Copenhagen, a two-year physical-theatre program that has admitted a new class each September since that year. Mazzone-Clementi remained active on its teaching staff for fifteen years, and the school's training drew on his pedagogical methods. Around 1980, a governance dispute at Dell'Arte resulted in a restructuring that separated its school and performing company, and Mazzone-Clementi was among those who left. After ten years as Dell'Arte's master teacher, he moved to Copenhagen and later taught and lived in Denmark and Italy.

After more than a decade away, Mazzone-Clementi returned to Blue Lake in 1994 and resumed presenting lectures and workshops at Dell'Arte. A year before his death, Mazzone-Clementi taught at the fourth Big Stinkin' International Improv & Sketch Comedy Festival in Austin and served on its Masters Panel alongside Charna Halpern, Gary Austin, Fred Kaz and Dan O'Connor. Mazzone-Clementi died from complications following heart surgery on 5 November 2000 in San Francisco.

Performing history

Mazzone-Clementi's film credits included the 1950 comedy Side Street Story, Federico Fellini's The White Sheik (1952), the 1952 anthology film In Olden Days, and the 1954 epic Ulysses.

In 1957, he created the solo show Six Characters in Search of Commedia, in which he performed multiple masked characters, and subsequently toured it in the United States. While working in New York, Mazzone-Clementi was represented by agent Toby Cole. At the 1980 Venice Biennale's Carnevale del Teatro, he directed and performed in Birds of a Feather with the Dell'Arte Company. In 1984, he performed at a Mime & Clown Festival.