In the Footsteps of Harlequin and Pulcinella : Cultural Mobility and Localness of Theatre

"The author takes readers on a journey in the footsteps of Harlequin and Pulcinella, two well-known commedia dell?arte masks, to show the historically fluctuating way in which they participated in building 'Italianness' in the eyes of foreign theatre audiences (the history of the Harlequin mask in France, Italy and Poland in the XVII and XVIII century) and local ones (the history of the Pulcinella mask, or the Italian dialect theatre of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which historians, at a certain point, erased from the process of the creation and construction of the Italian national community). Using modern performance studies methodologies, this book effectively cuts the distance between past and present theatre practices, opening new prospects for an active and clearly situated epistemology for theatre studies, cultural studies, media studies, and performance studies."-- Provided by publisher Dedication 8 Table of Contents 10 List of Illustrations 14 About the Author 18 Acknowledgments 20 Introduction: The Localness of Theater and the Culture of Global Mobility 22 Part I. In the Footsteps of Harlequin 38 1. The Case of the Harlequin 40 2. Over the Alps 56 3. Harlequin on Stage 72 4. Harlequin in Books 94 5. The “New Italian Theater” and Harlequin the Savage 114 6. The Harlequin in Poland 124 7. The Erasure of Harlequin 140 Part II. In the Footsteps of Pulcinella 168 8. Localness and the National Community 170 9. The Imagined Community in Drama 184 10. The Case of Pulcinella 188 11. The Provincial Theater 194 12. Erasing Pulcinella 214 13. Localness in the Era of Television and New Media 224 14. Nostalgia for Backwardness 232 15. Dialect Theater on Television 250 Part III. Determining the Place 286 16. The Place of the Theater 288 17. The Pragmatics of Theater 292 18. Localness and the Performativity of Memory 320 19. The Localness of Theater in the Era of Postnationalism 332 Instead of a Conclusion. Toward Utopia 350 Texts and Plays Quoted and Described 356 Literature 362 Index 372