In the Footsteps of Harlequin and Pulcinella
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.
Ewa Bal is a professor at Jagellonian University in Krakow (Poland) and visiting professor at Italian and Spanish universities. Her major academic interests are the theory of performance studies, the cultural mobility of performance and theatre, minority language theatre and performance in the Polish, Italian and Spanish language area. She is also active as a translator.