André Derain, Harlequin and Pierrot, c. 1924: In Derain's Harlequin and Pierrot, silent musicians play stringless instruments amid a barren landscape. Both are comic servants, but Pedrolino, as a so-called first zanni, often acts with cunning and daring, an engine of the plot in the scenarios where he appears. Pierrot is a stock character of pantomime and commedia dell’arte whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne, the name is a diminutive of Pierre (Peter), via the suffix -ot. Il peut également pleurer, mais il fait Paul Wilson. Son vêtement est blanc. He was a key figure in every art-form except architecture. Pierrot and his fellow masks were late in coming to the United States, which, unlike England, Russia, and the countries of continental Europe, had had no early exposure to commedia dell'arte. The 20th century Russian cabaret singer Alexander Vertinsky was famous for his See more ideas about For an account of the English mime troupe The Hanlon Brothers, see France above. [94] So uncustomary was the French Aesthetic viewpoint that, when Pierrot made an appearance in Pierrot the Painter (1893),[95] a pantomime by Alfred Thompson, set to music by the American composer Laura Sedgwick Collins, The New York Times covered it as an event, even though it was only a student production. As the diverse incarnations of the nineteenth-century Pierrot would predict, the hallmarks of the Modernist Pierrot are his ambiguity and complexity. [44], With him [wrote the poet and journalist Théophile Gautier after Deburau's death], the role of Pierrot was widened, enlarged. "[119] In her own notes to Aria da Capo, Edna St. Vincent Millay makes it clear that her Pierrot is not to be played as a cardboard stock type: Pierrot sees clearly into existing evils and is rendered gaily cynical by them; he is both too indolent and too indifferent to do anything about it. Casorti's son, Giuseppe (1749–1826), had undoubtedly been impressed by the Pierrots they had seen while touring France in the late eighteenth century, for he assumed the role and began appearing as Pierrot in his own pantomimes, which now had a formulaic structure (Cassander, father of Columbine, and Pierrot, his dim-witted servant, undertake a mad pursuit of Columbine and her rogue lover, Harlequin). In the 1880s and 1890s, the pantomime reached a kind of apogee, and Pierrot became ubiquitous. Sometimes he appears with a frilled collaret and a hat, usually with a close-fitting crown and wide round brim, more rarely with a conical shape like a dunce's cap. He also retains monochromatic face make-up, a large ruffled collar around his neck, and dresses clownish, like classic Pierrot is most often portrayed. Not only actors but also acrobats and dancers were quick to seize on his role, inadvertently reducing Pierrot to a generic type. Pedrolino became tremendously popular in later French pantomimes as the naive and appealing Pierrot. Séverin (Séverin Cafferra, called) (1929). Il est jeune, beau garçon et honnête. In a similarly (and paradoxically) revealing spirit, the painter Paul Hoecker put cheeky young men into Pierrot costumes to ape their complacent burgher elders, smoking their pipes (Pierrots with Pipes [c. 1900]) and swilling their champagne (Waiting Woman [c. 1895]). [2] In short, Pierrot became an alter-ego of the artist, specifically of the famously alienated artist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Multiple works by artists are listed chronologically. Pierrot (commedia dell'arte) Pour les articles homonymes, voir Pierrot. One of the comic servants, or zanni, Pedrolino functioned in the commedia as an unsuccessful lover and a victim of the pranks of his fellow comedians. ")[107] Prufrock is a Pierrot transplanted to America. Yet in several lines of the play his actual unhappiness is seen,—for instance, "Moon's just a word to swear by", in which he expresses his conviction that all beauty and romance are fled from the world. Using Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the saltimbanque paintings of Picasso and Schoenberg's musical experiments as the starting point, they examine the modernist consciousness, which evolved from the 16th-century concept of the commedia dell'arte character of Pierrot, the original free-spirited revolutionary of European improvisational theater. And the Pierrot of popular taste also spawned a uniquely English entertainment. For the plays, see Lesage and Dorneval; for an analysis, see Storey. This page was last edited on 19 January 2021, at 14:06. It ended by occupying the entire piece, and, be it said with all the respect due to the memory of the most perfect actor who ever lived, by departing entirely from its origin and being denaturalized. He is sometimes said to be a French variant of the sixteenth-century Italian Pedrolino,[5] but the two types have little but their names ("Little Pete") and social stations in common. He was the naïve butt of practical jokes and amorous scheming (Gautier); the prankish but innocent waif (Banville, Verlaine, Willette); the narcissistic dreamer clutching at the moon, which could symbolize many things, from spiritual perfection to death (Giraud, Laforgue, Willette, Dowson); the frail, neurasthenic, often doom-ridden soul (Richepin, Beardsley); the clumsy, though ardent, lover, who wins Columbine's heart, o… As the entries below tend to testify, Pierrot is most visible (as in the eighteenth century) in unapologetically popular genres—in circus acts and street-mime sketches, TV programs and Japanese anime, comic books and graphic novels, children's books and young adult fiction (especially fantasy and, in particular, vampire fiction), Hollywood films, and pop and rock music. [87] The Hanlon-Lees made their first U.S. appearance in 1858, and their subsequent tours, well into the twentieth century, of scores of cities throughout the country accustomed their audiences to their fantastic, acrobatic Pierrots. "[92] And yet the Pierrot of that species was gaining a foothold elsewhere. Thus were born the seaside Pierrots (in conical hats and sometimes black or colored costume) who, as late as the 1950s, sang, danced, juggled, and joked on the piers of Brighton and Margate and Blackpool. and sometimes the most opposed to his personality. Corrections? Il lui arrive de jouer des mauvais tours aux vieillards. Pierrot/Commedia Dell'Arte/Italian Clown Costume Handmade by me in the 1980's. Contemporary illustrations suggest that his white blouse and trousers constituted "a variant of the … [45], Deburau seems to have had a predilection for "realistic" pantomime[46]—a predilection that, as will later become evident here, led eventually to calls for Pierrot's expulsion from it. Il ne porte pas de masque et a le visage enfariné. The Pierrot bequeathed to the twentieth century had acquired a rich and wide range of personae. ), In 1895, the playwright and future Nobel laureate Jacinto Benavente wrote rapturously in his journal of a performance of the Hanlon-Lees,[85] and three years later he published his only pantomime: ‘’The Whiteness of Pierrot’’. Rachel Nightingale was a highly imaginative child. Dover Publications, inc. 1966. It also contains a short tale of Pierrot by Paul Leclercq, "A Story in White". It would set the stage for the later and greater triumphs of Pierrot in the productions of the Ballets Russes. Souvent dans la commedia dell'arte, il est le rival d’Arlequin auprès de Francisquine ou de Zerbinette, et il est amoureux de Colombine la … [118] Vsevolod Meyerhold, who both directed the first production and took on the role, dramatically emphasized the multifacetedness of the character: according to one spectator, Meyerhold's Pierrot was "nothing like those familiar, falsely sugary, whining Pierrots. Around the mid-twentieth century, he traveled about in pairs or larger groups, contending for supremacy among his companions,[189] but by the dawn of the twenty-first century, he had become rather solitary, a vestige of his former gregarious self. But the pantomime that had the greatest appeal to his public was the "pantomime-arlequinade-féerie", sometimes "in the English style" (i.e., with a prologue in which characters were transformed into the commedia types). Thus does he forfeit his union with Columbine (the intended beneficiary of his crimes) for a frosty marriage with the moon.[86]. In the last year of the century, Pierrot appeared in a Russian ballet, Harlequin's Millions a.k.a. "'A multicoloured alphabet': rediscovering Albert Giraud's. Thanks to the international gregariousness of Modernism, he would soon be found everywhere.[103]. Such a figure was Stuart Merrill, who consorted with the French Symbolists and who compiled and translated the pieces in Pastels in Prose. Antoine Galland's final volume of The Thousand and One Nights had appeared in 1717, and in the plots of these tales Lesage and his collaborators found inspiration, both exotic and (more importantly) coherent, for new plays. He is sometimes said to be a French variant of the sixteenth-century Italian Pedrolino, but the two types have little but their names ("Little Pete") and social stations in common. Pierrot (pengucapan bahasa Prancis: ) adalah sebuah karakter stok pantonim dan Commedia dell'Arte yang bermula dari kelompok para pemain akhir abad ketujuh belas yang tampil di Paris dan dikenal sebagai Comédie-Italienne; nama tersebut adalah sebuah hipokorisme dari kata Pierre (Petrus), melalui suffix -ot. In this section, with the exception of productions by the Ballets Russes (which will be listed alphabetically by title) and of musical settings of Pierrot lunaire (which will be discussed under a separate heading), all works are identified by artist; all artists are grouped by nationality, then listed alphabetically. Besides making him a valet, a roasting specialist, a chef, a hash-house cook, an adventurer, [Lesage] just as frequently dresses him up as someone else." The French version of the character was fashioned by Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796-1846). Thereafter, until the end of the century, Pierrot appeared fairly regularly in English pantomimes (which were originally mute harlequinades but later evolved into the Christmas pantomimes of today; in the nineteenth century, the harlequinade was presented as a "play within a play" during the pantomime), finding his most notable interpreter in Carlo Delpini (1740–1828). In not a few of the early Foire plays, Pierrot's character is therefore "quite badly defined. On late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century French pantomime, see Bonnet; Martinez; Storey. However, he is not above picking up cigarette butts or robbing a baby of its candy. Švehla, Jaroslav (1977). Prior to that century, however, it was in this, the eighteenth, that Pierrot began to be naturalized in other countries. [77] Obviously inspired by these troupes were the Will Morris Pierrots, named after their Birmingham founder. Pierrot—as "Pjerrot", with his boat-like hat and scarlet grin—remains one of the parks’ chief attractions. Students of Modernist painting and sculpture are familiar with Pierrot (in many different attitudes, from the ineffably sad to the ebulliently impudent) through the masterworks of his acolytes, including Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Georges Rouault, Salvador Dalí, Max Beckmann, August Macke, Paul Klee, Jacques Lipchitz—the list is very long (see Visual arts below). For 20 years at the Théâtre des Funambules, the great French mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796–1846) played Pierrot as the pathetic, white-robed lover eternally mooning over the beautiful Columbine. [188] A feeble fighter, he spars mainly with his tongue—formerly in Creole or French Patois, when those dialects were common currency—as he circulates through the crowds. Jean-Baptiste Pater. A mime whose talents were dramatic rather than acrobatic, Legrand helped steer the pantomime away from the old fabulous and knockabout world of fairy-land and into the realm of sentimental—often tearful—realism. Pierrot ou Pedrolino, est un personnage de l’ancienne comédie italienne, l’un des zanni ou valets bouffons de la comédie italienne. [99] For the Spanish-speaking world, according to scholar Emilio Peral Vega, Couto "expresses that first manifestation of Pierrot as an alter ego in a game of symbolic otherness ..."[100]. Pierrot, usually in the company of Pierrette or Columbine, appears among the revelers at many carnivals of the world, most notably at the festivities of Uruguay. A true fin-de-siècle mask, Pierrot paints his face black to commit robbery and murder; then, after restoring his pallor, he hides himself, terrified of his own undoing, in a snowbank—forever. Although he lamented that "the Pierrot figure was inherently alien to the German-speaking world", the playwright Franz Blei introduced him enthusiastically into his playlet The Kissy-Face: A Columbiade (1895), and his fellow-Austrians Richard Specht and Richard Beer-Hofmann made an effort to naturalize Pierrot—in their plays Pierrot-Hunchback (1896) and Pierrot-Hypnotist (1892, first pub. The format of the lists that follow is the same as that of the previous section, except for the Western pop-music singers and groups. [15] He acquires there a very distinctive personality. His costume consisted of a white jacket with a neck ruff and large buttons down the front, loose trousers, and a hat with a wide, floppy brim. Bird and Frank Hazenplug. The pantomime under "review" was Gautier's own fabrication (though it inspired a hack to turn it into an actual pantomime, The Ol’ Clo's Man [1842], in which Deburau probably appeared[49]—and also inspired Barrault's wonderful recreation of it in Children of Paradise).