Dartmouth Events

When the Italian playwright and performer Dario Fo gave his Novel Prize lecture in Stockholm in 1997, instead of a written text for the audience to follow, he handed out a 25-page booklet of colored drawings. He delivered his speech impromptu, as he referred to the pages the audience was following. In this way he demonstrated the art of improvisation in performance, a device that was essential to the Commedia dell’arte in Europe and to oral traditions around the world. Dr. Antonio Scuderi, Professor of Italian at Truman State University, will discuss the mechanisms of improvisation that were intuited by Dario Fo and explicated by scholars of folklore. In the second part of the lecture, Taylor Ho Bynum (Director of the Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble) and Carlo Aonzo (guest mandolinist) will continue to expand on the concept of improvisation as a codified musical language, providing musical examples to the audience.