Carlo Mazzone-Clementi

Carlo Mazzone-Clementi, born on 12 December 1920 and died on 5 November 2000 in San Francisco, was a performer, educator, and co-founder of two schools dedicated to commedia dell'arte, mime, and physical theatre. His Broadway credits include the 1965 comedy The Country Wife, performed with the new acting ensemble at the Theatre of Lincoln Center. It was during this engagement that he adopted the hyphenated surname Mazzone-Clementi, having previously worked under the name Carlo Mazzone. The addition of Clementi honored his mother's family name and that of his grandfather, Girolamo Clementi, who had a deep familiarity with the work of Paduan playwright Angelo Beolco, known as Ruzzante, a forerunner of commedia dell'arte.

Mazzone-Clementi's European career began in earnest in 1947, when he appeared alongside Marcel Marceau during the mime's first tour outside of Paris, drawing early attention in Italy. From 1948 to 1951, he worked as an assistant to Jacques Lecoq while Lecoq taught and directed the Players of Padua University. In 1953, he performed with Vittorio Gassman's National Theatre in Rome, and in 1954 he was at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano alongside Dario Fo and Franca Rame. During this same period, American theatre scholar and director Eric Bentley traveled to Italy to direct the Padua Players in the first Italian production of a Bertolt Brecht work. Bentley subsequently became Mazzone-Clementi's patron, supporting a 1958 tour of the United States in which Mazzone-Clementi conducted workshops in mime and commedia and introduced the leather masks of craftsman Amleto Sartori to American audiences.

His performing work extended across stage and screen. He appeared in over a dozen films, among them Ulysses with Kirk Douglas, and was frequently cast for his abilities as a mime. In 1958, he played the role of the Cock in the world premiere of Sean O'Casey's Cock-A-Doodle Dandy in New York. Represented by agent Toby Cole, he toured a solo show titled Six Characters in Search of Commedia in 1958 and 1959. He also performed at numerous International Mime Festivals throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and appeared in Birds of a Feather with the Dell'Arte Company at the 1980 Venice Biennale.

His arrival in the United States in 1957 marked the beginning of a sustained effort to spread commedia dell'arte throughout North America. Teaching appointments followed his early touring work, including positions at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Brandeis University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the American Conservatory Theater, among others. In 1972, Mazzone-Clementi and his wife Jane Hill, a Carnegie-Mellon graduate, traveled to Humboldt County, California to lead summer workshops on their rural property. That experience led to a permanent relocation and, in 1974, the couple purchased the Oddfellows Hall in Blue Lake, California and co-founded the Dell'Arte School of Mime and Comedy, an institution now known as the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre. Hill joined the faculty at the College of the Redwoods, where the two also created the Grand Comedy Festival at Qual-a-wa-loo, a summer repertory festival presenting Shakespeare's plays in rotation with musical adaptations of those works. Mazzone-Clementi served as the festival's artistic director for six years. In 1974, he and Hill co-authored the article Commedia and the Actor, published in The Drama Review TDR.

In 1984, Mazzone-Clementi relocated to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he co-founded a second school, the Commedia School, in partnership with Ole Brekke. He returned to California in 1994 and continued teaching until shortly before his death on 5 November 2000.