Parlamento and Bilora

by Ruzante

The production, created on commission from the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Japan Foundation for the “Primavera Italiana” Festival in Japan, has been staged with extraordinary success at the national theaters of Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto and Osaka. For the first time in history, non-Japanese actors performed in spaces devoted to Noh theater.

Parlamento and Bilora are two of Ruzante’s most representative works. It was the rustic dialect of Venetian he used, “Pavan,” that underpinned the popularity of his comedies of a bluntly anti-literary character, in which some scholars see the origin of the Commedia dell’Arte. Until a series of historical vicissitudes – including the decline of the republic of Venice and the rise of Tuscan at the expense of Venetian, demoted from the language of European diplomacy to the status of a dialect – resulted in the eclipse of Ruzante’s fame, causing his work to fall for a long time into oblivion.