Carlo Mazzone-Clementi

Carlo Mazzone-Clementi (1920 - November 5, 2000) was a contemporary and colleague of the giants of modern European theater. He first gained attention in Italy in 1947 when he worked alongside Marcel Marceau in the mime’s first tour outside of Paris. From 1948 to 1951, he assisted the master of movement, Jacques Lecoq, while Lecoq taught and directed the Players of Padua University. In 1954, Mazzone-Clementi was in the Piccolo Teatro di Milano with Dario Fo and Franca Rame. Their young Italian company was on the forefront of the renaissance of Italian theatre in the ’50s.

While he was performing with Piccolo Teatro, the American theatre scholar and director Eric Bentley came to Italy to direct the company in the first Italian production of Bertolt Brecht. Then, with Bentley’s patronage, Mazzone-Clementi toured the United States in 1958, conducting workshops in mime and commedia, and introducing the leather masks of Amleto Sartori to this country. That led to a teaching assignment at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now known as Carnegie-Mellon University) and to similar work in colleges and universities around the country.

In 1972, Mazzone-Clementi and his wife Jane Hill, a graduate of Carnegie-Mellon, went to Humboldt County, California to conduct summer workshops at their rural property. From this experience came the decision to re-locate permanently in Humboldt and to establish a full-time actor training program. In 1974, the couple purchased the Oddfellows Hall in Blue Lake, California and co-founded the Dell’Arte School of Mime and Comedy (now known as the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre). Hill also joined the faculty at College of the Redwoods, where the pair created the Grand Comedy Festival at Qual-a-wa-loo, a summer repertory festival that produced plays of Shakespeare in rotation with musical adaptations of those plays. Mazzone-Clementi served as the festival’s artistic director for six years.