La visibile favella

Before a singer in 1640 opened his mouth, his hands had already begun to speak.

Gesture was not decoration laid over the music. It was a second language running alongside it — as ruled, as teachable and as public as counterpoint — and an audience read it as fluently as they read the words.

The discipline descends from classical rhetoric, from the actio of the orator, who was trained to believe the hands were all but capable of speech on their own. Renaissance Italy inherited that training and turned it towards the stage, where it met the affetti — the catalogue of passions a singer was expected to raise and set down again within a single aria.

It survives because people wrote it down. The treatises below are the working library: a vocabulary large enough to be a language, set out by men who assumed their readers would use it that evening.

In a laboratorio the work is practical rather than antiquarian. Singers learn the positions, then learn to let them arrive on the affect rather than on the beat, and then — the part that takes longest — learn what to leave out. The aim is not a reconstruction. It is a performer with one more thing to say with.