So how do we encourage stillness in our young mask performers?
Maskshave been used in actor training for over a century. Some Acting Teachers like to use the Neutral Mask for this. That’s ok, but they can be pretty boring for a teenage student. What happens to a lot of students, when they put the mask on, is they over-compensate for the loss of speech and facial expressions by moving too much. They try to communicate as if they could talk, they start miming, over-gesturing.
FOR MASK PERPORMERS Less is More
Jacques Lecoq, the great French Theatre teacher of the 20thC called working in masks the Via Negativa. What he went was, there are so many things you can’t do in a mask, you have to avoid those things and work out what you can do. And we can also rely on the audience, they’re a clever bunch. Let the mask do the work, and the audience will do the rest. The mantra is LESS IS MORE. Move less, gesture less, stillness is a virtue, so long as you keep the mask gently animated at all times. Like a puppet, if a mask freezes for longer than about 5 seconds, its dead.
When students first put on the mask, they tend to over-move, so we’ve tips on how to run your first mask sessions, to encourage stillness and subtlety. The best part is getting the feedback from the rest of the class, about what does and doesn’t work. The learning takes place in the audience as well as onstage.
