If you are stuck for ways to introduce Mask Theatre to your class then the following may be of help.
Many students, of any age, will have had little or no experience of masks on stage. Google ‘masks’ and you’ll get either pages and pages of COVID-related content, or endless pictures of the Greek masks of Tragedy and Comedy. You might get sent to the Jim Carrey film!
Basic Transformations
There are two ways of approaching this. Firstly, if the essence of the mask is to TRANSFORM, then watching this transformation is easy. Masking can take many forms. Put a red nose on them. A bucket over their heads! A paper bag. Swathe their head in cloth. Just a scarf. Then get them to stand still, facing the class, and do a range of really simple movements. Ask them to SLOWLY drop their head, as if in sadness or regret. Lift their head as if in expectation. Puff their chests up as if proud, retreat as if scared. What the class will see is a perceptible transformation of ATTITUDE. The face doesn’t change, but the body seems to be communicating something that the class can read. Hot-seat someone by covering their faces in some way then asking them questions they can relate and respond to easily:
“How are you today? I hear it’s your birthday! Are you excited? Did you get many cards? I hear no-one came to your party! Maybe people don’t like you? Can you do something now to make people like you? How about a dance? Oh my goodness, that was great!”
It’s not TV!
The second way of introducing masks to the class is to understand how they affect the ability to communicate. By removing the facial expressions and the voice, the audience is forced to read body language, attitude, the speed and rhythm of movement to understand what is going on. You could start with showing them some Buster Keaton. His face is an unwavering mask. In fact, mask acting is a lot like film acting. There’s clarity, economy, not too showy, and not a reliance on text. On YouTube you’ll find a mask piece called “Handle with Care’ by the Moving Picture Mime Show, the first great mime company to come out of L’Ecole Jacques Lecoq in the mid 70’s. I’ll be putting some of my work onto the website too, from past productions so they can see masks working on stage. But masks are very much a live medium, not suited to television.
If you’ve got a set of masks (you can buy a set from the website) then there are plenty of exercises to get the juices flowing. There are pre-mask exercises, where the student explores the restriction imposed by the mask – and how to overcome them. Things like facing front, not speaking, just using body language, creating character etc. Getting students to successfully bring a mask alive can be very rewarding, as is moving onto devising their own work in masks. There are no mask scripts!
