Why teach masks in your drama class? They’re tricky to study. There are no mask texts to pore over, very few recorded mask performances, and even fewer live mask shows. What’s the point?
The Roots of Theatre
Studying and teaching Drama and Theatre takes a necessarily academic route, but the origins of performance in many cultures started with the mask. The mask offers a quick access to the fundamental game of theatre. Masks transform the performer from one being to another, and the audience must suspend their disbelief to engage with the performance. That is theatre. So whether it’s the pre-historic cave paintings of Lascaux, the pagan festivals of Europe or early Greek theatre, Noh and Kabuki theatre, early North American rituals or the plethora of African cultures, the mask was always there at the beginning. To truly understand theatre and performance, it is useful to understand the mask.
The Audience
You can sit at a desk and study a script, maybe learn the lines and rehearse them. You can learn the songs from a musical, listen to them on your headphones. You can dance alone in your room, or rehearse in front of mirrors. There are benefits to all these pastimes. But the mask? Masks need an audience to observe the transformation, to believe. I’ve created around 40 separate mask productions over a 40 year career, and the writing and rehearsal process is an interesting one. If there’s one lesson I’ve learnt, it is that rehearsing a mask scene with no-one watching is a pointless task. A director, teacher, fellow cast member – it doesn’t matter – but someone has to witness the mask working to be able to say ‘it works’ or ‘I’m bored’ or ‘….what are you doing?’ What this tells me is that understanding the mask is fundamentally also about understanding the audience. And it’s that relationship, between performer and observer, that is at the heart of theatre, and therefore worthy of study.
For the Student
Some theatre is ‘Writer’s Theatre’, studying scripts by Stoppard, Brecht or Beckett, or different genre from realism to avant-garde, melodrama or satire. Then there is ‘Director’s Theatre’. Brook, Artaud, Stanislavski, Grotowski. Brecht again. Where is ‘Performer’s Theatre’? Even the fabulous Frantic Assembly can direct and choreograph their performers. But masks? For a mask to truly work on stage, to reach its full power of transformation, the performer needs to be in charge of what they’re doing. A mask-maker makes a mask that works. A writer or director can create a narrative or a situation in which to place the mask. But ultimately it is the actor that must bring the inanimate object alive, and fill its every moment on stage with meaning. The words the audience hears in its head are created in the mind of the actor and are communicated through their skill and subtlety. Masks can only really be used effectively on stage through DEVISING!
Now take that into the classroom. A mask liberates the student from interpreting other people’s work, to creating their own. The mask requires a skill that is non-verbal, physicalized and also hidden from direct view. The mask encourages the student that is maybe less confident verbally or not so forthcoming as a performer. The mask subjugates the ego, it’s not the big ‘I am’, the ‘watch me!’ performer who excels but the quieter, more measured and maybe introverted student. Someone who can work with stillness and silence, encouraging subtlety. The mask can provoke hilarity without a clever word spoken, but the simplest of thought and gesture can have a room in hysterics.
Learning by Watching
And all the time the mask is being worked, the mask is being watched. Learning about the mask is never just about putting one on and being on stage. There is so much to glean from being one half of the relationship – the audience. Five minutes on stage can provoke twenty minutes of discussion. The essence of performance – what works and what doesn’t – can be fully explored in a 45 minute session when only 3 people get to use a mask. With a set of masks, 10 people can be on stage in an exercise and 10 watching. Discussions follow and then roles reversed. Introducing the concept of the ‘Black Box Voice Recording’ to a class liberates them again to imagine and create. This is the idea that a script is a recording of the words spoken on stage. What actually manifests itself onstage is the prerogative of the performers/creators. Shakespeare is rarely performed as he intended. I directed the Edwardian parlour-drama “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” but exploded the text by adding mask characters, ghosts, a deaf actor signing her text and sections of pure visual theatre. It was still the play written by Rudolf Besier but it was also much more, in tune with its modern audience.
Using masks in the classroom is about empowering the student, encouraging creativity and teamworking, provoking debate and opinion and developing performing skills.