Maskwork

Studying theatre with masks for a few sessions has been a comical and enjoyable experience for me. We started off exploring with expressive movement and how because your character is expressed facially (happy face, sad face, crazy face etc), you have to make more of an effort to make gestural expression, this reminds me of Brechtian technique with his technique of 'Gestus'. It's also using mime, which, when you get the hang of, really brings the mask character to life, and after a while I forgot that there was a person behind the mask. It's like the mask becomes one with the actor.


The Journey of Masks, http://www.giovannifusetti.com/en/workshops-detail.php?nav=1&lang=en&post=28

In the above picture, these are similar masks to what we were working with. To make them look more realistic, people would put their hair infront of it, putting hoodies up. Experimenting with open and closed positions determines what the characters are about, for example, closed actions could represent someone sad, scared, innocent etc, and open actions represents happy, silly, high in status.
 Positioning on stage is everything aswell. We did an exercise where we just had to keep altering positions with about 3 people in masks on stage, and each time, this was opening up possibilities of interactions with characters and storylines. So basic yet so effective.

Yesterday, we then constructed our own plot using mask characters and there's so much you have to think about, its mind boggling.You have to think about how the mask would react at every point, feel at every point and also focus on trying to 'Counter Mask' which is expressing gesturally a different mood to what their face is saying, for example: a happy mask but trying to be sad or angry with gestures and body language.
 In that situation, it's best to just 'do it', rather than 'think it'.

I honestly never thought that I'd be interested or amused by this field of theatre.
 Learning about it, has actually made me want to see future shows and I wouldn't mind exploring this field when starting my career in the big wide world.




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