The mystery of the mask

At the core of the mystery of the (theatrical) mask lies the question: who is the mask primarily for, the one who wears it or the one who sees it worn?

The mask is for both, of course, if in different ways. So what does ‘primarily’ mean here?

Insofar as the mask possesses its wearer, we might assume that such possession comes first, for presumably it’s the possession by the mask and not the mask ‘in itself’ that grips and maybe even entrances someone watching. (Forms of possession are much more common than most people realize, and they're nothing to be anxious about; a fit of the giggles is possession, for example, as is yawning when you half-notice someone else yawn.)

Even so, there is a rule of mask work in theatre, which can be expressed like this: the mask becomes the eye, the body becomes the face. (I have no idea who conceived this way of putting it.)

To understand this, note that there are three ‘seats’ or loci of the body’s expressiveness: the eyes, the face and the body as a whole. In observing others we tend to hierarchize these, giving most attention to the eyes, second most to the face and least to the rest of the body, even if we are watching an actor on the stage who is at a relatively great distance from us. On occasions, of course, some particularly expressive use of ‘body language’ can catch our primary attention, and in certain real life situations there are taboos around looking some people directly in the eye, but the general rule of ‘eyes then face then body’ holds. But not if the person we are watching is wearing a mask, or more precisely a full mask (one that entirely covers their face). In this case the mask itself becomes the centre and primary focus of our attention and this is the sense in which “the mask becomes the eye”. (It may be disconcerting, in fact, to notice the actual eyes of the mask wearer through the eye sockets of the mask, for they will seem drained of expressiveness.) Then “the body becomes the face” as a consequence, for the body is the necessary expressive context of the mask. Without the body, the mask can express nothing, just as the eyes cannot be expressive except in their proper context of the face.

All this amounts to a strong sense in which the mask is primarily for those who observe it being worn. After all, the mask cannot tell its wearer how to perform in accordance with the rule that defines the manner in which it is seen. This has to be deduced. The first step is to see that the rule defines a magnification. Everything is made bigger.

But there’s another side to the coin. To ‘shoe’ a mask – that is, to put it on your face – a standard technique is first to spend some time holding the mask in front of you in order to observe – and absorb – its features. You imagine that your face is slowly transformed into the face of the mask. Only when this adoption of an ‘imaginary face’ is achieved do you actually put on the mask, which is now not like putting anything on at all (other than a kind of ‘sealer’). As a method of shoeing the mask this is much stronger, that is more transformative, than simply putting the mask on and then looking at yourself in a mirror.

Here, then, the mask is primarily for you, as its wearer. You do not ‘offer’ it to the audience until it has possessed you, and you must undertake a kind of ritual for this to happen.

This shoeing technique is essential for so called ‘character masks’ or ‘expressive masks’. But what about the neutral masks introduced into actor training by Jacques Lecoq? (A neutral mask is entirely unexpressive. It should contain no hint of character or mood or emotion. At the same time it must seem alive rather than dead. Good neutral masks are therefore difficult to fashion.) Up to a point it’s possible to perform the same ritual, that is, to observe the mask and to imagine one’s own face being transformed into the same expression… or rather lack of expression. But it’s not so clear that there’s a point in this.

When you imagine your face taking on the shape of an expressive or character mask, then something in the rest of your body will follow or echo this. This provides the foundation on which you can go on to find the character’s posture and gait. (Moreover, in a powerful extension of the shoeing ritual described above, you can imagine your whole body becoming like the mask you are holding – but following this up here would take me too far from my main theme.) But when you adopt a neutral facial expression the rest of your body doesn’t follow or echo it in the same way or to the same extent. This is basically because neutrality is a form of relaxation while expressiveness is a species of tension. (The relationship of neutrality to relaxation is complex, however. I explore it in depth in Re-Imagining Your Body Part 2, along with the relationship between tension and energy.)

To achieve complete neutrality of presence, then, those watching are required to help. Firstly, you sit on an upright chair while wearing the neutral mask. You try to adopt a neutral sitting posture, but those watching will very likely need to adjust this to make it truly neutral (as seen by an observer). Secondly, you stand, trying to do so as neutrally as you can, but once again those watching will almost certainly need to adjust your stance in order for it to seem truly neutral to them. Thirdly, you walk as neutrally as you can. This is more difficult. A person’s walk tends to be very individual, that is, distinctive, and it’s not possible for others to physically adjust your walk as you are walking. So advice tends to become verbal, which entails that it’s also vague. Even so, some progress can be made here and you can learn to achieve a more neutral walk than you started with, with the help of others. In these different phases, your body learns and absorbs the ‘feel’ of true neutrality, but not (directly) from the mask you are wearing. Nonetheless it’s only because you’re wearing a neutral mask that those watching can see how neutral you are. (To put this more precisely, the observers do not have any privileged knowledge of what true neutrality is, in the sense that they have no clear prior image of it; but they still easily see when – and how – you are not neutral, because you are wearing the mask.)

To fully understand this, it helps to distinguish two kinds or levels of neutrality. There’s a limited neutrality that most people can achieve quite quickly. This is really their own individual version of neutrality. It expresses no mood or emotion. But there’s also a full or ‘pure’ neutrality, which is much harder to achieve, in which a person’s individuality is erased. Not only mood and emotion disappear, but character too. It’s the latter that we’ve been concerned with here… up till now. But from here on I want to focus on a moment a few years ago that was a true revelation to me, even a kind of shock, one which took my understanding of masks to a different level.

On that occasion, when working with neutral masks, I asked students to ‘mask’ their faces with stockings instead, bank robber style. The idea was to see if neutrality could be achieved in this way. It was immediately apparent that it could not be. The stocking abstracted the wearer’s face and head rather than masking the face in the way required. That is, it drew too much attention to bone structure which is quite individual and therefore did not re-focus the spectator’s attention on the body to anything like the same extent as the mask did. (In a sense the neutral mask is also abstract, of course, but it is not abstracted from the given face of the wearer.)

I don’t know why, but later in that session I said to someone, ‘Put on the neutral mask, then put the stocking over that’. They did so. The transformation was amazing and completely unexpected. In a bizarre way, the neutrality of the mask was neutralized and turned into something else. The mask was masked! That is, the neutral mask no longer looked like a mask, for it was transformed into a bizarre kind of head. Part of this effect was simply that it was now more like a helmet mask, rather than a frontal mask. But it went much further. The eyes were still visible, just, but everything – body, head, mask and stocking – seemed synthesized, a unity. Most importantly, the way the wearer’s body appeared was transformed. With the first person who tried this I was immediately reminded of an insect, so I suggested appropriate kinds of ‘insect movement’ to complete what had turned into a weird and shocking otherness.

When others did the same, the transformation was equally radical – but what was especially striking was that they all turned into different things!

While S, the first, was a stick insect or mantis, M became a sea horse, L a nymph from Greek mythology, D a giant lizard, KX an extremely old woman who had experienced every possible tragedy, and KV some kind of mobile meat-eating plant or fungus!

Something extraordinary was happening, but what?

The truth is, I’m still not sure if I fully understand what happened that day. But it causes me to wonder if the question I started this post with (‘Who is the mask primarily for, the one who wears it or the one who sees it worn?’) may be wrong in some way, too neatly distinguishing between two different aspects of the mask that may not, after all, be so distinct.

What happened, I think, was that the ‘double masking’ drew a certain enhanced kind of attention to the distinctiveness of each body. We’re aware of this distinctiveness in everyday life, of course, but we see it in the context of the common human template, so that it appears as mere variation. But here it appeared as radical and essential, and this elevated it to the status of metaphor.

Up till now I’ve opted for the relatively neutral word ‘transformation,’ but to anyone watching it looked like possession.

But when a person put on the neutral mask and then put the stocking over it, initially they had no idea what they had been turned into. They had to be told, for this was not something that was already 'in' the mask in the way that a character is in a character mask. Nonetheless, once told, they could fully feel the reality of the transformation for themselves, for what they were transformed into was, in a sense, already 'in' them, but 'buried' quite deeply out of sight. The proof was their ability to move in the appropriate way. Whether this amounted to ‘feeling possessed’ is another question, but the ease and speed with which the metaphorical transformation was passed from the observers' eyes to the observed person's sense of their embodiment was remarkable - as though the supposedly 'outer' and 'inner' worlds had ceased to be distinct.