Neutral mask, revisited

Time for another update. For any who are checking this blog regularly, I apologize for the sporadic rhythm of my posts.

Only two weeks left in this term. Next week we each have a conference with Thomas to evaluate how it's going and whether we'll each be coming back for more in January. I assume everyone will have the option, and as far as I know everyone will choose to come back. I embarked on this journey assuming I'll be here for two years. It's too early to make a decision yet, but I've been thinking more and more that one year might be enough.

I think I'm rising to the occasion of the end of the term, but I've been in a bit of a doldrums for the past couple of weeks. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe fatigue. Maybe because some days this whole experience misses the mark for me. We've been in kind of a no-man's land for a while--or at least I have. All the improvisations for a few weeks now have been in the neutral mask, which I described earlier. The teaching style here is often, shall we say, indirect. And while they never out and out say "That's the wrong thing to do," it's clear that there is a kind of personality that they all agree that the neutral mask has, a certain kind of movement that the mask requires of its wearer. The neutral mask is unintimidated by anything (even earthquake, wind, and fire). The neutral mask is at home in all kinds of (imagined) natural environments. It is at home in the world of giants. It's a jumbo jet, one of the teachers likes to say, "and you don't drive a jumbo jet to the corner store for a gallon of milk." So while they never use this word, it seems to me that the neutral mask (that is, its character) could be described as heroic. It's mythical, maybe archetypal, but archetypal of what exactly, I'm not sure. And so the fact that we're always putting on the mask for our improvisations shapes the way we are to do things. "You can be much bigger," they're always telling us. "The mask is bigger than that." "Look at the mask. It knows no fear."

Is this an acting style they're encouraging us into? In a way, yes, but somehow it's more than acting. It's really a way of being in the world. But the settings in which we are to enact that way are always extraordinary. If you don't drive your 747 to the corner store, neither do you use it in your everyday life in any way. So there's something very artificial about all of this--even though in the vocabulary of the teaching here, the mask is by definition natural, but not normal. (Normal being our usual ways of living in the world--characteristically at a low energy level, in kind of a J. Alfred Prufrock state of being ("I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker, and in short I was afraid...") The mask is its antithesis.)

So what I think they're really about here is trying to pull the heroic, the brave, the extraordinary out of people as artists. And they're trying to nurture a feeling of connection with others, a generosity that wants to communicate and is always aware of others--your co-creators on stage at any given moment as well as your audience. I'm all for that. But there's no room for the small gesture in the world of the neutral mask, and sometimes I find that too limiting.

A small example from today. Our task was to present something on the theme of exodus: a group of people who have to leave home and go on a journey. They would prefer to stay, but some circumstance we've decided on as creative collaborators makes it necessary for us to leave home and go. Our group decided to portray a family having to leave a farm because of drought. (All of this is done nonverbally, and in mask.) Without saying so, my character was the old man (yeah, I know; go figure...), the one who had lived there for the longest, who probably built the house, perhaps had cleared the land. As we left, after finding the crops parched and no more water in the well, I bent down to scoop up a handful of soil and put it in my pocket. The teaching critique that came later was that's too small a gesture for the mask, and it just comes off as sentimental.

So is the mask human? subhuman? superhuman? Probably not exactly any of the three. And there's no point in asking for an answer to such a question in class, because none will be given, though the question itself will be celebrated.

It's not that this is frustrating to me--I've always been better at asking questions than at answering them anyway, and I know that a question stays alive, keeps working on you, pushes you to newer and deeper understandings when you can hold it in suspension and not demand an answer (which often reduces the question to a smaller level anyway). It's more that the questions I have are not primarily about who the neutral mask is. They have more to do with who I am and who I'm still becoming. Yes, it will be great if all this work will spur me to more boldness, to knowing what it is I want and to having the fire in the belly to pursue it. That's what I'm here for. But will learning to express a near-mythic drive through large bodily movement translate into that?

(I can hear it now: Greaaat! Yes! A very good question!)
But I'm not looking for praise for asking questions.

So I wonder how this will all progress in the months to come.

And by the way, I still think there's a place for the small meaningful action, even if there's no place for "sentimentality" in the world of the neutral mask.


Moving on to other topics...


Not acting. Reacting.


The focus in the improvisations isn't on acting. It's on creating a world--helping the audience to see a world--through our reacting to it, through having that imagined world work on us. We communicate through reacting to what only we can see (since we have no props, no costumes, and usually no dialogue). The mantra recently and again today, it seems, was "Give us the experience, not the idea." There's a lot of "Don't think. Do." "Turn your brain off and allow yourself to be surprised" by what comes to you in your improv. This is really hard--and means that it only gets in the way to start with much of a plan of what you want to do. And it's an open question to what extent it's a way of doing things that's transferable outside this program. Though I recognize that there are times I'd have been a lot happier, a lot freer, and might have created something better for myself and maybe also for others if I could just have quieted the eternal chatter in my brain.

Teaching gems, part 2

One day, as a way of spurring creativity for our Creation group times later, one of the teachers (Michael) led us in this exercise where we were to say yes to whatever anyone else proposed. The scenario was that we were put in groups of about 5 and given some silly product to create an advertising campaign for. Whatever proposal anyone came up with was supposed to strike us as the best idea ever. And we'd just build on it with whatever other suggestions arose. It was a lot of fun, and it also was remarkable to see how much energy was generated by the simple fact of not worrying over what others would think of your idea. Surely a broader lesson there somewhere.

And remember the blog entry about false starts and "It begins before it begins"? Teachers have continued the occasional practice of stopping people right as they start and having them start again. A scene has to begin with energy. You have to "take the space" to command people's attention from the very beginning. One of the teachers said "Josephine Baker used to get fucked right before she went onstage. Literally." But apparently (we heard later), not quite to the point of orgasm.

Talk about an entrance! Imagine how she must have commanded people's attention from the moment she stepped on stage!

(For any who are worrying, we don't have practicums in "How to take the space like Josephine Baker.")