Transformations

Before I get to any reflection and recollections about this week at Lispa, a Happy Easter and a Happy Passover to you all. I went to a Seder the other night at school. Seemed like as good a way to mark Good Friday as I could think of.

I read this morning about an Easter celebration in Sulmona, Italy, a ritual called "the Madonna who hastens in the square." The article describes this as taking place with statues carried around, but in my mind it's huge puppets. Anyway, thousands gather in the piazza to watch as statues of St. John and St. Peter knock on the doors of the church, announcing the Resurrection and imploring the mourning Madonna to come out. On the third knock she emerges, dressed in a black cloak. Slowly she walks into the square. Suddenly she's raised up as if on tiptoe and, seeing her resurrected son, breaks into a run. She throws off her shawl, releasing a dozen white doves and revealing her splendid green dress, a symbol of hope (and I would guess, spring). She drops her handkerchief, showing the end of her grief, and in its place there is a red rose.

The article in the Times concludes: "Claudio Pantaleo, prior of the Confraternity of the Madonna of Loreto, hopes that the ritual of hope and rebirth will be all the more poignant for the town this year, in the wake of Monday morning's earthquake which devastated L'Aquila, just 60 km away. He says that the parade will 'absolutely still go ahead...'"

I wish the article had ended there, but the last line of Mr. Pataleo's quote is "'unless the Bishop decides otherwise.'" Can you imagine canceling such a thing? Anyway, here's to loveliness, joy, and hope on this and every Easter day.

I'll be going to a friend's church for this afternoon. Afternoon seems an odd time for an Easter celebration, but I assume there are various services throughout the day. From what I can find on the internet, the church (St Leonard's, Shoreditch) has a long connection to theatre. The actor Richard Burbage, among others, is buried there. No surprise, I suppose, that a classmate would pick that one! And before that, I'm getting together with some other classmates for lunch.

Keepin' it larval

This week in school we've been working with larval masks. They're unpainted masks with simplified and exaggerated features and come from Basel, Switzerland. Many are basically just a nose on a face. They're related to the Fasnacht carnival masks used in that city at the beginning of Lent. My nephews and in-laws who lived in Basel will have special interest in this, though I'm sure we use them in a very different manner in class than they do at Fasnacht.

The first set of masks we used had no eye holes, so we couldn't see a thing. It's all about listening and reacting and moving slowly. It's a lot of fun for those who are watching. You read so much into the simplest of movements, like the tilt of a head. As you can imagine, though, it's quite a challenge for the person wearing the mask. And it gets so much more complex when you have two, three, or five actors on stage wearing larval masks, with no one being able to see what anyone else is doing. You're also not supposed to speak. Which again, makes it all the more enjoyable for the audience.

A side note here, which I may or may not have written about when I learned it in first term: In English we call the people watching the play an audience, which actually emphasizes that they are listening. In many other languages they're called spectators, which emphasizes the visual aspect. In English and American theatre, we tend to privilege language. In French and many other cultures, it's the physical that gets the emphasis, or certainly more of it. (This probably explains the French appreciation for Jerry Lewis. Whether it justifies it or not is another question. Do they love Jim Carrey, too, I wonder?)

As the week progressed, we worked with masks that were more and more human looking, though still very cartoony and all unpainted. And they did have eye holes, though tiny ones and not always in the most useful places. It's a real discipline to learn to do very little but to do it with a lot of focus. There seems to have been a theme in our work of late of doing less. It's becoming more Zen in a way, you could say.

I keep trying to include photos in my posts, but thus far have been unable to. But if you google larval masks you can get some pictures, including this one which also has another Lispa student's comments about the kind of thing we do in class.

All of this makes me recall one of my frustrations last term, having no idea what I look like performing. Working with larval masks takes that to a whole new level! But I'm really enjoying it and feel like I'm learning a lot. Plus, I just enjoy the mask work generally, as hard as it is. I'm less self-conscious, somehow freer when my face is hidden. We're also making our own masks this week, as I mentioned in my last post. I've made mine out of the kind of material that they used to to make plaster casts with. This morning I sealed my mask with glue. Tonight and tomorrow I'll paint it. (No school tomorrow. Bank holiday.) And then on Tuesday we start to see where we go from here.