The primary tool we will use to help us enter fully and truthfully into imaginary circumstances is via extensive “neutral mask” work. The Neutral, or Universal, mask was originally developed by mask and clown teacher, Jacques LeCoq, as a learning tool for actors - to help them develop emotional honesty and economy of movement, and to give them an inner core that is balanced, centered, and fully present. The mask itself is a simple, lightweight, unremarkable looking white or clay colored mask held comfortably to the face with a string or elastic.
Neutral mask work should not be confused with mime or pantomime, although they all share the need for articulation and expressiveness of the body. The difference is that mime and pantomime rely heavily on the imaginative manipulation of space to create the appearance that something exists, while neutral mask is focused on moment to moment truthfulness engaging what does exist.
We will employ many of the exercises outlined in Libby Appel’s text, “Mask Characterization” to lead us on our masked journey.
To give you an idea of the philosophical core of the neutral mask here are a few observations on neutral mask work:
“What is a mask? A mask is where one can go to meet the essence of oneself. Without the visual expression of the face, one must learn to activate the use of the whole body. Working with the mask helps to shift focus away from auto-mechanical movements, facial movements, the verbal language of the outer world to the inner world behind the mask of conscious body movements and nonverbal communication with the self, others and the invisible space around us.”
--Alessandra, reporting on a Mask Workshop with Samuel Avital“The Neutral mask allows those who wear it to get in touch with their core being, their most authentic, intuitive self. The mask encourages a sense of wholeness, of physical, emotional, and intellectual centeredness. In the mask, one lives in the moment, questioning nothing, yet empowered to make changes as needed. It integrates mind and body, clarifies impulse, and allows the wearer to experience the power and increased presence that come from absolute self-acceptance. Energy that formerly would be wasted on self-doubt and critical comments about a given situation is now used on problem solving. Neutral mask allows you to take off all the other masks.”
--Fool Moon Productions“Donning the mask, actors work toward a sort of ground zero, leaving behind accumulated personal habits and actorly artifice. The idea is to be outwardly curious and fully open to the space around you. The results can be amazing, say practitioners, giving you a whole new outlook on what it means to be you in the surrounding space.“There's a freedom that comes from putting on the mask, expressing yourself solely through your body. You're masking one part of yourself but unmasking another.... We all carry issues-abandonment issues, grief, and so on-within us. And they get in the way. The mask helps people slow down, be more grounded.Wrote Lecoq, "You take on the neutral mask as you might take on a character, with the difference here [being] there is no character, only a neutral, generic being.... Its moves have truthfulness, its gestures and actions are economical.... Having experienced perfect balance, the actor is better equipped to express a character's imbalance or conflictual states."A woman was asked what was it like to put on the mask for the first time. "My tendency was to clown around," she admits. Her instructor told her that if she treated the mask disrespectfully, it wouldn't work for her. She was initially embarrassed and angry but realized he was right. After doing mask work she sees how her own students have trouble being still. They're fidgety, wiggly, fussy, always trying to "act," commenting on themselves, trying to do something different and interesting. In the neutral mask, your body's self-conscious and extraneous movements become glaringly apparent to the viewer and, eventually, to you.The students in Letitia Bartlett's movement class at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater put on the masks and performed a deceptively simple Lecoq neutral-mask exercise: walking down a pier, waving goodbye to a ship in the distance-as though on this ship is a loved one you might never see again-then turning away. One actor stood out: His walk down the pier, his wave, his turn, were simple, eloquent, free of mannerisms, free of the need to demonstrate something individualized and unique.Lecoq wrote that this exercise reveals the actor's sense of presence and space and whether he "can find the common denominator of a gesture, one which anyone could recognize: the farewell of all farewells." That actor seemed to have achieved that universality. "What people tend to do [in this exercise] is skim the surface of the emotion or personalize it a little too much, which doesn't allow the depth of the moment to come through," says Bartlett. But isn't personalizing essential to truthful acting? “You can personalize on the inside," she says. The idea is to not translate that into tics or sentimentality.
--Jean Sciffman, Backstage, October 26, 2005
