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[page 222]
Ken D. Elston
Ritual and Inhabiting the Mask:
An Actor's Search for the Transcendent Creative State
Making
art exemplifies an "act of faith". At once necessary to the
human animal as a way of satisfying the visceral need to feel essential
in the world, daring to create assumes that there is completion in being
observed. The same leap necessary to believe that "if you build it
he will come", a line from the film Field of Dreams that captured
the zeitgeist of the nation, acknowledges the audience as integral to
the creation. Wholeness does not characterize the work of art, as it has
not reached totality, until it is seen. Artists often fear that it might
even hinge on acceptance, but we will consider that possibility later.
First
allow me to relate a story that Julie Taymor shared at the opening of
the exhibit Playing With Fire at the Wexner Center in Columbus,
Ohio in 1999. She said she had gone with a group to see a "performance"
in a village during her study in Bali. She separated herself from the
group and sought solitude amid the shadows of some trees near a vacant
spot. Men of the village, masked and costumed, came into that spot, and
they began to dance. Mesmerized, she watched them pour themselves into
their creative work. When they were done, when the piece was finished,
they prayed and then called the village to watch them do it again.
This
was no rehearsal; this was a communion. The sacred nature of the dance
meant that it could not find wholeness until it was offered to a higher
power, the intended audience to an act of human creation, only then could
it be celebrated with the social community. As a privileged witness to
this sacred ritual, Julie Taymor was later able to share the power of
that experience.
The
rituals surrounding performance in mask are ancient, ubiquitous in the
world, and uniform in certain attributes. The intended audience of each
masked performance can be particular, as the two performances of the same
dance in Taymor's story illustrate, but that intent, itself, is the difference
between them. The rituals surrounding them remain the same. [page
223] The intent that the performance be seen remains the same.
Reasonably the connection between performer and inspiration in the
art remains the same as well. Division between the secular and the
religious is a construct of intention; in fact theses worlds are joined
in the continuity of ritual and spontaneity, and the profound nature of
that continuity makes mask work a powerful catalyst for introduction to
and embodiment of the creative state. This creative state is one
of the uniform attributes of mask ritual.
Since
hearing Julie Taymor speak, I tell her story to every mask class I teach.
It is a reminder to them of the transcendent nature, the power, of art.
More importantly it is testimony to the personal investment that ritual
evokes. These students inevitably learn, through ritual with the mask,
that the creative state is a vital principal, an animating force in which
one can discover, surprise, and relate. More importantly to the student
is the possibility of reliability in a path to reach the creative state,
to coaxing artistic spontaneity, and to trusting intuition.
That
Balinese Dance should provide a clear model is hardly surprising, as the
sacred ritual remains bonded with the aesthetic ritual of performance.
John Emigh, in Masked Performance, uses this to illustrate the
potential for creative ascendance in the mask.
When a Balinese actor holds a new mask in his right
hand, gazing upon it, turning it this way and that, making it move to
a silent music, he is assessing the potential life of the mask and searching
for the meeting place between himself and the life inherent in its otherness.
If he is successful, then a bonding takes place that will allow him
to let the potential life flow through his own body. If he finds that
place of congruence between his physical and spiritual resources and
the potential life of the mask, then a living amalgam is created: a
character, a persona. This amalgam is at best unstable- based as it
must be upon paradox, ambiguity, and illusion- but "it" moves,
"it" speaks, "it" breaths, "it" is perceived-
by the performer and by the audience- as having an organic integrity.
If the performer fails to find this field of paradox, ambiguity, and
illusion, then the mask will retain its [page
224] separateness: whatever its worth as an object, a "work"
of art, it will at best function as a decoration, a costume element.(1)
The search for connection to the mask is the artist's
journey toward what Emigh calls "organic integrity". Ritual
manifests the creative state. Of course mask has long been a conduit in
performance and that communion between the individual and the larger body-
be that the village or the gods.
Prehistoric
evidence suggests that the roots of mask work lie in sacred ritual. Modern
examples abound as well. Those Asian Ritual masks that represent gods
and spirits are "housed" and "fed" as part of their
sacred nature. Of course there is distinction between Ritual masks and
theatre masks, but anthropologists worldwide detail commonalities in mask
ritual. The direct correlation to intent is assumed in such investigation,
and, as a result, the commonalties become more vivid. Samuel Glotz, writing
for Les Masques et leurs Fonctions (Masks and their Functions)
about European traditions, suggests,
a certain unity in the European world of the
mask. In spite of ethnic and political differences, there are parallel
currents which intercross and influence our countries. The same custom
is practiced in the same way from north to south, from Tagas (Portugal)
to the Ural [USSR (sic.)]. The same characters or identical accessories
are seen everywhere.(2)
This
pan-cultural phenomenon, stemming from sacro-religious traditions, bridges
the gap, cross-culturally, between the aesthetic world of myth and human
drama and the sacred or religious ritual. This commonality assumes the
distinction between ritualistic approach to mask and the parody of ritual
apparent in dime-store mask, Halloween play. The mechanical presence of
ritual does not have direct correlation to either meaning or discovery.
But, like the sacro-religious traditions of mask ritual, the aesthetic
mask ritual is charged with meaning. The [page
225] bridge between the two manifests in the way ritual connection
to the mask exposes us to our humanity and something larger than ourselves,
in this case the audience. But it is possible that communion, in so far
as it defines the creative state, suggests a fusing that makes the creative
state-self bigger than the pre-creative state-self.
Jean
Paul Sartre in defining the essential nature of art in society mused:
Human action, in the real world, is dominated by
needs and urged on by the useful. In this sense it is means. It passes
unnoticed, and it is the result which counts. When I reach out my hand
in order to pick up my pen, I have a fleeting [glissante] consciousness
of my gesture; it is the pen which I see. Thus man is alienated by his
ends. Poetry reverses the relationship: the world and things become
inessential become a pretext for the act which becomes its own end.(3)
And as we, in our quest to be meaningful, seek to be
worth more than those petty ends that surround us, we create. We seek
connection to something larger than ourselves through our making art,
our acts of faith. The nobility of art in Sartre's view begins with the
pretext, the intent. The seeking, the ritual search for the creative state,
an attainable end, is, in itself, an artistic endeavor.
Sartre's
distinction between action as a pursuit of need and action as a pursuit
of art defines the power of ritual. Ritual, conscious pursuit of art,
seeks to harness the raw, ambiguous nature of the sacred and links the
individual experience to that of the community. Grotowsky's attempts to
create what he dubbed a "secular sacrum in the theatre"
through surrender to discipline and strenuous ritual acknowledge that
link and the transcendence of creativity.(4)
[page
226] Historically the mask is a catalyst for transportation
out of the self and into something transformative. The depth of that transformation,
as stated, hinges on ritual and, as evidenced in the common experiences
of those who address this transformation; specific elements of that journey-
through ritual to spontaneity- have been identified.
Practical
transformation, the essence of any mask performance ritual, enjoys universal,
observable attributes. Because those physical attributes do not vary,
except in intensity, it is reasonable to assume that the whole Bodymind
experience is similar. [Bodymind refers to the transcendent integration
of the whole being, what the Hebrews called nephesh, "or 'the
integrated totality of the incarnate self'."(5) Bodymind is the whole:
the head and the body, spirituality and sexuality, the brain with ideas
and the breath carrying emotion.] As Bodymind defines an integrated whole,
the common, observable "externals" indicate common "internals"
of experience. For example, part of the ritual of working with mask is
ascribing space for exploration. In defining a physical sphere, a specific
near space world, the performer defines a here and now, or a current existence
free of the past and antecedent of the next here and now, the nest moment.
Donning a mask is a visible state of potential. It is a starting point.
Alone this ritual has value in education, but the transcendence of mask
ritual reveals far more than potential.
Other
obvious commonalities of rituals found in mask performance can be marked
including transformative moments for the performer, the Bodymind. An obvious
start to such a catalog of attributes is the silence for the artist as
the mask touches the skin, catches the breath, and replaces the visage.
Next might be a consideration of the intimacies of dance: the twists,
stretches, turns, gatherings, and, ultimately, the projection into space.
The ritual of donning the character gives way to the ritual of direct
contact with the performance character. In the studio students frequently
use the mirror to make this contact. The actor's eyes find a foreign character
in reflection, and the artist is drawn to explore perceived sovereignty
over the physical life of this character. At this point the paradox of
life in the mask materializes to the observer: the mask begins to inform
the artist's movement simultaneously with taking on life.
[page
227] Less obvious, but nonetheless observable, are what I refer
to as the stopping points that occur for actors playing in the
mask. The flow of energy, the exchange between the performer and the mask,
the intuitive response, interrupts. These are moments of culmination in
performance, and are often points at which the artist unmasks in practice.
At this point they can be identified as natural endings. While
these moments seem natural progression from the viewer's standpoint in
the audience, students invariably express both surprise and sudden awareness
of those moments in early mask work. "Those moments sneak up on you".
With more experience in the mask students note that these moments frequently
give way to new impulses, but the nature of impulses is another concept
that begs exploration.
Impulses,
as I use the term with students, are the possibilities suggested by the
flow of energy within the physical sphere. Impulses are potential reactions
to the observed or the "sensed". The mask is a performance "tool"
consistent in its power to evoke new sensitivity to impulses and connections
to creativity. So an ability to access the creative state becomes attuned
through ritual, as well. While the steps in the ritualistic path remain
the same, the connection invariably comes more quickly with practice.
Experiencing ritualized transformation codes the Bodymind to effect such
transformation. Ritual becomes the transformative "door" to
the creative state.
Impulse
and energy as performance terms might seem muddy in their lack
of specificity, but it is precisely that open-ended quality that defines
a kind of higher awareness compatible with a general experience of transformation.
Transformation takes place through ritual inhabitation of the mask as
the performer is literally on the threshold of something new. This transformation
resembles what Victor Turner dubbed "Liminal Phases".
Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they
are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed bylaw, custom,
convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate
attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies
that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is
frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to [page
228] invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness,
and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.(6)
Is
transformation toward the creative state is a liminal phase? Undeniably
transformation contains explosive fuel for creativity, and identifying
the potential sparks to that fuel means identifying impulse in the creative
state. It is fair to conclude that impulses are made available to the
performer through ritualized communication with the self, a calling forth
responsiveness in the Bodymind. This transformation meets the initial
requirements of Turner's definition. Here is Richard Schechner's suggested
definition of the experience of the action of the liminal phase:
The work of the liminal phase is two-fold: first,
to reduce those undergoing the ritual to a state of vulnerability so
that they are open to change. Persons are stripped of their former identities
and assigned places in the social world; they enter a time-place were
they are not-this-not-that, neither here nor there, in the midst of
a journey from one social self to another. For the time being, they
are literally powerless and often identityless. Second, during the liminal
phase, persons are inscribed with their new identities and initiated
into their new powers. There are many ways to accomplish the transformation
The
possibilities are countless, varying from culture to culture, group
to group, ceremony to ceremony. As I will explain later in this chapter,
the workshop-rehearsal phase of performance composition is analogous
to the liminal phase of the ritual process.(7)
Ritualized mask work meets the criteria. As a training
tool, such work develops the artist's capacity for universal application
of the creative state. Where the "workshop-rehearsal phase of performance
composition" is analogous as the theatre piece itself undergoes a
liminal phase, the ritual of mask work is analogous as it deals with a
transformation within the artist.
[page
229] In the initial approach to the mask actors address their
masks with the eyes, with their hands, and, ultimately, their faces. Schechner's
initial consideration in describing liminal phases, vulnerability, is
present in the studio. Students express that in connection to mask work.
Both their feedback and my observations of their journeys through the
ritual stages support this. Students feel vulnerable in the mask. Change
is difficult. Transformation to a true creative state does not allow for
the pre-planned or the known and honed. Of course there is irony in this
feeling of vulnerability when the actor is actually the Bodymind behind
the explorations and performance, but such is the paradox of the mask
to concentrate on the self even when "inhabiting" a character.
This too is part of the ritual and a quality inherent in liminality according
to Schechner. We have discussed the actor working in mask as "neither
here nor there" but rather in a place of impulse awareness, a muddy
place.
In
donning the mask the actor is stripped of identity. The anonymity of the
mask is legendary: in theater, comic books, and on Halloween, the mask
becomes a license for variant behavior, the behavior of characters. Anonymity
of the self continues while a partnership with the mask and the filling
of the physical sphere yields something new. The same analogy holds true
for the actor's awareness of change. Ritual becomes an active search to
uncover a new identity, the masked identity. The freedom from psychology
and strict structural form often makes the identities discovered surprising
and theatrically exiting. This fuels the actor's exploration toward the
liminal.
The
creative state is a wellspring of impulse and energy, an energy I frequently
refer to as improvisational energy, but it may as well be called post-liminal
energy. It is that with which we try to be in-tune: we know it when we
see it and know when we feel it. We have a myriad of terms with which
we refer to this state- intuition, "the zone", in the moment,
engaged, unconscious, to name just a few. It is what Nike wants us to
associate with its swoosh: "just do it" achieved as a state,
through ritualized and concentrated effort. Attempts to address the cultural
zeitgeist seem appropriate as metaphor. Though popular in nature,
the common links they reveal are useful. "Just doing it" assumes
a starting place. It just that starting place that the mask reveals as
it supports accessibility to an intuitive place: the creative state.
[page
230] Tapping the creative state through the mask is immediate
and jarring to the complacent eye. This ancient approach to communion
of the self with the "something larger" is primal. Having considered
the search for totality inherent in the creative act, the relationship
between the need and the act has been defined. Ritualized entry to this
communion echoes the outer/inner dialectic inherent in both the leap of
faith of creativity and the entrance into the mask. This dialectic suggests
the primal nature of this artistic quest and further supports the analogy
with liminal phases. To clarify the transformative nature of liminality
Turner, as an anthropologist, reserved the term for agrarian cultures
and anti-structural models. Once realized, the aesthetic transformation
to the creative state can be channeled into structured application.
Stanislavski,
as a spiritual man, assumed the necessity of such a transformation. In
describing the creative state in which the actor must begin work he used
a term that Elizabeth Hapgood translates as communion. He intends
the same alive and immediate transformation; a keen awareness of the shared
energies surrounding the actor in highly codified application, as the
ritual of mask work provokes. The actor's ability to become absorbed in
character retains the core of ritualized approach and demands the entrance
into the creative state. Speaking as the Director in An Actor Prepares,
Stanislavski maintains:
The eye is the mirror of the soul. It is important
that the actor's eyes, his look, reflect the deep inner content of his
soul
All the time he is on the stage he should be sharing these
spiritual resources with other actors in the play
He will not give
himself up wholly to his part unless it carries him away. When it does
so, he becomes completely identified with it and is transformed.(8)
The
basis for this modern leap of faith, holding a new ideal chief in consideration-
that Realism is the something larger than ourselves, that we determine
our sole audience- can only be identified in terms of the outer/inner
dialectic that is the connection of self to the creative state and, thus,
to the audience. There is nothing mystical about the efficacy of the ritualized
state. Ritual and mask tap into the creative because of the anti-structuralist
nature, not as a [page 231] reaction
against, but as an alternative to the defined audience model. In this
way the act of "tuning in" to impulse in the mask is training
to listen and respond outside of the rituals of the work itself.
Audience
as the integral aspect of performance, while true and inescapable, can
also prove a tyranny. At the outset I suggested that, for the artist,
wholeness or totality for the performance might hinge on acceptance. The
modern desire to define the audience feeds such an expectation, but it
also adds a component of fear to the mix that paralyzes potential.
Anathema
to creativity, fear predicates an awareness of self and a possibility
of failure that blocks the transcendent state. Indeed, fear, as the opposite
of faith, is anti-art. Its anti-ritualistic nature [because structure
cannot include play when fear predominates] squelches spontaneity and
invention just as it restricts freedom. The kind of play, childlike freedom
to be and do, necessary for creative transcendence requires permissiveness.
Ritual, and ritual play, infuses performance with vitality. While many
scholars have defined play, the common elements are exploration, learning
and risk and yield flow or total involvement.(9) Another element present
is spontaneity.
Spontaneity
within the mask results from the inner/outer dialectic: communication
between object and artist, between artists, and between the art and the
audience exist in the nexus of ritual and spontaneity.
Rituals are more than structures and functions;
they can also be among the most powerful experiences life has to offer.
While in a liminal state, people are freed from the demands of daily
life. They feel at one with their comrades, all personal and social
differences erased. People are uplifted, swept away, taken over. Turner
called the liberation from the constraints of ordinary life "anti-structure"
and the experience of ritual camaraderie "communitas".(10)
[page 232] The
rituals of mask, in dealing with the whole gamut of experience [personal,
contemporary, and cultural] are no exception. Students are consistently
moved by what they discover in the mask, because ritual is powerful and
the creative state so rewarding. Though discoveries may be as fleeting
as the camaraderie most often observed in the course of exploration, the
artist in post-liminal phase cannot dismiss the experiences of the mask.
Jacques Brunet, in writing about the "Masks of Southeast Asia",
made this observation about the partnership of performer and mask:
The mask is made not to hide or to conceal, but
to expose. As an instrument of metamorphoses, the mask permits man to
lose his identity, and allows the gods to manifest themselves with an
uncovered face. To mask oneself is to give life to a superior being.(11)
The aesthetic exploration is little different in nature,
though miles apart in intent. Regardless of intent, the ritual engenders
social recoding. So, instead of lessons concerning good and evil and the
mythic history of a culture, inhabiting the mask leads to an artistic
recoding, an aesthetic transformation, away from the fear based, memorize-those-lines
world of modern educational theatre.
Of
course embracing structural approaches is natural. Bjorn Krondorfer, in
his introduction to Body Bible, asserts that in the new century
"we experience life as bricolage [and] coherent meaning systems
are replaced by a coincidental accumulation of objets trouvés."(12)
Meaning systems are transient in the modern age. They are both necessary
and fleeting. So as we desire worth, meaning and definition in this world,
we tend to cling more doggedly, more fiercely to those found objects that
reify us in consistent, predictable ways. Mask work can [page
233] never fit that model, but then art cannot either. Hence,
mask is an effective alternative to the doggedly predictable outcome in
absence of the creative state.
Hans-Georg
Gadamer did not believe that reality could be transformed, and so was
out of reach to the human artist. In this modern ideal truth is actually
unattainable, and transformed reality (i.e.: art) needs play to have any
meaning at all. This makes sense: the play needs playing, the character
needs breath, and the mask needs to be inhabited before it can have transcendent
value. He went further to say that there is no value in art past its essential
quality, its search for truth. Surely aesthetic ritual has relevancy,
as the religious does. There is value in the creative state. Perhaps Gadamer
would replace the "something larger than us" with this idea
of essential quality.
The players are not the subjects of the play; instead
play merely reaches presentation through the players
[Neither]
the separate life of the performer, who acts the work, nor that of the
spectator who is watching the play, has any separate legitimacy in the
face of the being of the work of art.(13)
Gadamer defines artist and audience as the communal
body, united in the act of artistic expression. Perhaps the legitimacy
exits both in the quest for and the fleeting ascension to the creative
state itself.
Tapping
into the intuition, gathering the clues to this assumed truth might just
be the closest we can get to a definition of something beyond the observable.
But as artists might that not be enough?
We
have license and necessity to create. The personal freedom to create is
all that is left to require. Achievement, as I relate it to my students
working within the mask, is transformation. It is not the transformation
to character, but the liminal change that we are after, that transformation
toward the creative state. The unconscious tapped through conscious [page
234] attention to ritual reassures the artist of the dialectic
of exchange and emboldens the leap of faith that is the creative act.
Endnotes
- John Emigh, Masked
Performance: the Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre, p.
275.
- Samuel Glotz. The excerpt
is taken from an article originally edited by Cherif Khaznadar and published
by Maison de la Culture de Rennes, France. It was reprinted in "The
Drama Review" (Winter 1982), p. 18.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, The
Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 369.
- Jerzy Growtowsky, Towards
a Poor Theatre. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1968. p. 49.
- Walter Wink from an essay
entitled, Bible Study and Movement for Human Transformation published
in Body Bible: Interpreting and Experiencing Biblical Narratives,
Krondorfer, ed, and p.121.
- Victor Turner, The
Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, p. 95.
- Richard Schechner, Performance
Studies: an Introduction, p. 57-58.
- Constantin Stanislavski,
An Actor Prepares, p.196.
- Schechner, p. 82.
- Schechner, p.62.
- Jacques Brunet. The excerpt
is taken from an article originally edited by Cherif Khaznadar and published
by Maison de la Culture de Rennes, France. It was reprinted in "The
Drama Review" (Winter 1982), p.68.
- Krondorfer, Body Bible,
p.2.
- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth
and Method, p.113.
References
Emigh, John. Masked Performance: the Play of Self
and Other in Ritual and Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1996.
The Drama Review: Masks. Michael Kirby,
ed. Vol. 26; Number 4 (T96). Cambridge: MIT Press, winter 1982.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. London:
Sheed and Ward, 1979.
Growtowsky, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre.
New York: Simon and Shuster, 1968.
Krondorfer, BjÖrn, ed. Body Bible: Interpreting
and Experiencing Biblical Narratives. Philadelphia: Trinity Press,
1992.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Robert Denoon Cumming, ed. The
Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Vintage Books, 1965.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: an Introduction.
New York: Routledge, 2002.
Stanislavski, Constantin. An Actor Prepares.
Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, trans. New York: Routledge, 1964.
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure
and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.
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