Masks and Mask Making

Adapted from a PowerPoint presentation & lecture notes by Dr. Kelly S. Taylor, delivered as Featured Speaker to the Third Annual Patti Pace Performance Festival academic conference at Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville Georgia, 14 February 2003.

The mask is one item on a very few short lists of universal artifacts.  All cultures make and use masks.  It is unknown when the first masks were made; cave paintings in France seem to portray what some archeologists believe are human beings in animal costumes.  When we create projections of what humans would be like in the future, we frequently have them wearing masks.  Why would something that, on first glance, seems so trivial be so essential to so many people for so long?

A mask is -- in the broadest and simplest definition -- any device that wholly or partially conceals the face.

I think the face is the key to the mask's universal appeal.  The face, as you know, is what we call the front of the head.  You can live without arms, legs, or other assorted appendages, but you cannot lose your head.  We keep important things on the front part of the head, breathing holes, seeing holes, and a Cheeto-eating hole.  Sometimes we have to cover or shield these essential holes and still have our hands free.  Enter masks.

Not all masks are purely functional, though.  In fact, when I say “mask”, you probably don’t think of a strictly functional one.  One commentator claims that there is a popular contemporary misconception that “Masks unleash uncontrollable powers in individuals and that have taken on misleading associations with the darker side of human nature.”

I think the people who wear these sorts of masks would disagree with her… either that, or they’re living the myth, baby.

Cuteness.

Babies learn to recognize faces and sustain eye contact.  This results in otherwise selfish adults bonding with the little parasites.  So the face is a recognizable pattern that exists in our earliest memories.  So early, in fact, that you don’t remember any more than you recall thinking “Toes?  What the hell are these?  Can I eat them?”  Babies know that faces are important.  That’s why you can play hide-the-face with babies.  Faces are an image from our earliest organized thinking.  It is a symbol that we don’t understand -- so it is mysterious -- but it is demonstrably life-sustaining -- and of vital importance, therefore powerful -- and that what they provide are essential to forming emotional bonds.

The power of the mask is the power of the face.

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Masks fall into six main categories:

Full Masks

Half Masks -- (top half or bottom half)

Stick Masks

Helmet Masks

Crest Masks – don’t touch the face; worn like a hat

Materials:

Wood, decorated with beads or shells, paper, leather, plastic, metals from tin to gold.

Healing

Sometimes the healing is more metaphorical.  These are masks from Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico.  Both positive and negative emotions about death are part of this event.  It is a way of coming to terms with the deep human emotions surrounding death.

Enlighten

Castigation

In medieval Europe there was a long-standing and well documented tradition of mask wearing at carnivals.  Carnival, as you Mikhail Bahtin fans out there know, was a time when the social order was temporarily inverted.  During this time of ubiquitous chaos it was acceptable for mask-wearers to poke fun at the powerful public figures and critique the status quo.

It’s a shame we don’t do that sort of thing anymore, isn’t it?

-Another quality of masks that I find to be of the most interest to people in Performance Studies is their transformative power.

Transformation

This ugly little mask from Venice is called a larva mask.  My initial assumption was that the name referenced a resemblance to a maggot.  But that turns out not to be the case.  In Latin, “larva” originally meant either a “mask” or a butterfly or ghost.  Thus the caterpillar is a “mask” the butterfly wears until it is transformed into a moth.

Masks carry a double awareness.  They signpost mimesis.  We are simultaneously aware of the character suggested by the mask and the presence of the person hidden by the mask.  Masks are liminal.

These masks intertwine the natural and supernatural worlds.  The double awareness of the simple larva mask is quadruple here.  The viewer is aware of the stylized face of the character from nature, the hidden face of the character from the spirit world represented with a human faced mask, and underneath it all, hidden real human face of the performer.

By creating a stylized, and abstracted, version of the human face, masks serve as a constant reminder of the inherently abstract and metaphorical nature of performance itself.  They alert the viewer to look at the performance text as a metaphor as well.