TELLING STORIES IN MASK (WITH PHOTOS)

By Rita Grimaldi

         

Since 1994 I have been performing stories in mask. These performances follow this pattern; first I drum a steady even heartbeat rhythm. Then I add voice to this rhythm telling the audience that we will enter another realm - the realm of the story. After this I stop drumming and lift the mask and put it on. Raising a small mirror I look through the eyeholes of the mask at my changed face. I lay the mirror down and begin to speak in the first person, not in my voice but in the voice of the story character. I am someone else. I tell the story with that person’s face and body and being. I have done this process many times - for small and large audiences - outdoors and inside. But I have never really understood it. Now I write to gain understanding.

Making the Mask

The process of mask making begins with my own face. Plastercine or clay is molded onto a plaster replica of my face. The eyes of the mask are molded over my eyes leaving a round hole at the pupil so I can see through the mask eyes. The mouth of the mask is over my mouth and when I talk the mask mouth moves as my mouth moves. At the moment I begin to tell the story the mask person and I form on being.

A Doorway of Faces

Coyote was my first story mask. It was beyond my sculpting skills to make coyote’s face but he flowed out from my hands onto the plasticine. The first story I performed in this mask was the story of Coyote’s love for a girl whose family rejected him. His voice was strong. I felt the power of his ability to bring her back to life after her death and the friction of his relationship to her human family. Many masks followed. Here is my litany of the masks I have made between 1992 and 2002: three bear masks, three bird masks, Granny Shelock. two young girls, Katrine from Beckets Mother Courage, Coyote, Monkey King, a native woman and a native man, two bone dwarves, a goat, fierce rose and a tree spirit I saw in a dream. All these faces are like doorways into someone else’s world. I enter this world not as myself but as the story character the mask represents. When performing in mask, the doorway and the mask identity bond into the story. The story becomes my life for the time I tell it.

Less and Less

In the last nine years I have only performed stories in mask three times and I have made no new masks. Why has my mask making and performing of stories in mask diminished so radically? If I examine my deeper story choices in the last nine years I see that I have become enamoured with words. I enjoy the words themselves rather than the experience of being the words. Somewhere I lost the bravery of becoming the story person. I lost the courage to take on the story person’s voice and physicality and feelings. It became easier to just tell the story. I don’t mean to say that during the mask period I did not tell stories out of mask. I did. But the most powerful experiences were telling in mask. And these experiences I have for the most part set aside.

A Child absorbs Rita’s Mask Storytelling.

In 1996 I told the story of Bone Dwarf in mask at the Peterborough Folk Festival. In 1997 I was again telling stories at the Peterborough Folk Festival and after the telling a little girl came up to me with her mother. She looked up at me and said, “You’re the one who told Windigo stories. I said yes. Then her mother told me that after hearing my stories the year before her daughter had had a great desire to hear more Windigo stories. So the mother had searched until she found a book containing these stories. The little girl cut in and kept asking me to come to her house to see this book. I was really touched. I could hardly believe that a four-year-old child could have such a bond with this story and the Bone Dwarf mask.

Our Identity and the Identity of the Old Story Characters

Last week, thinking of writing on mask, I asked my partner Paul what it was like to hear me tell stories in mask. He answered, “It isn’t you who is telling the story. It is some one else”.

All of us have our habitual identity or gestalt of identities.

To give up being who we are even for a short time takes risk and courage.

The reward for doing this in mask is profound.

It allows the seeing of the world with other eyes.

And on top of the milk of seeing as someone else sees

Is the cream of seeing another reality through those eyes.

The reality of the story or myth the mask character lives in.

This is the old reality,

The reality before that of our modern world,

The reality that we dream in

And hope in

And die in.

                                                                      COYOTE MASK

                   

                                                   BONE DWARF MASK

August 22, 2012

Posted with the permission of Rita Grimaldi. Rita is a founding member of the Peterborough Storytellers and is an active, popular story teller in her community.