By Rita Grimaldi
The Hero and the Mask
I usually choose
the hero of the story to tell the story. A mask representing the story’s hero
tells his own story. This was not the case in last night’s telling of The Boy Who Lived With Bears. The Boy is
the hero of the story. The story is about the boy’s journey out of the world of
humans and into the wild world of the bears. And then back into the world of
humans. Yet it never crossed my mind to have the boy tell the story. As I
consider the power and emotion in last night’s performance, I wonder why I did
not consider using a mask representing the Boy as the teller.
The Boy,
his Uncle and the Bear
The deep
unconscious answer is that I thought the boy in the story was too vulnerable to
be the teller. Certainly there have been other vulnerable heroes that have told
their stories in mask through me. The Curious Girl’s story told last March is
an example on one of these heroes (see our YouTube video).
But while the girl
resolves her vulnerability by overcoming her adversary, the boy in this story
does not. His adversary repents his bad behaviour but my question is would this
repentance last. That is why I rewrote the ending of the original story to say
that after the boy leaves Mother Bear she still watches to see that his uncle
treats him well. My feeling is that even at the end of the story the boy needs to
have her protection. Mother Bear says to the boy “Grandson, we will always be
your relatives.”
This statement
confirms that she will always be there to help him. As the storyteller I wanted
to feel her strength and power as a protective force. I wanted to know that it
would be there as long as the boy was a child.
The Boy, the Bear and the Spirit of the Northern Forest
So I chose the
protective bear to tell the story. But the boy had his moments of dialogue
through the bear. The most powerful section of the boy’s dialogue is when the
Mother Bear describes him crawling out of the log to defend his adopted bear
family. Mother Bear says in the boy’s voice, “Stop! Don’t hurt my family.” So
in my body wearing the bear mask, I felt both the power and strength of Mother
Bear and the vulnerability and courage of the boy. Still, this was not enough.
I wanted a second
level of protection. So in the last week before performance, I added the Tree Spirit
mask. This mask portrayed the spirit of
the northern forest. The Tree Spirit mask added the magic ability of a spirit
presence who was able to witness the evil deed of the uncle and to bring the
help of the animals to the boy.
Performance in the Black Bear Mask
The Experience of Telling the Story
The two masks I
used to tell this story caused almost overwhelming feelings of different forms
of identity in me. Once I accepted the power of the bear into me (read previous
posts above) it swept over my body like a wave of strength. It gathered and
focused all the power of my body in the story’s task of protecting its own life
and the lives of its bear cubs and its human cub. The Tree Spirit mask, taking
the role of the Spirit of the Northern Forest, gave me a real tangible
presence, inside my body, of the spirit reality of nature.
The experience of
rehearsing and telling this story in these two masks brought me into a feeling
mode that I have not experienced before in mask. Usually when I perform in
mask, there is a cognitive track running simultaneously with the feeling of the
story. This performance obliterated the cognitive function of my mind. My mind
ran on the Bear’s feelings of power, strength and protection of her young and
on the Tree Spirit’s feeling of magic and spiritual reality.
Having lived this
story through these two masks, I will always have some part of the strength of
Mother Bear inside me. And I will always have some of the Tree Spirit’s feeling
of the spirit of the forest inside me.
This is the
achievement of performing this story in these masks. And it is an achievement
that will always remain with me.
All
rights reserved by Rita Grimaldi (2014)
Rita
welcomes your comments on her Black Bear mask series of posts.
She can be contacted at peterboroughstorytellers@cogeco.ca
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invite you to visit www.facebook.com/peterboroughstorytellers
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