By Rita Grimaldi
Who am I? Who are my people? And where do I belong?
These are questions that are asked by many of the old stories. In the story of The Boy Who Lived With Bears these are the questions that define the boy. The boy has been orphaned. The uncle, his only relative, leaves him to die in a forest cave. The boy has no one and no place to belong to in the world of humans. But luckily, as the story progresses, Bear Mother adopts the boy and he comes to belong to her family and to world of nature.
On Becoming Bear Mother
Bear Mother’s answers to the above three question might be…
Who am I? - I am the most powerful animal in the forest. (In the story, Bear Mother says to the boy, “We walk slowly through the forest and no other animal bothers us”.)
Who are my people? - 'My people’ are her family of bear cubs.
Where do I belong? – I belong in the forest.
Now comes my first difficulty in performing this story in mask. The Bear mask has the power of the bear but in my first rehearsals of the story, I was not able to be in sync with this raw animal expression of female power. I am not used to being inside a female mask with such a strong animal physical power attached to its identity. As a teller and performer, I could not yet answer the three questions as Bear Mother does above.
And answering the three questions as the mask and story answer them is absolutely necessary for telling a story in mask.
Two years ago, I told the story of Iron John using my Wild Man mask. The Wild Man was a powerful character living fully in the natural world and, like Bear Mother, he too looked after a young boy. The masculine power of the Wild Man mask felt right and good to me. But with the Bear mask, I must get used to its feminine physical power. I am thinking that perhaps my smaller, less powerful female self requires an answer to a fourth question:
How will the bear, who has great physical power, use her power?
In the first story told by the Bear mask – The Navaho Emergence Cycle - Bear/Woman uses her great physical power for revenge and killing. In the second story – The Boy Who Lived With Bears – which will be told by Bear mask, the Mother Bear mask will use her great physical power to nurture and protect her cubs.
In this story, the Bear Mother assesses danger and knows when to take a stand, when to flee and when to hide. The surprising ending to the version I will tell in the Black Bear mask is that the human boy risks his small, unpowerful self to defend his adopted Bear Mother and his sibling cubs. In other words, to defend his family.
Here is a last look at Bear Mother’s answers to what are now my four questions.
- Who am I? I am a powerful, female wild animal.
- Who are my people? My people are my bear cubs and my adopted human cub.
- Where do I belong? I belong in the natural world of the forest.
- How will I use my great physical power? I will use my power in the best way to defend myself and my cubs, taking into account the resources of my enemies.
Rita feeling the power of the Black Bear mask in its forest.
Helpful Coaching in the Powerful Physiology of the Black Bear Mask
To help me prepare to be Bear Mother, I asked a friend to coach me in understanding the physical power of the female bear. My friend is a scuba diver and is far more attuned to physical activity then I am.
She began by describing the Bear’s head. “A bear has a big head,” she said, gesturing with her open hands, one to each side of her head.
“And the bear’s shoulders are massive,” she said, hunching her own shoulders forward and then moving them powerfully from side to side.
“And the bear’s legs and hips are big and strong.” As she said this, she placed her hands on her own hips to signify strength. My friend ended by saying, “And all this strength she uses to defend her cubs.”
This was a very meaningful moment for me.
What I gained from this coaching was not so much what my friend said but how she said it. With her gestures and posture, she physically told me about the strength of the female bear. In using her whole body, she told me a powerful story about the animal’s strength.
I will let that demonstrated physical strength enter into me and then I will let it manifest in its own way within my body. The gestures that communicate the bear’s strength and power will evolve within me in a way that will be authentic to my own body.
The birth of the Black Bear mask and linking Bear mask’s first story to the second story it will tell
When I began mask making, the Black Bear mask was the second powerful mask I made. Coyote mask was the first. They were both made to tell the same story. In The Navaho Emergence Cycle, Coyote falls in love with the chief’s daughter and marries her. As the story progresses, Coyote through his trickster behavior, gets himself killed and the chief’s daughter blames her brothers.
In order to have the physical power to avenge her husband Coyote’s death, the chief’s daughter turns herself into a bear and begins to kill her brothers. She kills all but her youngest brother. But he is able to kill her because she has made herself vulnerable by leaving her heart outside of her body. Divine power revives her dead bear body as a real bear, the ancestor of all wild bears. The youngest brother instructs this bear not to harm humans.
This is the first story that Bear mask has lived and told. And now I see a possibility.
Perhaps the real bear at the end of this first story is the ancestor of the mother bear in The Boy Who Lived With Bears. That is a fine thought. It links the two stories in a way that goes beyond Bear/Woman leaving her heart outside the body to a new possibility of Bear Mother using her heart to nurture her cubs. For me, it shows a progression of the use of female physical power toward good ends.
Now I have arrived at a fitting place to begin rehearsing the story of The Boy Who Lived With Bears.
________________________________________
Part Three of this series will be posted on Monday, February 17th. In this posting, Rita will talk about the addition of a second mask to the storytelling performance.
All rights reserved by Rita Grimaldi (2014)
If you wish to send a personal comment to Rita, you can contact her at www.peterboroughstorytellers.cogeco.ca
Have you visited our Facebook page? Why not check it out?
www.facebook.com/peterboroughstorytellers
No comments:
Post a Comment