Charging: Let the Spirit Leap Forth
'Charging' is a process of breathing life into a mask for performance. This is my ritual that allows me to step into the life of another, leaving ‘me’ behind in the wings. This spiritual process sometimes gets forgotten in the West, as we simply pick up the next mask, stick it on our face and step onto a stage. Without a connection at a very primitive level, we risk leaving the spirit backstage and find ourselves forcing a character out through a face-shaped piece of leather. As a mask performer - more than in any other type of performance - you know when your mask is not alive for the audience; when they can see you on stage. It’s happened to me a few times and it jolted me like a bolt of lightning: “They can see me. You can see me,” the voice in my head said and suddenly I felt vulnerable and lost on stage. It’s not a feeling I want to experience again.
Mask performance dates back to the earliest civilisations, right back to the Shamans who would dance and chant, wearing animal skin, full body masks, allowing the spirit of the beast to enter them to guide the hunt. Eastern cultures still retain this element of ritual spirituality, taking days to prepare before a performance. The masks of Balinese Topeng are kept in a sacred place and performers pray many times before the show to the protective spirits for guidance in performance:
“a dancer may receive a message of advice or support in his dreams from his ancestors, or his gurus, or from the spirits of the masks”
Preparing for the role, the performer needs to allow themselves to be stripped of their own self, completely, and find an absolute neutrality and openness - Jacques Lecoq called this disponibilité. In those moments, when you look into the eyes of the mask, you allow yourself to transcend the physical object to feel the life that lives within it. At that moment where your face connects, the life of the mask fills you and as you breathe, the spirit enters you. It is from the breath that characters begin; the breath dictates the voice and the movement, the shape and the tension; the breath connects you to the mask so that you are in total complicité with the character.
My usual masks have recently been spending far too much time inside a suitcase, whilst I’ve been stuck behind a different kind of mask. Every time I open those suitcases, I see my old familiars, each one a life, a personality, a friend I know well. Easing them out, holding the mask before me, I read its mind and allow myself to be consumed by its energy so that I can step into this life for a capsule time, to speak with a voice and words that are not mine, letting the spirit of the mask leap forth.
I wrote a short 'poem' for Theatre Dance and Performance Training Journal recently, called ‘Charging‘. You can read it here:
