# Masks and Trance

**1**

**George Devine**

George Devine gave a Mask class to the Royal Court writers' group in 1958. He arrived with a box full of
dusty Masks that had last been used some years before at the Old Vic
Theatre School. I didn't like the look of them:
they reminded me of surgical prostheses, and I didn't like what he was
saying either. Already I was feeling threatened.
George talked to us for about
forty minutes, and then gave us a demonstration.
He retired to the far end of the
long, shadowy room, put a Mask on, looked in a mirror, and turned to
face us---or rather 'it', 'the Mask', turned to face us.
We saw a 'toad-god' who laughed
and laughed as if we were funny and despicable.
I don't know how long the 'scene'
lasted, it was timeless. Then George removed the Mask and
suggested that we try.

Next day he was despondent. He thought the class had
been a failure and that this had been his fault.
He said that none of the Masks had
been 'inhabited', by which he meant that none of us had been
_possessed_ by the Masks.
I tried to explain how amazed we'd
been, but he insisted that the class had been a poor one, and that I was
wrong to be so enthusiastic.

William Gaskill borrowed the Masks, and began to give Mask classes
along the lines laid down by George.
He collected some old clothes, and
some props, and developed the theory that the actor should shock himself
with the Mask's reflection. The time at the mirror
was to be kept short, and the student was to be pushed into acting on
whatever impulse came to him. George's ideas related
to Oriental theatre (Noguchi had designed his King Lear) but we had seen
the toad-god, and thought more in terms of voodoo than the Noh Theatre.
Gaskill persuaded me to give Mask
classes as well: 'It shouldn't all be left to me,' he said, and we both
gave classes to groups who visited the
theatre.

It's true that an actor can wear a Mask casually, and just pretend to
be another person, but Gaskill and myself were absolutely clear that we
were trying to induce _trance_ states.
The reason why one automatically
talks and writes of Masks with a capital 'M' is that one really feels
that the genuine Mask actor is inhabited by a spirit.
Nonsense perhaps, but
[that's
what the experience is like, and has always been like.
To understand the Mask it's also
necessary to understand the nature of trance
itself.]

One day Devine invited me to lunch, which he never did unless he wanted
to discuss something. He was embarrassed (he was
actually a shy man), and finally when we were almost through coffee and
the restaurant was practically empty, he said that he thought Bill and I
had misunderstood the nature of the Mask.
At this time George was giving
comedy classes at the Studio, so I suggested a swop: I would give his
comedy classes, and he would give my Mask
classes.

George allowed his students to work in a very casual way.
Bill and I had tried to condition
a response to the wearing of a Mask by insisting that whenever one was
on the face, the actor should attempt to enter the 'Mask state'.
This led to Masks being handled as
if sacred. George shocked me by allowing
actors to talk as themselves while actually wearing the Masks.
They'd choose clothes or wander
about with the Masks on without any attempt to be in character.
I think George was overreacting to
the way we'd been teaching, because even in performance these Masks
often spoke with the wearer's voice, although George had explained that
they'd need speech lessons before they could speak 'as the Masks'.
Eventually, George said that the
students who had worked first with William Gaskill and myself were
usually the better ones, so that our method must have something to
recommend it. I think this was because we used
to hurl the students into the work, whereas George was much gentler.
He was very good at explaining
exactly when a Mask was 'inhabited', but it was really up to the actors.
Many of his students played safe,
and kept to their preferred areas acting with Masks on, rather than
being possessed. George's attitude was really very
different from mine, and possibly Gaskill's; George was primarily
interested in developing characters that could be used
_without the
Mask_ when the actor was cast in
plays. I saw the Masks as astounding
performers, as offering a new form of theatre, and I didn't care what
Mask creatures arrived, so long as they were possessed.
The Masks we were using covered
the top half of the face, leaving the mouth and lower half of the cheeks
exposed. George had learnt the technique
from Michel Saint-Denis in the 1930s, and Michel had been taught by
Jacques Copeau (his uncle). These half masks are
usually called 'comic masks' but George called them 'Character Masks'.
He thought it important to hand on
the tradition unchanged, and he was shocked when he found that I was
mixing Character Masks with Tragic Masks (Tragic Masks work by a quite
[different
technique---see page 184](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_page_184)).
My students showed him one of the
mixed scenes they had prepared with me, and they reported him as saying
that it did work, but that he still didn't like it!
When I visited him during his last
illness, almost the last thing he said to me was 'I still don't think
that Mask work was right.'

George cited Chaplin's Tramp as a Mask, since the character had come
from the clothes and the make-up. Here's Chaplin's own
account (from his autobiography).

'On the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big
shoes, and a cane and a derby hat.
I wanted everything to be a
contradiction; the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the
shoes large. I was undecided whether to look
young or old, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older
man, I added a small moustache which, I reasoned, would add age without
hiding my expression . .
.

'. .
.
I had no idea of the character.
But the moment I was dressed, the
clothes and make-up made me feel the kind of person he was.
I began to know him, and by the
time I walked on the stage he was fully born.
When I confronted Sennett I
assumed the character and strutted about, swinging my cane and parading
before him. Gags and comedy ideas went racing
through my mind . .
.

'. .
.
My character was different and
unfamiliar to the Americans. But with the clothes on
I felt he was a reality, a living person.
In fact he ignited all sorts of
crazy ideas that I would never have dreamt of until I was dressed and
made-up as the Tramp.'

Elsewhere Chaplin has said, 'I realised I would have to spend the rest
of my life finding out about the creature.
For me he was fixed, complete, the
moment I looked in the mirror and saw him for the first time, yet even
now I don't know all the things that are to be known about
him.'^[1](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_26)^
(Isabel Quigly, _Charlie Chaplin---Early
Comedies_, Studio Vista,
1968.)

**2**

**Russians**

At first I thought that Mask work was completely unlike Stanislavsky's
concept of actor training, but this isn't true.
Here's Stanislavsky describing the
Mask state in _Building a
Character_.
Kostya, a drama student, has been
told to put on a character make-up, but nothing satisfies him.
He creams his face to remove the
greasepaint and then, unexpectedly .
.
.

[' All
the other colours blurred . .
.
It was difficult to distinguish
where my nose was, or my eyes, or my lips.
I smeared some of the same cream
on my beard and moustache and then finally all over my wig.
Some of the hair clotted into
lumps . .
.
and then, almost as if I were in
some delirium, I trembled, my heart pounded, I did away with my
eyebrows, powdered myself at random, smeared the back of my hands with a
greenish colour and the palms with light pink.
I did all this with a quick, sure
touch, for this time I knew who I was representing, and what kind of
fellow he was!']

He then paced the room feeling 'how all the parts of my body, features,
facial lines, fell into their proper places and established themselves .
.
.
I glanced in the mirror and did
not recognise myself. Since I had looked into it the
last time a fresh transformation had taken place in me.
"It is he, it is he!"
I exclaimed .
.
.'

He presents himself to the director (Tortsov), introducing himself as
'the critic'. He's surprised to find his body
doing things by itself, things he hadn't
intended.

'Quite unexpectedly my twisted leg came out in advance of me and threw
my body more to the right. I removed my top hat
with careful exaggeration and executed a polite bow .
.
.'

He then played a scene with the director, having no difficulty in
sustaining this weird character he had become, and knowing always
exactly what to say. Later Kostya reflects: 'Can I
really say that this creature is not part of me?
I derived him from my own nature.
I divided myself, as it were, into
two personalities. One continued as an actor, the
other as an observer.'

At the time when Copeau was working with Masks in France,
Stanislavsky's favourite pupil Vakhtangov was working with them in
Russia. Nikolai Gorchakov has left an
account of those rehearsals. Vakhtangov set up a
circus in which the Masks were to be auditioned as clowns.
They were to do things that would
make the spectators '. .
.
applaud wildly, rush on the stage
and hug and kiss you! Or at least roll on the floor with
laughter. Go ahead, start!
.
.
.'

Vakhtangov threw an incredible number of instructions to the Masks
until they were lost and confused.
Someone played circus music and
they had no choice but to perform.
They tried imaginary gymnastics,
and ice-skated, and pretended to juggle, and finally succeeded in
getting warm applause from the onlookers.
'Do you really think you've hit on
the "grain" of the Masks merely by doing a few exercises in front of the
audience?' said Vakhtangov.
'You haven't even started to act
as Masks! .
.
.
You must vie with one another in
captivating the audience [by
every possible means---talk, act, dance, sing, do acrobatics, do
anything. Understand?']

Things got worse until finally Vahktangov left, the Masks continuing
without him. Suddenly two of them became
genuine Masks in the characters of Tartaglia and Pantalone.
Tartaglia was eating a cake, and
Pantalone was starving. Tartaglia spoke with a stutter
(which was unexpected) and said that Pantalone would have to earn it,
but he 'graciously allowed Pantalone to eat the crumbs remaining on his
palm each time he swallowed a bit.
This made Pantalone very happy,
and it was fun watching him pick up these crumbs while Tartaglia
lectured him on the necessity of work .
.
.

'The episode was fairly long, but we were so enchanted we did not
notice it. We were not much interested in
their chatter, but were fascinated by their naive seriousness, the kind
one sees only in two children when one is sucking a toffee and the other
cannot tear his eyes away from this sweet process, looking enviously at
the happy owner . .
.

'Tartaglia was so carried away that he began to tease Pantalone,
passing the cake under his nose every time he nipped a bit off.
Suddenly, Pantalone opened wide
his mouth and snapped up about three-quarters of what remained.
Tartaglia burst into tears while
Pantalone, his mouth full, gestured that it served him right---he should
not have teased him.'

Vakhtangov had been watching from a doorway.
He immediately set up another
scene with the same characters. Pantalone was to be a
dentist, and Tartaglia his patient.
Tartaglia panicked, stepped out of
character and said he didn't want to do
it.

' "And what do the dentists say to that?"
Vakhangov turned gravely to his
partners.

' "There have been many cases in history of medicine of patients
refusing to be treated," Kudryavtsev replies seriously, without
forgetting that he was Pantalone, the learned secretary of King Altoum's
court. "Such refusal is a sure sign of
illness. In this particular case I presume
we'll have to extract the aching teeth not only through the mouth, but
also through other apertures, ears and nostrils included .
.
."
'

Afterwards Vakhtangov commented that they had at first tried to 'think
up' what to do. 'I don't deny the importance of
thinking, inventing or planning, but if you have to improvise on the
spot (and that's exactly what we have to do), you must act and not
think. It's action we must have---wise,
foolish or naive, simple or complicated,
[but]
_action_.'
(Nikolai Gorchakov,
_The Vakhtangov School of Stage
Art_, Foreign Languages Publishing
House, Moscow.)

Vakhangov forced his students to act
_spontaneously_.
This produces a light trance state
in which the actors feel as if something else is controlling them.
They 'know' what to do, whereas
normally they 'choose' what to do.
The state is regressive, but they
experience no self-consciousness.

**3**

**Destroying the Mask**

Masks seem exotic when you first learn about them, but to my mind Mask
acting is no stranger than any other kind: no more weird than the fact
that an actor can blush when his character is embarrassed, or turn white
with fear, or that a cold will stop for the duration of the performance,
and then start streaming again as soon as the curtain falls.
'What's Hecuba to him?'
asks Hamlet, and the mystery
remains. Actors can be possessed by the
character they play just as they can be possessed by Masks.
Many actors have been unable to
really 'find' a character until they put on the make-up, or until they
try on the wig, or the costume. We find the Mask strange
because we don't understand how irrational our responses to the face are
anyway, and we don't realise that much of our lives is spent in some
form of trance, i.e. absorbed.
What we assume to be 'normal
consciousness' is comparatively rare, it's like the light in the
refrigerator: when you look in, there you are ON but what's happening
when you don't look in?

It's difficult to understand the power of the Mask if you've only seen
it an illustrations, or in museums.
The Mask in the showcase may have
been intended as an ornament on the top of a vibrating, swishing
haystack. Exhibited without its costume, and
without a film, or even photograph, of the Mask in use, we respond to it
only as an aesthetic object. Many Masks are beautiful
or striking, but that's not the point.
A Mask is a device for driving the
personality out of the body and allowing a spirit to take possession of
it. A very beautiful Mask may be
completely dead, while a piece of old sacking with a mouth and eye-holes
torn in it may have tremendous
vitality.

In its original culture nothing had more power than the Mask.
It was used as an oracle, a judge,
an arbitrator. Some were so sacred that any
outsider who caught a glimpse of them was executed.
They cured diseases, they made
women sterile. Some tribes were so scared of
their power that they carved the eye-holes so that the wearers could see
only [the
ground. Some Masks were led on chains to
keep them from attacking the onlookers.
One African Mask had a staff, the
touch of which was believed to cause leprosy.
In some cultures dead people are
reincarnated as Masks---the back of the skull is sliced off, a stick
rammed in from ear to ear, and someone dances, gripping the stick with
his teeth. It's difficult to imagine the
intensity of that experience.]

Masks are surrounded by rituals that reinforce their power.
A Tibetan Mask was taken out of
its shrine once a year and set up overnight in a locked chapel.
Two novice monks sat all night
chanting prayers to prevent the spirit of the Mask from breaking loose.
For miles around the villagers
barred their doors at sunset and no one ventured out.
Next day the Mask was lowered over
the head of the dancer who was to incarnate the spirit at the centre of
a great ceremony. What must it feel like to be that
dancer, when the terrifying face becomes his
own?

We don't know much about Masks in this culture, partly because the
church sees the Mask as pagan, and tries to suppress it wherever it has
the power (the Vatican has a museum full of Masks confiscated from the
'natives'), but also because this culture is usually hostile to trance
states. We distrust spontaneity, and try
to replace it by _reason_: the Mask was driven
out of theatre in the same way that improvisation was driven out of
music. Shakers have stopped shaking.
Quakers don't quake any more.
Hypnotised people used to stagger
about, and tremble. Victorian mediums used to rampage
about the room. Education itself might be seen as
primarily an anti-trance activity.^[2](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_24)^

The church struggled against the Mask for centuries, but what can't be
done by force is eventually done by the all-pervading influence of
Western education. The US Army burned the voodoo
temples in Haiti and the priests were sentenced to hard labour with
little effect, but voodoo is now being suppressed in a more subtle way.
The ceremonies are faked for
tourists. The genuine ceremonies now last
for a much shorter time.

I see the Mask as something that is continually flaring up in this
culture, only to be almost immediately snuffed out.
No sooner have I established a
tradition of Mask work somewhere than the students start getting taught
the 'correct' movements, just as they learn a phoney 'Commedia dell'
Arte' technique. The manipulated Mask is hardly
worth having, and is easy to drive out of the theatre.
The Mask begins as a sacred
object, and then becomes secular and is used in festivals and in the
theatre. Finally it is remembered only in
the feeble imitations of Masks sold in the tourist shops.
The Mask dies when it is entirely
subjected to the will of the
performer.

**4**

**Faces**

We have instinctive responses to faces.
Parental feelings seem to be
triggered by flat faces and big foreheads.
We try and be rational and assert
that 'people can't help their appearance', yet we feel we know all about
Snow White and the Witch, or Laurel and Hardy, just by the look of them.
The truth is that we learn to hold
characteristic expressions as a way of maintaining our personalities,
and we're far more influenced by faces than we realise.
When I was a child there were
faces in books that were so terrible that I had to jam the books tight
into the bookcase for fear they would somehow leak out into the house.
Adults lose this vision in which
the face _is_ the person, but after
their first Mask class students are amazed by passers-by in the
street---suddenly they see 'evil' people, and 'innocent' people, and
people holding their faces in Masks of pain, or grief, or pride, or
whatever. Our faces get 'fixed' with age as
the muscles shorten, but even in very young people you can see that a
decision has been taken to appear tough, or stupid, or defiant.
(Why should anyone wish to look
stupid? Because then your teachers expect
less of you.) Sometimes in acting class a student will break out of his
habitual facial expression and you won't know who he is until you look
at his clothes. I've seen this transformation
several times, and each time the student is flooded with great joy and
exhilaration.^[3](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_22)^

Even if you just alter the face with make-up, astounding effects can be
produced. A journalist called Bill
Richardson told me that he'd been asked to take part in a circus matinee
as one of the clowns. It was when he was cub reporter,
and his editor had thought it might make an interesting story.
Once the make-up was on he became
'possessed' and found himself able to tumble about, catch his feet in
buckets, and so on, as if he'd been a clown in another incarnation.
He stayed with the circus for some
weeks, but he never got the same feeling without the
make-up.

Another journalist, John Howard Griffin, disguised himself as a black
man. He
wrote:

'The transformation was total and shocking.
I had expected to see myself
disguised, but this was something else.
I was imprisoned in the flesh of
an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship.
All traces of the John Griffin I
had been were wiped from existence.
I looked in the mirror and saw
reflected nothing of the white [John
Griffin's past. No, the reflection led back to
Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless
struggles against the mark of blackness.
Suddenly, almost with no mental
preparation, no advance hint, it became clear and it permeated my whole
being. My inclination was to fight
against it. I had gone too far .
.
.
The completeness of the
transformation appalled me. It was unlike anything I
had imagined. I became two men, the observing
one and the one who panicked, who felt negroid even into the depths of
his entrails.' (John Howard Griffin,
]_Black Like
Me'_, Panther,
1969.)

It's not surprising then to find that Masks produce changes in the
personality, or that the first sight of oneself wearing a Mask and
reflected in a mirror should be so disturbing.
A bad Mask will produce little
effect, but a good Mask will give you the feeling that you know all
about the creature in the mirror. You feel that the Mask
is about to take over. It is at this moment of crisis
that the Mask teacher will urge you to continue.
In most social situations you are
expected to maintain a consistent personality.
In a Mask class you are encouraged
to 'let go' and allow yourself to become
possessed.

**5**

**Trance**

Many actors report 'split' states of consciousness, or amnesias; they
speak of their body acting automatically, or as being inhabited by the
character they are playing.

Fanny Kemble: 'The curious part of acting, to me, is the sort of double
process which the mind carries on at once, the combined operation of
one's faculties, so to speak, in diametrically opposite directions; for
instance, in that very last scene of Mrs Beverley, while I was half dead
with crying in the midst of _real_ grief, created by an
entirely _unreal_ cause, I perceived
that my tears were falling like rain all over my silk dress, and
spoiling it; and I calculated and measured most accurately the space
that my father would require to fall in, and moved myself and my train
accordingly in the midst of the anguish I was to feign, and absolutely
did endure.' (William Archer,
_Masks and
Faces_,
1988.)

Sybil Thorndike: 'When you're an actor you cease to be male and female,
you're a person, and you're a person with all the other persons inside
you.' (_Great
Acting_, BBC Publications,
1967.)

Edith Evans: '. .
.
I seem to have an awful lot of
people inside me. Do you know what I mean?
If I understand them I feel
terribly like them [when
I'm doing them . .
.
by thinking you turn into the
person, if you think strongly enough.
It's quite odd sometimes, you
know. You are it, for quite a bit, and
then you're not . .
.'
(]_Great
Acting_.)

In another kind of culture I think it's clear that such actors could
easily talk of being 'possessed' by the character.
It's true that some actors will
maintain that they always remain 'themselves' when they're acting, but
how do they know? Improvisers who maintain that
they're in a normal state of consciousness when the improvise often have
unsuspected gaps in their memories which only emerge when you question
them closely.

It's the same with Mask actors. I remember Roddy
Maude-Roxby in a Mask that got angry during a show at Expo 67.
He, or 'it', started throwing
chairs about, so I walked on stage to stop the scene.
'S' goin' to be all right,' said
the Mask, waving me aside. Afterwards Roddy
remembered the chairs, but not that I'd entered the scene and tried to
stop him. If he'd been in a deeper trance
he'd have forgotten everything. The same kind of
amnesias can be detected in any spontaneous work.
An improviser writes: '.
.
.
If a scene goes badly I remember
it. If it goes well I forget very
quickly.' Orgasms are the
same.

Normally we only know of our trance states by the time jumps.
When an improviser feels that two
hours have passed in twenty minutes, we're entitled to ask where was he
for the missing hour and forty
minutes.

Many people think that to be awake is the same as to be conscious, but
they can be deeply hypnotised while believing that they are in 'everyday
consciousness'. A student assured me that he'd
spent two hours on stage fooling a hypnotist, which is unlikely.
Then he said that funnily enough
he'd been singled out to tell the audience that he'd really just been
pretending, and that he hadn't minded when they laughed, because it
did---by coincidence---happen to be
true!

I knew a hypnotist's assistant who used to be left in store windows as
an advert for the show.

'Of course he doesn't really hypnotise me,' he
said.

'No?'

'No, he used to push needles through me and it hurt, so finally I told
him and now he doesn't push them through me any
more.'

'But why do you agree to sit motionless in shop windows all
day?'

'Well, I like him.'

I can't imagine anyone in a normal state of consciousness sitting
motionless in shop windows day after day
_and_ doing the evening
show. [How
much then are we to trust what anyone tells us about their state of
mind?]

We don't think of ourselves as moving in and out of trance because
we're trained not to. It's impossible to be 'in control'
all the time, but we convince ourselves that we are.
Other people help to stop us
drifting. They will laugh if we don't seem
immediately in possession of ourselves, and we'll laugh too in
acknowledgement of our inappropriate
behaviour.

In 'normal consciousness' I am aware of myself as 'thinking verbally'.
In sports which leave no time for
verbalisation, trance states are common.
If you think: 'The ball's coming
at that angle but it's spinning so that I'll anticipate the direction of
the bounce by . .
.'
you miss!
You don't know you're in a trance
state because whenever you check up, there you are, playing table
tennis, but you may have been in just as deep a trance as the bobsleigh
rider who didn't know he'd lost a thumb until he shook
hands.

Most people only recognise 'trance' when the subject looks
confused---out of touch with the reality around him.
We even think of hypnosis as
'sleep'. In many trance states people are
_more_ in touch, more
observant. I remember an experiment in which
deep trance subjects were first asked how many objects there had been in
the waiting-room. When they were put into trance and
asked again, it was found that they had actually observed more than ten
times the number of objects than they consciously remembered.
Zen Masters, and sorcerers, are
notoriously difficult to creep up on (Castaneda's Don Juan, for
example). In Mask work people report that
perceptions are more intense, and that although they see differently,
they see and sense _more_.

I see the 'personality' as a public-relations department for the real
mind, which remains unknown. My personality always
seems to be functioning, at some level, in terms of what other people
think. If I am alone in a room and
someone knocks on the door, then I 'come back to myself'.
I do this in order to check up
that my social image is presentable: are my flies done up?
Is my social face properly
assembled? If someone enters, and I decide
that I don't have to guard myself, then I can get 'lost in the
conversation'. Normal consciousness is related to
transactions, real or imagined, with other people.
That's how I experience it, and I
note widespread reports of people in isolation, or totally rejected by
other people, who experience 'personality
disintegration'.

When you're worried about what other people might think, the
[personality
is always present. In life-or-death situations
something else takes over. A friend scalded himself
and his mind split immediately into two parts, one of which was a child
screaming with pain, while the other was cold and detached and told him
exactly what to do (he was alone at the time).
If a cobra dropped out of the air
vent into the middle of an acting class, the students might find
themselves on the piano, or outside the door, with no memory of how they
got there. In extremity the body takes over
for us, pushing the personality aside as an unnecessary
encumbrance.]

**6**

**Induction**

How do we enter trance states? I would prefer to ask
'How do we stay out of them?' In the middle of a dark
night I wake up, how do I know I'm awake?
I test for consciousness by moving
a muscle. If I block this impulse to move I
feel a tremendous anxiety. The control I exercise
over the musculature reassures me that 'I'm me'.
By tensing muscles, by shifting
position, by scratching, sighing, yawning, blinking, and so on, we
maintain 'normal consciousness'. Entranced subjects will
sit quite motionless for hours. An audience 'held' by a
theatrical performance suddenly find a need to move, to shift position,
to cough, as the spell breaks.

If you lie down and make your body relax, going through it from feet to
head, and loosening any points of tension that you find, then you easily
float away into fantasy. The substance and shape
of your body seem to change. You feel as if the air
is breathing you, rather than you breathing the air, and the rhythm is
slow and smooth like a great tide.
It's very easy to lose yourself,
but if you feel the presence of a hostile person in the room you break
this trance, seizing hold of the musculature, and becoming 'yourself'
once more.

Meditators use stillness as a means of inducing trance.
So do present-day hypnotists.
The subject doesn't have to be
told to be still, he knows intuitively not to assert control of his body
by picking his nose of rapping his
feet.

When you are 'absorbed' you no longer control the musculature.
You can drive for miles, or play a
movement from a sonata while your personality pays no attention at all.
Nor is your performance
necessarily worse. When a hypnotist takes over the
function normally exercised by the personality, there's no need to leave
the trance. Mask teachers, priests in
possession cults, and hypnotists all play high status in voice
[and
movement. A high-status person whom you
accept as dominant can easily propel you into unusual states of being.
You're likely to respond to his
suggestions, and see, like Polonius, the cloud looking like a whale.
If the Queen knocked unexpectedly
on your door and said 'I wonder if I might use your lavatory?'
then you'd probably be in a very
odd state indeed.]

Eysenck tells the seemingly improbable story of a hypnotist who worked
for a total of three hundred hours on one subject with no apparent
result. When the frustrated hypnotist
finally snarled, 'Go to sleep, you \*\*\*\*\*!'
the subject went straight into
deep trance. I would interpret such an incident
as the subject yielding to the status attack of the
hypnotist.

I once asked a girl to close her eyes while I put a coin under one of
three cups. Secretly I put a coin under each
cup. When I asked her to guess which
cup the coin was under, she was, of course, correct.
After she'd made a correct choice
about six times, she was convinced I was somehow controlling her
thoughts, and moved into a rather disassociated state, so I explained,
and she 'snapped out of it'. I would suggest this as
a possible means of inducing hypnosis.
Alan Mitchell describes a
technique of 'confusion' used by the American hypnotist, Erickson.
He
writes:

'Erickson made a number of conflicting suggestions to a patient: "Lift
your left arm, now your right. Up with the left, down
with the right. Swing the left arm out and the
left arm follows." Eventually the subject became so
confused by these directions, which were woolly and conflicting, that he
was glad to clutch at any straw, so long as it was given to him firmly
enough and in a loud voice. Then, while he was so
confused, if he were told: "Go to sleep", apparently he would drop off
immediately into a deep sleep.' (_Harley Street
Hypnotist_, Harrap,
1959.)

Again we see that the subject is made to feel that his body is out of
control, and becomes subject to a high-status person.
Some hypnotists sit you down, ask
you to stare upwards into their eyes and suggest that your eyelids are
wanting to close---which works because looking upwards is tiring, and
because staring up into a high-status person's eyes makes you feel
inferior. Another method involves getting
you to hold your arm out sideways while suggesting that it's getting
heavier. If you think the hypnotist is
responsible for the heaviness rather than gravity, then you are likely
to accept his control. Hypnotists don't, as sometimes
claimed, ask you to put your hands together and then tell you that you
can't part them, but they do ask you to link them in such
[a
way that it's awkward to part them.
If you believe the hypnotist
responsible for such awkwardness, then you may abandon the attempt to
separate them. If you squeeze your index fingers
hard, and then wait, you'll feel it starting to swell---I imagine this
is an illusion caused by the weakening of the muscles of the compressing
hand. This too can be a way of inducing
trance so long as the subject doesn't realise that the 'swelling' would
be experienced anyway, even without the hypnotist's
suggestion.]^[4](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_20)^

Once you understand that you're no longer held responsible for your
actions, then there's no need to maintain a 'personality'.
Student improvisers asked to
_pretend_ to be hypnotised, show
a sudden improvement. Students asked to pretend to be
_hypnotists_ show no such
improvement.

Many ways of entering trance involve interfering with verbalisation.
Repetitive singing or chanting are
effective, or holding the mind on to single words; such techniques are
often thought of as 'Oriental', but they're
universal.^[5](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_18)^

One dramatic way of entering trance is by 'trumping'.
This was used in a West Indian
play at the Royal Court, with the unwanted result that actors kept going
into real trance, and not just acting it.
It works partly by the 'crowd
effect', everyone repeating the same action and sound, but also by
over-oxygenating the blood. It looks like a
'forward-moving two-step stomp'.

'With the step forward the body is bent forwards from the waist so
sharply as to seem propelled by force.
At the same time the breath
exhaled, or inhaled, with great effort and sound.
The forcefulness of the action
gives justification to the term "labouring" .
.
.
When the spirit possession does
take place . .
.
and individual's legs may seem
riveted to the ground . .
.
or he may be thrown to the
ground.' (S.E.
Simpson,
_Religious Cults of the Caribbean:
Trinidad, Jamaica and Haiti_, Institute of
Caribbean Studies, University of Puerto Rico,
1970.)

Crowds are trance-inducing because the anonymity imposed by the crowd
absolves you of the need to maintain your
identity.

**7**

**Possession**

The type of trance I am concerned with in this essay is the 'controlled
trance', in which permission to remain 'entranced' is given by other
people, either by an individual or a group.
Such trances may be rare, or may
pass unrecognised in this culture, but we should
[consider
them as a normal part of human behaviour.
Researchers who have studied
possession cults report that it is the better adjusted citizens who are
most likely to become possessed. Many people regard
'trance' as a sign of madness, just as they presume that 'madmen' must
be easy to hypnotise. The truth is that if madmen were
capable of being under 'social control' they would never have revealed
the behaviour that categorised them as insane.
It's a tautology to say that
normal people are the most suggestible, since it's because they're the
most suggestible that they're the most
normal!]

If we compare Mask work with 'possession cults', then we can see many
similarities. It's true that the possessed
person is often supposed to remember nothing that happens during the
trance---but this is also observed sometimes in Mask work, even though
it's not demanded. And two types of possession are
often described: an amnesiac and a lucid state.
Possessed people don't seem to
need speech lessons (which Masks do, as described later), but there are
many descriptions of inarticulate sounds
_preceding_ speech.
And sometimes a deeply possessed
Mask will speak from the first
moment.

Every Mask teacher will recognise this situation, reported by Simpson
of a Shango cult: 'One person said, "The drummers are not beating well
tonight." A drummer called out that "It is
no use to drum if you get no response."
Later a woman stood up and
shouted: "You are not singing at all tonight."
The leader appeared and denounced
the group for its lack of
enthusiasm.'

[Like Mask teachers, the 'priests' in possession cults are high status,
but 'indulgent' to the possessed trancers.
Maya Deren describes an incident
in Haiti when someone possessed by the God
Ghede \*](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_3)
arrived at the wrong time. The Houngan (priest)
objected.

' "Oh I just dropped in", he (Ghede) said, making a self-effacing
gesture, "to look around a bit, I'll just stroll around and look things
over." ' (Ghede then asked for nine
cassavas---flat breads.) 'Ghede stood eating two of them at once as if
he was part of the audience, and watched the great ioa (spirit) Ogoun
and Damballa. Then the audience was distracted
by the problem of a man who had climbed up a tree under possession of
Damballa. As the possession seemed about to
leave him the Houngan was begging Damballa to bring the man to earth
before leaving (else the man might fall and kill himself).'
Ghede then missed some of his
cassavas. 'Suddenly Ghede threw a great
tantrum about the thieves who had stolen his remaining cassavas.
He
[caught
hold of the Houngan and shrieked and stamped his feet, meanwhile
Damballa and Ogoun were being ignored.
There was no choice but to buy
Ghede more cassavas and some biscuits to placate
him.]

'Now as the loa turned to walk off with the new food, the Houngan,
smiling, said to him, "Are you sure it wasn't a man in a little
multicoloured cap who stole those
cassavas?"

'Ghede wheeled with enormous eyes of innocence.
"A little cap?
What man in a little cap?"
.
.
.
Someone called out: "Are you sure
you don't know who stole your cassavas?"
Whereupon, looking at us out of
the corner of his eye with a delightful and endearing expression, Ghede
winked once, slowly, and walked away.'
(_The Divine
Horsemen_, Thames and Hudson, London,
1953; Delta Books, New York,
1970.)

Ghede, God of death, and of sexuality, is consumed by raging hungers,
but note the paradox that the supernatural creature who we would expect
to be 'super-adult' is very childlike---exactly as the Masks are.
Ghede, in Deren's description,
sounds exactly like a Mask.

'We asked him why he liked to wear smoked glasses.
"Well," he explained, "I spend so
much time in the dark underworld that it makes my eyes sensitive to the
sun." "Why", we asked then, "do you
remove the right lens so often?" "Well, my dear," he
answered, "it's this way: with my left eye, I watch over the whole
universe. As for the right, I keep that eye
on my food, so that no thief will get
it."'

The character of a Mask will _not_ be like the wearer's
character. Simpson, writing of the Shango
cults, says: 'My informants denied that there is a close correspondence
between the personality characteristics of a power and his followers.
Sometimes a power manifests itself
on a "child" ("horse") whose personality is the exact opposite of the
god's. A devotee may be possessed by a
violent power at one time and by a quiet power on another occasion
according to the work to be done .
.
.
One informant said: "What a person
is afraid to do, he does when possessed."
'

My suspicion is that the number of 'personality types' that emerge in
Mask work is pretty limited. To be sure, we would
have to compare films from different cultures, and analyse the movements
and sounds of the 'spirits'. This research hasn't
been carried out, but just as myths from all over the world show similar
structures, so I believe that wherever there is a 'Pantalone-type' Mask
there will be Pantalones. The same characters
persisted in the Commedia dell' Arte not because the tradition was
sterile, but because the Masks themselves imposed certain ways of
behaving. Chaplin's Tramp has always
existed. Harpo,
[and
Stan Laurel, and Pappa Gueda, and Ranga the Witch, and the Braggard
Soldier, are just there, wherever there is a human
brain.]

I consider the possessed trance as a particular form of the hypnotic
trance. Some people have denied this, but
all the phenomena typical of possession can be induced by hypnosis.
It's true that clinical hypnosis
looks very different, but that is because the hypnotist isn't arranging
a performance before an approving
audience.^[6](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_16)^
As there is hardly any literature on Mask possession, I'll quote some
examples of spirit possession. Anyone teaching the Mask
is likely at some time to encounter deep trance states, so it's useful
to understand their nature.

Here's Lucian's description of a priestess being possessed at Delphi:
'She went blundering frantically about the shrine, with the god mounted
on the nape of her neck, knocking over the tripods that stood in her
path. The hair rose on her scalp, and
when she tossed her head the wreaths went flying over the bare floor .
.
.
her mouth foamed frenziedly; she
groaned, gasped, uttered weird sounds, and made the huge cave re-echo
with her dismal shrieks. In the end Apollo forced
her to intelligible speech . .
.
Before her spirit could be
restored to the light of common day, a spell of unconsciousness
intervened. Apollo was washing her mind with
Lethe water, to make her forget the fateful secrets she had learned
during this effulgent visitation.
The spirit of divine truth
departed and returned to whence it came; Phemonoe collapsed on the
floor, and was revived with difficulty.'
(Translated by Robert Graves,
_Pharsalia_, Penguin,
1956.)

The fear, and the feeling of the god mounting on the neck, or head, is
typical of possession as encountered in the New World
cults.^[7](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_14)^
But compare Lucan's description above with one by David G.
Mandelbaum writing of possession
in a village in South India.

'A spasm of shivering works through the diviner, then another, and his
head begins to shake from side to side.
The head movements continue with
increasing velocity until it seems as if no human vertebrae could stand
the strain. The diviner may fall to his knees
and beat his palms against the earth with a furious tattoo, but the
deity does not speak through him until his hair is loosened.
The long Kota locks are tied up
with a cord which has ritual significance, and this cord must be
dislodged by the force of the head motion.
When the diviner's hair does fall
free about his oscillating head, a strangled sob bursts forth from
him---the first articulation of the god speaking through his chosen
medium. With jerky, strangled utterance,
the diviner's voice serves as the mouthpiece of the deity.'
(_Anthropology of Folk
Religion_, Charles Leslie,
1960.)

[William
Sargant has compared the possessed trance to the Pavlovian state of
'transmarginal inhibition'. When a brain is
subjected to great stress a protective breakdown occurs: first the brain
begins to give the same response to strong as to weak signals (the
grading goes), next the brain responds
]_more_ strongly to
_weak_ signals, and then
conditioned responses reverse---he cites the case of Maya Deren as an
example of 'transmarginal inhibition'.
During her study of the voodoo
cults in Haiti, she became possessed herself on several occasions.
Once she arrived to film a
ceremony, but 'blanked out' when the drums started, and recovered
consciousness to find that not only was the ceremony over, but that she
had conducted it herself. She
says:

'The possessed benefits least of all men from his own possession.
He may suffer for it in material
loss, in the sometimes painful, always exhausted aftermath.
And to the degree that his
consciousness persists into its first moments or becomes aware of it at
the very end, he experiences an overwhelming fear.
Never have I seen the face of such
anguish, ordeal and blind terror as at moments when the loa
comes.'

One would imagine that people would struggle to avoid this terrifying
experience, but it's obvious that many people desire it.
It's part of the voodoo mythology
that the god should possess you 'against your will'.
I would think that Maya Deren was
subject to a high level of conflict, but it's significant that she was
possessed by the beautiful, sexy goddess Erzulie, and she did get an
amazing chapter of her book.

I. M.
Lewis says: 'The possessed person
who in the seance is the centre of attention says in effect, "Look at
me, I am dancing" . .
.
Haitian voodoo ceremonies are
quite clearly theatres, in which problems and conflicts relating to the
life situations of the participants are dramatically enacted with great
symbolic force . .
.
Everything takes on the tone and
character of modern psychodrama or group therapy.
Abreaction is the order of the
day. Repressed urges and desires, the
idiosyncratic as well as the socially conditioned, are given full public
rein.' (_Ecstatic
Religion_, Penguin,
1971.)

Maya Deren's first possession occurred when she was a guest of honour
at a voodoo ceremony. She was absorbed in talking to the
Houngan and wasn't attending to the drums or the singing.
This would tend to make her
_more_ vulnerable.
Then she was called to take part
in the ceremony for a moment, and 'forgot' what she had to do, even
though she had done it often at previous ceremonies.
What she did 'happened' to be
right and she returned to her chair, to find that the drums and singing
were louder and 'sharper'.

I would say that she was now already in light trance.
She was then
[caught
up in the singing until she found herself 'standing bolt upright,
singing or perhaps even screaming the song'.
She felt 'winded' and took no part
in the dancing.]

She describes a strong feeling of being at one with the group: 'I have
but to rise, to step forward, to become a part of this glorious
movement, flowing with it, its motion becoming mine, as the roll of the
sea might become the inundation of my own body.
At such moments one does not move
_to_ the sound, one
_is_ the movement of the
sound, created and borne by it; hence nothing is
difficult.'

She then crosses to her servant, only to find that her leg 'roots to
the ground'. She experiences an 'unpleasant
lightness in the head', and repeats the words 'hold together' to
herself. She goes outside and smokes a
cigarette and feels her head 'tightening, integrating, becoming solid
once more'.

When she hears the salute to the god Odin, she 'has' to return in order
not to give offence. Had she
_really_ wanted to escape she
could of course have 'become ill'.
She touches the hand of a
possessed person and feels a momentary shock like 'electricity', and
other people indicate to her that she is likely to become possessed.
She is troubled by her 'persistent
vulnerability' and all round her people are falling into trance.
She decides to continue: 'To run
away would be cowardice. I could resist, but I
must not escape. And I can resist best, I think to
myself, if I put aside the fears and nervousness; if, instead of
suspecting my vulnerability, I set myself in brazen competition with all
this which would compel me to its
authority.'

At some level she clearly wants to enter trance, but she believes she
is being forced into it _against her
will_.
The spirits are to be fully
responsible for casting aside her personality.
She's had all the warning signals,
and now she joins in the singing and the dancing and feels no fear.
She feels incredibly tired but she
doesn't stop until suddenly it becomes
_easier_, although she doesn't
notice the exact moment at which 'the pace which seemed unbearably
demanding had slipped down a notch into a slow
motion'.

It's clear that her time sense is distorting, and that she's already in
a very odd state of consciousness.
Her leg 'roots' to the ground
again. The 'slower' drums will actually
be speeding up as the drummers try to push her into deep trance.
She sees everything as very
beautiful and she turns to a neighbour to say, 'See how lovely that is'
when she finds herself isolated, alone in a
circle.

'I realise like a shift of terror struck through me, that it is no
longer myself whom I watch. Yet it
_is_ myself, for as that
terror strikes, we two [are
made one again, joined by and upon the point of the left leg.
The white darkness starts to shoot
up; I wrench my foot free but the effort catapults me over what seems a
vast, vast distance, and I come to rest on a firmness of arms and bodies
which would hold me up. But these have
voices---great insistent, singing voices---whose sound would smother me.
With every muscle I pull loose and
again plunge across a vast space .
.
.
My skull is a drum; each great
beat drives that leg, like the point of a stake, into the ground.
The singing is at my very ear,
inside my head. This sound will drown me!
"Why don't they stop!
Why don't they stop!"
I cannot wrench the leg free.
I am caught in this cylinder, this
well of sound. There is nothing anywhere except
this. There is no way out.
The white darkness moves up the
veins of my leg like a swift tide rising, rising; it is a great force
which I cannot sustain or contain, which surely will burst my skin.
"Mercy" I scream within me.
I hear it echoed by the voices,
shrill and unearthly: "Erzulie!"
The bright darkness floods up
through my body, reaches my head, engulfs me.
I am sucked down and exploded at
once. That is
all.']

This sounds more like a priestess at Delphi than hypnosis, but isn't
just a spectacular induction technique.
Alfred Metraux observes that
'People who are used to possession pass quickly through the whole range
of nervous symptoms, and then, suddenly, there they are: in full trance.
Even as much preamble as this may
be dispensed with when a ceremony is in full swing and demands
instantaneous entry on the part of the gods.'
(_Voodoo in
Haiti_, translated by H.
Charteris, André Deutsch, 1972.)
He also points out that the intensity of the attack depends on the
nature of the god being incarnated.
I see Sargent's 'transmarginal
inhibition' as being just _another_ way of entering
trance.

As for the terror that she insists on, there are many accounts of
'calm' possession, do I don't think terror is 'built-in' to the process,
or rather that it's the mythology that produces the terror.
Interestingly Maya Deren said
elsewhere, and before ever she went to Haiti: 'Total amnesia, although
less spectacular than many other forms of mental disorder, has always
seemed to me the most terrifying.'
('An Anagram of Ideas on Art',
_Form and
Film_,
1946.)

In possession cults the worshippers incarnate the gods, and their
posture, movements, and voices change as does the facial expression.
Oesterreich says: 'Transformation
of the physiognomy appears in all descriptions.'
(Oesterreich also mentions an
eleven-year-old girl who began speaking in a 'deep bass voice'.) The
spirits that arrive are almost [always
well known to the congregation, and the priest will have the requisite
costumes or props ready for them.
Extended improvisations then take
place which are very theatrical. Here's Jane Belo
describing an Indonesian possession
ceremony:]

'The crowd that gathered was alert and attentive, the whole spirit like
that of a game in which everyone would take part.
Everyone would join in the singing
which directed the trancer's performance.
People would call out jibes to the
performers, urging them on, taunting them with phrases known to
infuriate them. The crowd enjoyed this very much
indeed. When the time came to bring the
act to an end, a whole group would fall on the trancer, who struggled
fiercely in convulsions precipitated by the attack.
Amid great excitement, everyone
would fall over everyone else in a headlong rough-and-tumble.
They would then set themselves to
nursing the trancer back to normal consciousness.
All would then be just as intent
on caring for the man who was coming back to himself as they had been a
few minutes before in taunting and exciting the creature he had
"become".' (_Trance in
Bali_, Columbia University Press, New
York, 1960.)

Voodoo trancers may be possessed by several different gods one after
another, and the same god may inhabit several people at the same
time---in Haiti there was once a mass demonstration in which several
hundred people all possessed by Papa Gheda, marched on the presidential
palace. It's reported that voodoo trancers
remember nothing about their possessions, but Jane Belo, writing of
trance in Indonesia, describes two types of possession: one in which a
'power is present that is different from his "I", and makes two
simultaneous integrations, and that in which there is a temporary but
total change of the personality in which the person is "transformed"
into another being or object.' (_Trance in
Bali_.)

Here's an example of voodoo gods improvising together described by
Metraux: 'These impromptus, which vary in style, are much appreciated by
the audience, who yell with laughter, join in the dialogue, and noisily
show their pleasure or discontent.
Take an example: someone possessed
by Zaka appears under the peristyle in the get-up of a peasant.
By canny movements he mimes the
anxiety of a countryman come to town, and who fears to be robbed.
Now another possessed person joins
him, one might almost say 'comes on'.
It is Guede-nibo of the Guede
family, which watches over the dead.
Zaka is clearly terrified by the
presence of his gloomy colleague and tries to propitiate him, inviting
him to have something to eat and to drink some rum.
Guede, who is making a show as a
townsman, exchanges [courtesies
with him, trying to tease him. He asks him: "What have
you got in your bag?" He searches it and examines the
contents. Alarmed, Zaka cries "Stop, stop!"
The bag is returned to him only to
be surreptitiously lifted off him while he is examining one of the sick.
Zaka, in despair, calls for cards
and shells in order to discover the thief by means of divination.
The audience chants "Play, Zaka,
play".' (And so on.)
(]_Voodoo in
Haiti_.)

Any Mask teacher will recognise the scenes reported to occur during

'possession' as typical of the Mask.
One would expect the gods to be
presented as supermen, but in all 'trance' cultures we find a mythology
which describes the gods as acting in a childlike way.
As Melville says, 'The gods are
like children and must be told what to
do.'

**8**

**Teaching Mask Work**

For an introductory Mask class I will set up a table with a variety of
props on it. They'll be on a table because the
act of bending down may turn a new Mask off.
I avoid any props that would
present 'difficulties'. An umbrella might
encourage a Mask to think how to open it.
An alarm clock might suggest
winding it up. Anything that would require a Mask
to have a mental age of more than two and a half I would remove.
The objects on the table are the
sort that would interest young children.
I choose things that give a
variety of tactile experiences: a scarf, a carrot, bells, silver foil, a
jar, a balloon, a piece of fur, a doll, a toy animal, a stick, rubber
tubing, flowers, sweets. Children's books are all
right if they're small, and it helps if they're in a foreign language.
(My wife, Ingrid, wraps up little
presents for the Masks in the classes she gives; each tiny packet has a
sweet, or a little toy in it, which is something the Masks
like.)

I put some furniture on the stage, and set up a screen to one side.
Behind the screen are hats, and
coats, and pyjamas, boiler suits, and a few dresses.
If the clothes are a little out of
fashion, so much the better. Real clothes are
generally better than stage costumes, though.
Sheets of coloured material are
good. I used to have some big felt
'shoes' that some Masks liked---I think they were made to fit inside
gumboots in cold weather.

Once the students are ready I change my status, and play 'high'.
I don't bounce around and wave my
arms like I would for a comedy class.
I become stiller, 'serious' and
more 'adult'. The change in me products a change
of feeling in the students which I exploit by assuring
[them
that the Masks are ]_not_ dangerous, that
whatever happens I can handle it, and that all that matters is that they
must take off the Mask when I ask them to.
The more I reassure them the more
jumpy they get, and by the time they come to take a Mask many of them
will be trembling. The skill lies in creating the
correct balance between interest and
anxiety.

I also have to establish that they will not be held responsible for
their actions while in the Mask. I illustrate this with
stories.

We had a Mask that had a thick droopy nose and angry eyebrows.
It was a deep, congested red in
colour, and it liked to pick up sticks and hit people.
It was quite safe so long as the
teacher knew this and said 'Take the Mask off!'
sharply at the critical moment.
Someone borrowed it once---Pauline
Melville, who had taken over my classes at Morley College.
Next day she returned the Masks
and said that someone had been hit on the arm.
I had to explain that it was my
fault for not warning her. (And I pointed to the
Mask that hit people.) I once saw three similar droopy-nosed
Masks---they were Kabuki Masks, and they were on the
_hanamichi_ (the platform that
runs through the audience) and yes, they had sticks and were threatening
people.

Another Mask was called Mr Parks.
This one used to laugh, and stare
into the air, and sit on the extreme edge of chairs and fall off
sideways. Shay Gorman created the character.
I took the Mask along to a course
I gave in Hampshire. The students were entering from
behind a screen and suddenly I heard Mr Parks's laughter.
It entered with the same posture
Shay Gorman had adopted, and looked up as if something was very amusing
about the ceiling, and then it kept sitting on the extreme edge of a
chair as if it wanted to fall off.
Fortunately it didn't, because the
wearer wasn't very athletic. It really makes no sense
that a Mask should be able to transmit that sort of information to its
wearer.

Once students begin to observe for themselves the way that Masks compel
certain sorts of behaviour, then they really begin to feel the presence
of 'spirits'. I remember a Mask I'd just made.
A student tried it out and turned
into a hunched, twisted, gurgling creature.
Then a latecomer arrived, picked
up the same Mask, and the identical creature appeared.
I tell students to take any Mask
as long as it's comfortable. Probably they'll be
manoeuvring to pick one that they think they can do well, but this
doesn't really matter because it'll look quite different when they see
it reflected in the mirror. Once the student has
found a comfortable Mask, one that doesn't dig into his eyes, I arrange
his hair so that it covers the elastic and the top of the forehead of
the Mask.

[I
then say: 'Relax. Don't think of anything.
When I show you the mirror,
]_make your mouth fit the Mask and
hold it so that the mouth and the Mask make one
face_.
You'll know all about the creature
in the mirror, so you don't have to think about it.
Become the thing you see, turn
away from the mirror, and go to the table.
There'll be something that it
wants. Let it find it.
Disobey anything I'm saying if it
wants to, but if I say "Take the Mask off", then you must take it
off.'

I present the mirror very smoothly, slicing it upwards into the space
between me and the actor. The shock of seeing the
reflection is to be as strong as possible.
After two seconds I begin to step
aside, swinging the mirror with me, so that the actor will automatically
take a step, and will be facing the table with the props as the mirror
leaves him. If the actor seems to be resisting
the change I might say 'You're changing now', or 'Make the fact fit the
Mask.' I use a head-sized mirror because
the information they need comes from the face.
If the mirror is bigger, then they
see their whole body and are likely to start posturing.
I don't want them to
_think_ about being another
creature, I want them to experience being another
creature.^[8](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_12)^

Some students will compulsively touch their Mask as soon as they see
their reflection. This is a defence: they want to
reassure themselves that it's 'only a mask'.
If students seem seriously afraid
then I tell them to cross their fingers or something.
Once they accept such a method of
keeping themselves 'safe' they've already entered a 'magical universe'.
When they agree to uncross their
fingers or whatever, the effects of the Mask will be even stronger.
In possession cults you can
protect yourself by clinging to the beams or 'tying knots in your
underwear'. Some students go rigid, and then
remove the Mask, visibly shaken, and say 'Nothing happened.'
Other students 'think out' what to
do, and then hop around pretending to be boxers, or posture like
Harlequins or whatever. 'Don't have any words in
your head', I say.

When a student tries on a Mask for the second time I may say 'When you
look in the mirror let the Mask make a sound, and keep the sound going
all through the scene.' This is a meditation
technique very effective in blocking verbalisation (like Tibetan monks
chanting 'Oooooommmmm'). I often say things like
'Yes, that's excellent', or 'Who is it?'
or 'Amazing' even before students
have looked in the mirror, so that the feeling of being different, and
hidden, is reinforced. The Masks begin to paint, and
wheeze, and howl, which freaks out the people watching even more, and
'pumps the atmosphere up'. In voodoo cults the
drums throb for hours to call the gods across the ocean from
Africa.

[Once
one person is possessed, others usually follow almost immediately.
In a beginners' Mask class there
is usually a 'dead' twenty minutes before the first Mask appears---if
you're lucky. My method is to 'seed' the class
with a fully developed Mask. The presence of a
'possessed' Mask allows students to 'let go', and alarms and reassures
at the same time. The same phenomenon is reported in
possession cults; and it's easier to hypnotise someone who has just seen
it done to someone else.]

I encourage students to throw themselves in, and to stop being
'critical', by saying: 'Make mistakes!
These Masks are more extreme, more
powerful than ordinary faces! Don't be timid.
Make big mistakes.
Don't worry about being wrong!
Rely on me to stop you!'
Sometimes I say: 'What you saw in
the mirror was _right_!
But you only showed me a shadow of
it. Try the Mask again.
You'll never get anywhere if you
aren't brave.' Sometimes I see that a person is
transformed for just a moment as they look in a mirror, but then take
hold of themselves to cancel it out.
I stop them, make them remove the
Mask and then start again
immediately.

A girl puts on a Mask and is transformed.
She seems to illuminate the room,
but instantly she removes it.

'Be gentle with the Mask,' I say.
When people feel that the Mask has
made them betray themselves they'll throw it down.
I've seen one hurled from centre
stage to the back of the stalls. In the present case my
warning reinforces the feeling that unexpected and violent things may
happen.

'I couldn't do it,' she says.

'But it was marvellous.'

'It felt wrong.'

'You mean you didn't like the thing you had turned
into.'

'That's right.'

'That means you can do it, the experience was
_real_.'

I reassure her, and let her watch and see that no one is coming to
harm.

The problem is not one of getting the students to experience the
'presence' of another personality---almost everyone gets a strong kick
from their reflection---the difficulty lies in stopping the student from
making the change 'himself'. There's no reason for
the student to start 'thinking' when he already 'knows' intuitively
exactly what sort of creature he is.
Getting him to hold his mouth in a
fixed position, and having him make sounds helps to block verbalisation,
and 'finding a prop' helps to tear the Mask away from the mirror.
Unfortunately,
[even
the effort of walking may throw the actor into normal consciousness.
That's why I hold the mirror near
the table (less than eight feet), and in extreme cases I start the Mask
at the table, or sitting in a
chair.]

A new Mask is like a baby that knows nothing about the world.
Everything looks astounding to it,
and it has little access to its wearer's skills.
Very often a Mask will have to
learn how to sit, or bend down, or how to hold things.
It's as if you build up another
personality from scratch; it's as if a part of the mind gets separated,
and then develops on its own. There are exceptions,
but in most cases the very best Masks start off knowing the least.
They don't know how to take the
lids off jars; they don't understand the idea of wrapping things (given
a present they just admire the paper).
When objects fall to the floor
it's as if they've ceased to exist.
One student always left the room
before wearing a particularly regressive Mask.
I asked her why, and she said,
'It's silly, but I'm afraid I might wet myself, so I always go to the
toilet.'

Normal Masks go through a period of learning, so that after a dozen or
so classes they have a limited vocabulary, a number of 'props' that they
regularly handle, and some sort of history based on interactions with
other Masks. A Mask that grabs everything will
have learned that the other Masks will punish it, and so on.
Actors who 'can't do' Mask work
are never able to let the Mask be truly stupid and ignorant.
They try to transfer their own
skills directly. Instead of allowing a Mask to
explore a closed umbrella they'll 'take over' and open it.
Instead of letting the Mask suffer
because it hasn't learned to sit in a chair they'll 'make' it sit.
By their impatience, and desire to
exert control, they bypass a necessary process.
The Mask feeling leaks away and we
are left with the actor pretending to be another person, instead of
_being_ another
person.

Some Masks are 'muscle-bound', and act like 'monsters'.
I don't encourage these unless
they're all an actor can produce.
The most important thing is that
an actor should dredge up some sort of 'spirit', but I prefer Masks that
release the actor physically and vocally.
I encourage Masks that are
'human', like big extrovert children, or expressive of very intense
feelings: greed, lust, or tenderness, for example.
As soon as a Mask arrives that
seems useful I get the actor to repeat it.
I say, 'Tell yourself you're
looking in the mirror for the first time, the Mask will do the rest.'
This stops the actor from trying
to remember what the Mask did 'last
time'.

Soon there are a number of recognisable 'personalities' that I can
[put
together in scenes. I usually tell each Mask that it
owns all the props, and that it's going to meet some nice people.
At first Masks are often rather
grotesque, very depressed or manic---and sometimes frightening.
Interacting socialises them.
They make friends and enemies.
We now have a community of Masks,
each with its own costume, props, and personal
history.]

They probably still don't _speak_---and the inability to
speak is almost a sign of good Mask work.
Actors are amazed to find that
it's necessary to give the Masks 'speech lessons'.
Masks usually understand words
said to them, but they have the comprehension of a young child.
Long words are ignored, or produce
bewilderment.

I set up a scene in which the Mask is to meet a 'very nice voice
teacher'. I collect the props that I think
will interest the Mask, and I get someone to stay close to it with a
mirror.

'Come in', I say. 'Sit?'

It looks baffled.

'Sit,' I say, and I sit on a chair.
If it 'catches on' it'll imitate
me and probably make some sort of sound.
'Stand,' I say, and we play
'sitting and standing' like two idiots.
Then I give the Mask a present,
perhaps a balloon. 'Balloon,' I say, and if it
doesn't want it, or won't say the word, I don't pressure it.
If it likes the balloon, I say
'Yellow balloon' or whatever. Whenever the Mask begins
to turn off, it gets a recharge from the mirror, and I keep well back,
and hand it things at arm's length.
If I get too close to it I'll
probably turn it off. I have to be careful not to invade
the Mask's 'space', although proximity between Masks will deepen their
trance.

When other people act as voice teachers they usually want to bully the
Masks. I suppose this comes from the way
we treat young children. They touch the Masks;
they try to blackmail them into speaking, refusing to give them presents
until they obey. If a word is said, the 'teachers'
try frantically to get the pronunciation exactly right.
Then the Mask suffers and won't
co-operate.

By far the best way is to have one Mask that already speaks work as
teacher. Such Masks often express annoyance
at their pupils' 'stupidity', but there's something very magical in
removing the human being from the process so that the Masks hand on
their own traditions. Masks can even hold the
mirrors.

I'm happy if I get three sounds which resemble words in a five-minute
session. Many words can't be said at the
beginning because of the way the mouth is being held.
Three words is a great
achievement. Once the Mask has learned a dozen
or so words it begins to transfer
[words
from its wearer's vocabulary, or to pick them up from other
Masks.]

Speech lessons sound silly, but remember Chaplin, who never really
found the right voice for his Tramp.
He made many experiments and
finally made him sing in gibberish
(_Modern
Times_).
'Charlie' always sounds like
Chaplin when he talks, and I think Chaplin knew this, and this is
probably why he abandoned the character.
If he'd been able to work in a
Mask class he'd almost certainly have been able to find a
voice.

An actor may develop several Masks, each with its own characteristics
and vocabulary. If I use an unfamiliar word to a
Mask it'll ask me what it means, and it'll
_always_ remember that word.
What is freaky is that each Mask
remembers what it knows, and also what it doesn't know.
An actor left the Studio just when
his Mask was learning to speak. After two years he
returned, and started another speech lesson, and he was using exactly
the vocabulary he had learned at the previous class.
Hypnotic subjects are reported to
be in rapport with all the other occasions when they were in trance, and
the same is true of Mask
characters.

I speed up the learning of words by getting the Masks to count up to
ten, or to say the alphabet. Nursery rhymes are
useful. I get Masks to recite little poems
to the audience who applaud wildly.
One nursery rhyme can teach so
many words that the Mask goes straight into simple
speech.

Here are some notes by Mask students on what the Mask state feels
like.

'I found that the inability to speak was the freakiest feeling,
combined with a feeling of being on an energetic high, and having a
total disregard for the audience.
Colours seemed to deepen in
intensity, and objects became possessions.
The terrible feeling of having to
succeed in front of people faded into the background, and body movements
lost their stiffness and inhibitions.
Sounds came unplanned to my
throat.

'Once out of the Mask I find I am exhausted emotionally and physically,
and cannot resume the Mask for a while without a rest.
As an improviser I am nervous
about appearing 'right', but once in a Mask, there's no such feeling and
the Mask can improvise indefinitely (if
happy).'

This student was an experienced amateur actress, and had learned an
untruthful but effective way of presenting herself, based on strong
'demonstrations of feeling'. She was very 'armoured'
against the [audience,
but in Mask work she was 'released', and seemed wonderfully gifted.
My suspicion is that her extreme
exhaustion may have been linked to residual anxieties about 'letting
go'. I worked with her for a year,
mostly on improvisation, and she was just beginning to transfer her Mask
skills into her acting skills. With luck she should be
out of the cul-de-sac.]

Another student writes:

'I always come away from a Mask class with a feeling of
_renewed_ freshness, a light
feeling.

'I like the Mask state very much---I guess you could say it acts on me
the way some drugs would affect other people---an escape
perhaps?

'My sense of touch and sound are increased, I want to touch and feel
everything, loud sounds don't bother me.
Colours are much brighter and more
meaningful---I am more aware of
them.

'Something happens to my eyes.

'A childlike sense of discovery.

'As a Mask there are a lot of things that can do a lot of harm---being
hit---seeing someone else take their Mask off .
.
.
a sense of failure during a Mask
class. Maybe when I say harm I don't mean
physically--- but mentally it boggles the mind a lot---because you are
literally a young child _open_ to all the world will
offer and the first experience is usually the lasting
one.

'I feel much happier with myself as an actor now---because I have had
some Mask training---can I tell why I feel better?
I don't know.
I just have a lot more confidence.
I feel 'right' in the Mask state,
whatever I do is fine, no emotional
hangups.

'It's hard for me to take a Mask off that has worked for a long period
of time successfully---once when I did take it off, I felt my face was
being ripped off with it.'

A third student writes:

'When I had my first successful speech lesson, I felt that I knew how
to say the words but the Mask didn't.
A part of me knew how, and a part
of me did not. The latter part was much the
stronger of the two and maintained control without a struggle .
.
.

'Masks do not like to pretend. In order to do the scene
where the Mask enters from outdoors, I had to go out to the hall door
and then come in. On the other hand it was easy for
her (the Mask) to pretend that Ingrid's purse was a tea-cosy because she
had no idea what a tea-cosy was.'

I remember some rather staid Swedish schoolteachers being let loose in
a garden wearing Masks that they had developed indoors.
[They
shrieked with delight, raced over the flower beds and started tearing up
the flowers. I stopped the scene, and found
some of them very upset, since they'd never imagined themselves behaving
in such a way.]

Students are likely to have vivid dreams when they begin Mask work.
One very gifted student found
himself sleepwalking for the first time in years.
A Canadian student was trying a
Mask on at home and went out into his garden wearing it when the
temperature was minus twenty Centigrade.
He was astounded to find that he
was standing in the snow in his bare feet.
Masks are very strange and should
be approached with caution, not because they're really dangerous, but
because a bad experience may put a teacher or student off for
good.

At the moments when a Mask 'works' the student feels a
decisionlessness, and an inevitability.
The teacher sees a sudden
'naturalness', and that the student is no longer 'acting'.
At first the Mask may flash on for
just a couple of seconds. I have to see and
explain exactly when the change occurs.
The two states are actually very
different, but most students are insensitive to changes in
consciousness. Some students hold rigidly to
'normal consciousness', but most keep switching from their control to
the Mask's control and back again.
It becomes possible to say 'The
mask switched off when you touched the table,' or 'It flashed on for a
second when you saw the other Mask.'
Once a student understands the
immense difference between controlling a Mask and being controlled by a
Mask, then he can be taught. It doesn't matter if he
loses the Mask state a couple of seconds after leaving the mirror,
because once he understands the point at which the change occurs, the
trance state can be extended. The essential thing is
to identify the two sensations: (1) the student working the Mask, which
we don't want; (2) the Mask working the student, a state which the
student learns to sustain.

When the actors have developed one or two characters, and have learned
to sustain them, I push them into playing more complex situations.
There's a sort of 'hump' you have
to get them over. I invent the sort of situations
that a three-year-old would respond to: playing 'shop', stealing, being
shouted at by angry grown-ups, and so on.
I also set up 'marathon' scenes in
which the Masks interrelate for a long time---up to an hour.
If someone turns off they can get
a 'recharge' from the mirror, or they can rejoin the audience.
More Masks arrive as other Masks
leave. Once this stage is reached, then
the Masks function as _entertainers_.
You put Masks together and enjoy
the scenes that [emerge.
They have their own 'world', and it's fascinating to watch them
exploring it.]

In normal life the personality conceals or checks impulses.
Mask characters work on the
opposite principle: they are childlike, impulsive, open; their
machinations are completely transparent to the audience, although not
necessarily to each other. If you look at, say, the
adults on a bus, you can see that they work to express a
'deadness'.

If Masks were subjected to the same pressures as our children are, then
they also would become dull and inexpressive.
We adults have learned to be
opaque. We live among hard surfaces that
reflect sound back to us, so we're constantly telling our children to be
quiet. Our lives are surrounded with
precious objects---glass, china, televisions, stereos---so that movement
has to be restrained. Any adult who acted like a
three-year-old would be intolerable to
us.

John Holt made this point when discussing the 'wooden' look of retarded
children (in _How Children
Fail_).
A fourteen-year-old with a mental
age of six doesn't 'act six' because we won't let him, but he can't 'act
fourteen' either, so he looks stupid as a defence.
A child of one and half can look
bright and alert, but an adult with a mental age of ten has to look like
a moron because this is the most acceptable persona he's able to
assemble. When Veronica Sherbourne allows
retarded children to behave spontaneously, we see at once that the
deadness was only a cloak, a crippling disguise, yet we 'normal' people
are wooden and inexpressive compared to the
Masks.

This is why Mask teachers or the priests at possession ceremonies are
so indulgent. When Masks are set free among a
crowd they are permitted all sorts of behaviour which would be instantly
forbidden to normal people.^[9](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_10)^

One famous French teacher of the Mask---who won't approve of this
essay---divides students immediately into those who can work Masks and
those who can't. I think this is damaging.
One of my best improvisers
(Anthony Trent) spent eight weeks working very hard until a Mask
possessed him. Whether a student can succeed or
not depends partly on the skill of the teacher, and the incentive of the
student. When I began teaching I thought
that only about one in ten of my students could really 'become the
Mask'. Recently I created a Mask play
with a company of actors, and because they
_had_ to succeed, everyone
did---to some extent. Where possession is the norm (at
least in the West Indies and Indonesia), there are always some people
who don't become possessed. Maybe these just don't
have sufficient incentive.

[The
great improvement in my Mask teaching came when I thought of having
people standing by to present mirrors
]_during_ the scenes.
The moment the Mask actor 'comes
to himself' he snaps a finger and maybe two or three mirrors are rushed
at him. This makes the learning process
much easier. Masks can also have little mirrors
in their pockets to turn themselves back
on.

Mask work is particularly suitable for 'tough' adolescents who may
normally think of drama as sissy.
It appeals to them because it
feels dangerous. I've seen excellent, and very
sensitive Mask work by rather violent teenagers.
Personally I think Mask work is
something almost anyone can learn to enjoy.
It's very refreshing to be able to
shed the personality thrust on you by other
people.

**9**

**The Waif**

I'll consider one particular Mask in more detail.
This is 'the Waif' and it was made
almost as a joke. I had smeared plasticine over a
wig stand to serve as a base for further modelling.
Then I stuck on three bits of
plasticine, two circles and a lump, so that it had a nose and eyes.
The result looked very 'alive'.
I decided that this 'joke' was
worth making into a Mask---a decision which the people around me
objected to, so I knew there must be something rather disturbing about
this particular face. When the layers of paper were dry
I painted it bluish grey, with a white nose and white protruding
eyes.

My wife Ingrid tried out the Mask and created a 'lost child' character,
very nervous and wondering. Everyone became very
fond of it. We turned it on in a garden once
and it said everything seemed to be 'burning'.
It seemed to see the world in a
visionary manner. Ingrid and I both kept notes on
it. Here are some of
mine.

'When first created it looked at everything as if amazed.
It made "cor!"
and "ooooooooorh" noises.
It covers Ingrid's top lip, which
makes Ingrid's mouth form a strange shape, as if her own top lip were
fixed to the Mask.

'I gave the Waif an ice cream on a stick.
She tried to eat the paper.
I took the paper off and showed
her how to hold it. She held it by the chocolate
coating. I explained again and she held the
stick. She didn't wipe or lick the
chocolate from her hand, she didn't seem to know there was a sticky mess
on it.

'The Waif has a strong rapport with me, so I play scenes with her.
I
[am
sweeping when she enters the acting area.
She asks what I am doing.
I say "sweeping", and offer her
the broom. She takes the broom and holds it
as if it was a baby. She hugs it as if it were alive,
and nothing to do with sweeping. When she leaves she
takes it with her and says "sweep" as if that were the broom's
name.]

'I have used the Waif to civilise the violent Mask.
This is an incredibly violent old
man who picks up sticks and threatens to hit people.
The Waif seems to be about four
years old, so I set up a scene in which she was to arrive as his
granddaughter. Everything the Waif touches she
treats as someone else's, so I told the 'grandfather' that he was to
tell her not to touch anything, and then leave.
There was a teddy bear on the
table. The Waif entered nervously holding
a little suitcase, and was fascinated by the teddy bear.
Granddad was gruff with her, and
left. She picked up the teddy bear, and
Granddad came back enraged and hit her (not hard).
The Waif was appalled.
Since this time the two Masks have
almost become inseparable, and Granddad is now very protective, and
interacts well with other
Masks.'

Here are some notes on the Waif by
Ingrid:

'I get very high on Mask work---it's like stepping out of my skin and
experiencing something much more fluid and dynamic---sometimes when the
Mask is turned on there is a part of me sitting in a distant corner of
my mind that watches and notices changed body sensations, emotions, etc.
But it's very passive, this
watcher---does nothing that criticises or interferes---and sometimes
it's not there at all. Then it's like the "I" blanks out
and "something else" steps in and experiences.
When Ingrid switches back she
can't always remember what that something else did or experienced.
But while I am the Mask I
experience it, or rather the Mask experiences itself like I do myself .
.
.
only the way the Mask experiences
itself is more intense. Things are more alive.
The universe becomes magical---the
body full of sensations. I suppose this is where
the "high" comes from . .
.

'It's like you get the freedom to explore all the personalities that
any human being may develop into---all the shapes and feelings that
could have been Ingrid but aren't.
Some Masks don't trigger any
response . .
.
maybe these are spirits outside
Ingrid's repertoire, that is any one person may have a
_limited_ number of
possibilities when he develops his personality.
Most of the time it's like
becoming a child again, but some Masks feel very adult even though their
knowledge is limited. With the Waif I feel a distinct
maturing process . .
.
she now feels like a
thirteen-to-fourteen-year-old; at first she felt six or seven years
old.'

[Ingrid
found that the Mask work helped her development as an improviser.
At first, she says, she was
'extremely cautious and afraid of appearing in front of the class, and I
couldn't bear being out in situations that made me appear vulnerable.
The Waif had none of these
qualities. She wasn't afraid to
]_feel_ the emotions that
came. She didn't really care about or
notice the audience; also she is much freer in her relations with other
Masks than Ingrid is with other people.
I suppose for these reasons it was
very nice for me to slip into this other creature and experience things
I normally avoided or hadn't experienced since childhood.
It was a tremendous release---like
a marvellous kind of therapy, because the feeling of release would still
be with me after I'd taken off the Mask.
However, I could still never have
done all those things without the Mask
on.'

If we wanted to be analytical we could say that the flatness of the
Mask, and its high forehead, are likely to trigger parental feelings.
The eyes are very wide apart as if
looking into the distance, and helping to give it its wondering look.
Where the bottom of the Mask
covers the wearer's top lip, a faint orange lip is painted on to the
Mask. Everyone who has created a 'Waif'
character with the Mask has lined their lip up with the Mask's, and then
held it frozen. I wrote my play
_The Last
Bird_ for this Mask, and the Danish
actress Karen-lis Ahrenkiel played the role in the Aarhus production.
It was only when she froze her top
lip in this way that she suddenly found the character.
The eyes of the Mask aren't level,
which gives a lopsided feeling, and is probably the cause of the
characteristic twisting movements that the Waif always
has.

**10**

**Executioners, 'Noses' and
'Men'**

Another type of character Mask is the Executioner.
This is a figure I resurrected
from my childhood for a children's play,
_The Defeat of Giant
Big-Nose_.
The actors wear dark clothes and
soft black leather helmets which mould to the head and expose only the
mouth and chin. Black tapes are sewn on so that
they can be tied--- which they never are, but the tapes help the brutal
feeling and draw attention to the chin.
Each actor cuts his own eye-holes,
making them as small as possible.
Only a glint of an eye is
occasionally visible. If necessary pinpricks can be made
around the hole, but the constriction of vision helps the actor to feel
'different'.

To work this Mask you face another Executioner, and hold a
[grimace
that shows both sets of teeth. You must never entirely
lose his grimace. With it you can speak 'in
character'---the voice has a threatening roughness---and it releases
very brutal feelings in the body.
You feel aggressive, powerful and
wide. If you expose both sets of teeth
you're bound to sense yourself differently.
Try it now: grimace and look round
the room, move about and try and sense the differences.
Some people who find it impossible
to work the half masks break through after working Executioner Masks.
Women never look 'right' as
Executioners, but the grimace also releases strong feelings in
them.]

'Noses' may be a 'way in' for some students.
You need a long, pointed red nose
held on by elastic, and a fluffy wig or soft hat.
You then climb into a large sack
or wrap a sheet round you---white seems to be preferred---and make
yourself into a sort of tube that takes little steps and skips about.
You place all your attention on
the nose and hold it there, and then you face another 'Nose' and you
both jabber in high-pitched gibberish, holding wide grins.
'Noses' are maniacally happy, move
very quickly, and never do what they are told.
They can be controlled by telling
them to do the opposite of what you want them to do.
They prefer to work in pairs,
often turning each other on again by 'mirroring' each other for a
moment. Very soon the high-pitched
gibberish begins to throw up words, but they always jabber a lot.
When they're really turned on
they're amazing. The red noses seem to be pulling
them around.

Executioners and 'Noses' are likely to be hindered if they use mirrors.
It's much better, in the early
stages, if they just use each other.
Later on, mirrors can be
useful.

'Men' are plastic commercial masks which are just round eyes, round
noses and little moustaches---you see through the pupils of the 'eyes'.
The actors wear overalls and soft
hats. They use each other as mirrors and
raise their hats to each other---straight up and down.
They grin all the time, keep their
elbows in to their sides as much as possible, and take short steps.
They speak in gibberish, which
soon gives way to language. With luck very real
characters will suddenly emerge, and the actors will suddenly 'know'
what to do, instead of
'deciding'.

**11**

**Pre-Mask Exercises**

Most of my 'acting theory' comes from my study of the Mask, and there
are many exercises that can be used as pre-Mask exercises.
Here are some of
them.

**[Face
Masks]**

Face Masks probably go back at least to Copeau.
I sit four actors on a bench, show
them a mirror and say 'Make a face, nothing like your face, hold it,
don't lose the expression.' The audience laugh at
the transformation, but the actors don't feel that 'they' are being
laughed at. 'Get up,' I say, 'shake hands with
each other, say something.' Most actors find that
their bodies move in a quite different way, but some hold on to
themselves and 'insert a barrier' in the neck, so that the changes in
the face can't effect the posture of the body.
It's easy to draw gentle attention
to his, and to encourage the actors to let their bodies 'do what they
want to do'. The actors then play scenes while
holding faces that express some sort of emotion.
The greater the emotion expressed
on the face the greater the change in behaviour and the easier it is to
improvise. I use the Face Mask as a rehearsal
technique. Actors pick faces at random and
then play the text. They often get insights into the
nature of the scene in this way, and they lose their fear of overacting,
which makes many actors appear
inhibited.

If all the actors hold an identical face, then they accept each other's
ideas more readily.

Some students 'can't' make a face.
They'll change expression just a
little, desperately clinging on to their self-image.
You can overcome this by asking
them to make an emotional sound, and then hold the face that accompanies
it. If you snarl, the face
automatically becomes savage.

It's a simple step from the Face Mask to Executioner Masks or 'Noses'
even for very upright people.

**Placing the Mind**

The placing of the personality in a particular part of the body is
cultural. Most Europeans place themselves in
the head, because they have been taught that they
_are_ the brain.
In reality of course the brain
can't feel the concave of the skull, and if we believed with Lucretius
that the brain was an organ for cooling the blood, we would place
ourselves somewhere else. The Greeks and Romans
were in the chest, the Japanese a hand's breadth below the navel, Witla
Indians in the whole body, and even outside it.
We only imagine ourselves as
'somewhere'.

Meditation teachers in the East have asked their students to practise
placing the mind in different parts of the body, or in the Universe, as
a [means
of inducing trance. The author of
]_The Cloud of
Unknowing_ writes 'Where do I want you to
be? Nowhere!'^[[1 0]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_8)^
Michael Chekhov, a distinguished acting teacher (and friend of
Vakhtangov) suggested that students should practise moving the mind
around as an aid to character work.
He suggested that they should
invent 'imaginary bodies' and operate them from 'imaginary centres'.
He
writes:

'You are going to imagine that in the same space you occupy with your
own, real body there exists another body---the imaginary body of your
character . .
.
you clothe yourself, as it were,
with this body; you put it on like a garment.
What will be the result of this
"masquerade"? After a while (or perhaps in a
flash!) you will begin to feel and think of yourself as
_another
person_ .
.
.

'Your _whole being, psychologically and
physically_, will be changed--- I would not
hesitate to say even _possessed_---by the character .
.
.
your reasoning mind, however
skilful it may be, is apt to leave you cold and passive, whereas the
imaginary body has the power to appeal directly to your will and
feelings.' (_To the
Actor_, Harper and Row,
1953.)

I suggest that you try out Chekov's suggestion.
The effects are very strong, and
students are amazed at the feelings created in them.
Chekov
says:

'So long as the centre remains in the middle of your chest (pretend
it's a few inches deep), you will feel that you are still yourself and
in full command, only more energetically and harmoniously so, with your
body approaching an "ideal type".
But as soon as you try to shift
the centre to some other place within or outside your body, you will
feel that your whole psychological and physical attitude will change,
just as it changes when you step into an imaginary body.
You will notice that the centre is
able to draw and concentrate your whole being into one spot from which
your activity emanates and
radiates.

'Try a few experiments for a while.
Put a soft, warm, not too small
centre in the region of your abdomen and you may experience a psychology
that is self-satisfied, earthy, a bit heavy and even humorous.
Place a tiny, hard centre on the
tip of your nose and you will become curious, inquisitive, prying and
even meddlesome. Move the centre to one of your
eyes and notice how quickly it seems that you have become sly, cunning
and perhaps hypocritical. Imagine a big, heavy,
dull and sloppy centre placed outside the seat of your pants and you
have a cowardly, not too honest, droll character.
A centre located a few feet
outside your eyes or forehead may invoke the sensation of a sharp,
penetrating and even a sagacious mind.
A warm,
[hot
and even fiery centre situated without your heart may awaken in you
heroic, loving and courageous
feelings.]

'You can also imagine a movable centre.
Let it sway slowly before your
forehead and circle your head from time to time, and you will sense the
psychology of a bewildered person; or let it circle irregularly around
your whole body, in varying tempos, now going up and now sinking down,
and the effect will no doubt be one of
intoxication.'

I find it sad that Chekov's work is not continued by more teachers.
Few actors have really tried it
out. In rehearsal it's sometimes been
perfect for helping an actor to find a 'character'.
And its relation to Mask work is
obvious.

**Costume**

I ask the actors to dress up as characters.
Most put on too many clothes.
It's quite normal for a student to
wear three hats at once, believing himself 'original'.
I encourage them to take few
articles.

A girl puts on a pink tutu. She wears a bus
conductor's hat, the peak low over her eyes, and one shoe.
As soon as she moves she assumes
an aggressive posture, like an angry child.
She stops instantly and starts to
remove the costume. I say, 'You felt something!'
She replies, 'It was too
childish.' I tell her to stop criticising,
and to keep any costume that makes her feel different.
She improvises a scene with the
costume on and she's very confident, most unlike her usual timid
self.

Someone wears a boiler suit stuffed with balloons to make him 'huge'.
He still looks 'himself'.
I say, 'Move and imagine that the
costume is your body surface', and suddenly he becomes a 'fat
man'.

Pretending that the costume is the actual body surface has a powerful
transforming effect on most people.
We all of us have a 'body image'
which may not be at all the same as our actual body.
Some people imagine themselves as
a blob with bits sticking out, and others have a finely articulated body
image. Sometimes a person who has slimmed
will still have, visibly, a 'fat' body
image.

Once students have found transforming costumes I set them to play
scenes in gibberish, and later in
speech.

**Animals**

If the class act as animals, playing together or clawing at each other,
or 'mating', very regressed states occur.
Playing different animals develops
movement and voice skills, but it may also unlock
[other
personalities. I gradually turn the animals into
'people'. I got this idea from Vernon
Hickling, one of my first teaching colleagues in Battersea, but the idea
is ancient.]

**Toddlers**

I read that small children don't punch each other, but 'pat', and that
the child with the hand nearest the head loses the confrontations.
I taught this at first as a status
exercise. But sometimes the result was that
the whole class were romping about like big
children.

**Being Handled**

Trance states are likely whenever you abandon control of the
musculature. Many people can get an incredible
'high' from being moved about while they remain relaxed.
Pass them round a circle, lift
them, and (especially) roll them about on a soft surface.
For some people it's very
liberating, but the movers have to be
skilled.

**12**

**Text**

Scholars have advanced many reasons for the use of Masks by the players
of the Commedia dell' Arte, but they miss the obvious one---that Masks
improvise for _hours_, in an effortless way.
It's difficult to 'act' a Commedia
scenario at any high level of achievement.
Masks take to it like ducks to
water.

Masks don't fit so well into 'normal' theatre, unless the director
understands their problems. The technique of
'blocking' the moves has to be abandoned, since at first the Masks move
where they want to, and it's no use getting the designer to work out
which Masks are to represent which
characters.

The biggest problem is that the Masks refuse to repeat scenes.
Even when you tell them they are
going to take part in a play, they insist on being spontaneous.
If you force them to act in plays,
then they switch off, and you are left with the actors pretending to be
Masks.

I now rehearse the Masks away from the text, letting them play scenes
together, and trying to find a Mask that will more or less fit the
dialogue. At the same time I rehearse the
actor on the text, but I don't set the moves, and I'm mainly concerned
that he should understand it, and learn
it.

When I decide it's time to put the Masks on to the text, I choose a
scene, and I tell the Masks they're going to act in a play.
I stand by the
[mirror
and feed the first line to the Mask as it sees its reflection.
It then turns away from the
mirror, says its line, and maybe proceeds to the next line.
I keep showing it the mirror as I
feed it lines, and after about half a page we stop and rest.
For the actor it will probably
have been an amazing experience. Everything suddenly
becomes 'real' and the Mask has quite different reactions from those
he'd intended.]

When they come to repeat the scene it's very important to say,
'_Tell yourself that this has never
happened to you before_.'
Everything is then OK.
Until I learned this last trick
the whole business of getting fully possessed Masks to function on text
seemed insoluble.

With this technique you can use Masks almost like actors.
It's a little different, because
of course the Masks only know what they have 'learned' or managed to
'transfer' from the skills of the wearer.
If a stranger enters the rehearsal
room all work will stop while the Masks turn to look at him.
If a staircase is suddenly
introduced the Masks may stop in amazement and you realise that they've
never met the concept of another level before.
My play
_The Last
Bird_ was written for a mixture of
Masks and people. In one rehearsal of the Copenhagen
production, the Mask actors suddenly removed the Masks and rolled on the
floor in hysterical laughter. The script said the
Masks were to make bird noises, and their lips had absolutely refused to
'whistle'. I had to give a 'bird noise'
lesson; even so, they never became very good at
it.

If you are not happy with the Masks---that is if they seem miscast---
you can change everything by running the scene with other Masks.
Everything will now alter, and the
'truths' of the scene will be different.
In the case of
_The Last
Bird_, which was written for two Masks
already created (Grandfather and the Waif), the original Grandfather
mask never worked. Finally we used a commercial
plastic 'old man' mask.

Masks aren't 'pretending', they actually undergo the experiences.
I remember an actress whom I asked
to approach a man lying in a 'wood' to ask him the way.
The class were impressed and said
her performance was very truthful.
Then I asked her to repeat the
exercise as a Mask, and everything was transformed.
The Mask was afraid of being in
the 'wood'. It thought the man must be dead
and was terrified to go near him.

In _The Last
Bird_, Death was to reap the
Grandfather. It was a 'good' scene, and the
actors were working well. But when we tried the
scene with the Mask, Grandfather stopped doing anything one could
recognise as 'acting' and stared transfixed at the point of the scythe.
It was just cardboard with
aluminium foil covering it, but suddenly it seemed the most terrible
instrument in the universe. Dick Kajsør, who
[was
playing Death, backed off. 'I can't kill him,' he
said, very upset, as we all were.
It took about an hour before we
could try the scene again.]

When I directed the second production of the play (at Aarhus)
everything was fine until we added the Masks.
Then the actors were appalled.
It seemed impossible that they
were to present this play night after night when it disturbed them so
much. The play is about a colonial war,
and what had been a game became a monstrous reality.
Tragedy is horrible when you
really experience it. Olivier has been reported as
saying he doesn't want to do any more of the great tragic roles because
it's too painful---he'd rather play
comedy.

In the first production Birthe Neumann 'found' the Waif almost
immediately. In the Aarhus production Karen-lis
Ahrenkiel could turn the Waif on, but the thing wouldn't speak.
It seemed desperately unhappy, and
thrashed its arms around and howled, and didn't want anything to do with
the text. It was eerie.
It was as if it had a
determination not to do the play because it knew the terrible things
that were to happen to it---Grandfather dies, the Waif is raped by the
Executioners, the wings are sawn off the Angel, Jesus sinks when he
tries to walk on the water, and so on.
When we had finally coaxed and
lured the Waif into performing the part (and at one time I thought I'd
have to cast someone else), it was a very emotional time.
Tears and mucus would pour out of
the nose holes. Even in performance you would hear
it howling as it groped off stage during the blackouts.
Directed with actors, the play
would have lost some of this raw emotion.
With Masks it seemed almost cruel
to show it to an audience who might be expecting museum
theatre.

One of the strangest paradoxes about the Mask is that the actor who is
magnificent wearing it may be colourless and unconvincing when he isn't.
This is something obvious to
everyone, including the actor himself.
In the Mask events really happen.
The wearers experience everything
with great vividness. Without the Mask they perpetually
judge themselves. In time the Mask abilities spill
over into the acting, but it's a very gradual
process.

My methods make it relatively easy to put character Masks into plays,
but you won't see good Mask work in the theatre very often.
Usually the Masks arrive with the
costumes---just in time for the dress rehearsal, and the actor is
expected to wear the Mask designed for him irrespective of whether it
turns him on or not. In my Mask productions I begin
rehearsing with fifty of sixty Masks and let the actors discover which
ones fit the roles in the play. My designers work with
the actors and assemble the costumes to the Mask's tastes.
I've even taken the
[Masks
out shopping to choose their costumes in department stores--- which
creates some odd scenes. I don't cast an actor to
play a Masked role until I know he has the ability to become
'possessed'. If necessary I rewrite scenes to
fit in with the Mask's requirements.
The depth of possession during
performance depends on the freedom with which mirrors are used.
In my productions there are
usually mirrors on stage, and people standing by to present a mirror if
a Mask snaps its fingers. Some Masks have little
mirrors on their person. The style of the
production has to allow for these eccentricities.
When the Mask is used, theatre has
to be theatrical, not just a 'slice of
life'.]

Once the Masks have learned their roles, and have mastered the
'This-is-for-the-first-time' trick, then they'll do more or less the
same thing each performance. It's silly to preset
exactly how they should move, but similar patterns will always appear.
If a moth flies in, maybe they'll
be momentarily distracted and start chasing it, or snapping at it as it
flies past, but the actors then assert their control, call in a mirror,
and set the Mask back on its track
again.

**13**

**Tragic Masks**

George Devine gave a second Mask class to the writers' group, this time
showing us the full, or 'Tragic' Mask.
These Masks cover the whole face
and make the wearer feel _safe_ (if he doesn't feel
claustrophobic) because there's no way his expression can betray him.
He can't look confused, or
embarrassed, or scared, so he isn't.
Some students find a physical
release for the first time when they perform with their face covered,
and it's usual to improvise with more emotion.
Thespis was said to have invented
tragedy in this way, using canvas clothes to cover the actors' faces.
I once asked Michael Saint-Denis
how Copeau, his uncle, came to be interested in Mask
work.^[[1 1]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_6)^
He said one of Copeau's students had been wooden and totally lacking in
absorption; all she worried about was whether the audience was admiring
her. In desperation Copeau made her
repeat the scene with a handkerchief in front of her face, and she
relaxed, became expressive, and was very
moving.

If one of the greatest half Masks of the cinema is Chaplin, then one of
the greatest full Masks is Garbo.
Critics raved about her face: '.
.
.
Her face, early called the face of
the century, had an extraordinary plasticity, a mirrorlike quality;
people could see in it their own conflicts and desires.'
(Norman Zierold,
_Garbo_, W.
H.
Allen, London 1970.)
[People
who worked with her noticed that her face didn't change.
Robert Taylor said: 'The muscles
in her face would not move, and yet her eyes would express exactly what
she needed.' Clarence Brown said: 'I have seen
her change from love to hate and never alter her facial expression.
I would be somewhat unhappy and
take the scene again. The expression still would not
change. Still unhappy, I would go ahead
and say "Print it." And when I looked at the print,
there it was. The eyes told it all.
Her face wouldn't change but on
the screen would be that transition from love to hate.'
(Kevin Brownlow,
]_The Parade's Gone
By_, Sphere,
1973.)

Garbo had a stand-in who was identical to her, and who was said to have
'everything that Garbo has except whatever it is Garbo has'.
What Garbo had was a body that
transmitted and received. It was her spine that
should have been raved about: every vertebra alive and separated so that
feelings flowed in and out from the center.
She responded spontaneously with
emotion and warmth, and what she felt, the audience felt, yet the
information transmitted by the body was perceived as emanating from the
face. You can watch a marvellous actor
from the back of a big theatre, his face just a microdot on the retina,
and have the illusion you've seen every tiny expression.
Such an actor can make a wooden
Mask smile, its carved lips tremble, its painted brows
narrow.

The reason usually given for the changes of expression that occur in
Mask work is that the Masks are asymetrical, and that as they move about
we see different angels. This may be true in a
few cases, but if you hold a Mask and move it about it won't smile
knowingly, or seem about to weep, or become filled with terror.
It's only when a Mask is being
worn by a skilled performer that the expression changes.
If you buy a magazine with
full-sized head and shoulders on the cover and hold it in front of your
face, very few Mask effects occur.
If you tear the cover off and
strap it on your face the magic still won't work.
Only when you cut the neck and
shoulders away, so that the angle between this mask and the wearer's
body can change with every head movement, does it become a 'face'.
We 'read' the body, and especially
the head--neck relationship, but we experience ourselves as reading the
Mask. If you look at the head--neck
relationship in great paintings you'll see amazing distortions which
increase the emotional effect. The angle between head
and neck, and neck and body is crucial to us.
There are reports of crowds
panicking with horror when they witness public executions; they don't
panic when the head is severed, but they do when the executioner holds
it up and turns it to face the
crowd.

[To
some extent we can say that the half, or comic, Masks are low status,
and the full Tragic Masks are high status.
If there are two different types
of Mask experience, then we should expect to find the same phenomenon in
possession cults---and we do. Jane Belo
writes:]

'When the manifestations are abandoned and violent, they are related to
the exhibitions of riotous behaviour which break out at cremations and
in great crowds, when the habitual decorum is cast aside.
Other individuals who go into
trance may seek a more quiescent change, sitting immobile during a
ritual sequence until the spirit of the god "comes into" them, when they
behave as an altered personality, demanding and imperious.'
(_Trance in
Bali._)

The first exercise George set involved an actor sitting in a chair,
putting on a full Mask with head lowered, and then raising the head as
if looking into the distance. It was interesting to
see how much more we did than was asked of us, either because we felt
the need to 'act', i.e. to add something extra,
or because we weren't used to doing anything so simple; hands fumbled
unnecessarily, the head wasn't brought up smoothly, and it trembled.
With the face covered every
movement of the body was
emphasised.

When a full Mask is absolutely still the spectator stares at the face
like a person entranced. The art of the full Mask
lies in moving the Mask in such a way that the attention is never
distracted away from the face, by the body.
This implies a method of acting, a
style, that all great tragedians master, whether they're wearing a Mask
or not---Duse for example, almost certainly Rachel.
When the student first wears a
full Mask his body betrays him, his posture isn't good enough, he's
hesitant, his 'space' is restricted.
When the Mask is still, or when it
moves smoothly and decisively, or in slow motion, then the room seems to
fill with power. Invisible ice forms on the walls.
When the Mask does anything
trivial, or moves in a trivial way, the power gutters
out.

Many students believe that the full Mask can only do a limited number
of things without turning off, but this is because of the limitations in
the performer's technique. A great Mask actor can
do anything, and still keep the Mask expressive and 'alive'.
In Kurosawa's
_Seven
Samurai_, when the peasants lose heart
and start to scatter, the leader of the Samurai---the great actor---runs
to block their retreat. Running at full speed
with drawn sword, his technique is still that of the full
Mask.

George said that learning the full Mask was as difficult as learning to
[sing;
that while a half Mask could spring into existence at the first moment,
the full Mask required a long training.
The posture had to be right, and
the body had to be fully
expressive.]

I don't think George ever wrote about his Mask work, and I'm
embarrassed to be explaining his ideas for him, but I have found an
account by Jean Dorcy of Mask work at Copeau's school (Ecole de
Vieux-Colombier) in 1922 (_The
Mime_, Robert Speller, New York,
1961). He
writes:

'What happens to the actor who puts on a mask?
He is cut off from the outside
world. The night he deliberately enters
allows him first to reject everything that hampered him.
Then, by an effort of
concentration, to reach a void, a state of un-being.
From this moment forwards, he will
be able to come back to life and to behave in a new and truly dramatic
way.'

The Masks that Dorcey used were 'neutral'---'mime' Masks.
I don't know at what point the
Tragic Mask was introduced, but the technique was clearly based on the
neutral Mask work. Here's Dorcy explaining how he
'shoed' the Mask, i.e. put it
on.

'Here are the rites I followed .
.
.

'A. Well seated in the middle of the
chair, not leaning against the back of the seat.
Legs spaced to ensure perfect
balance. Feet flat on the
ground.

'B. Stretch the right arm horizontally
forward, shoulder high; it holds the mask, hanging by its elastic.
The left hand, also stretched out,
helps to shoe the mask, thumb holding the chin, index and second finger
seizing the opening of the mouth.

'C. Simultaneously, inhale, close the
eyes and shoe the mask.

'In all this only the arms and hands are active.
They carry out the small movements
necessary to fasten the mask on the face, arrange the hair, verify the
proper adjustment of the elastic so that the mask will cling well and
hold without slackness.

'D. Simultaneously, breathe and place
forearms and hands on the thighs.
The arms, as well as the elbows,
touch the torso, fingers not quite reaching the
knees.

'E. Open the eyes, inhale then,
simultaneously, close the eyes, exhale and bend the head forward.
While bending the head, the back
becomes slightly rounded. In this phase, arms,
hands, torso, and head are completely
relaxed.

'F. It is here in this position that
the clearing of the mind occurs. Repeat mentally or
utter, if this helps, during the necessary time (2, 5, 10, 25 seconds):
"I am not thinking of anything, I am not thinking of anything.
.
."

[' If,
through nervousness, or because the heart was beating too strongly, the
"I am not thinking anything" was ineffective, concentrate on the
blackish, grey, steel, saffron, blue, or other shade found inside the
eye, and extend it indefinitely in thought: almost always, this shade
blots out conscious thought.]

'G. Simultaneously, inhale and sit
upright, then exhale and open your
eyes.

'Now the mask actor, sufficiently recollected, can be inhabited by
characters, objects, thoughts; he is ready to perform
dramatically.

'This was my method. One of us (Yvonne Galli) achieved
this clearing of the mind, this preliminary state better and more
rapidly. Had she another Sesame?
I have never asked for her
technique.

'When the actor is not seated but standing, nothing changes; however
(see 'E'), the back should not be rounded, for the weight of the head
would draw the torso forward.

'Al these phases are for beginners.
Later the technique will be
altered . .
.'

Closing your eyes and 'looking' into the darkness of the eyelids is a
common trace-inducing technique. I used it when I wanted
to study my hypnagogic imagery. Notice that Dorcy leaves
his body alone except for those parts which he must move in order to put
the Mask on.

George set simple scenarios for his actors, and insisted that they find
a simple, direct way of moving, and that the Mask should be
_presented_ to the audience.
It wasn't good to turn away or to
hold the Mask at too sharp an angle.
Once the technical aspects of a
scene had been mastered, he asked the actor to invent a tragic
background for it. A man lifting his head to look at
the far horizon might imagine himself looking over a battlefield of
corpses, or the sea that had drowned his sons.
George didn't invent the 'given
circumstances' and he didn't ask what they were.
It was a private matter.
If the actor was brave enough then
he would choose something that was profoundly upsetting for him.
If so then the Mask would transmit
his grief to the audience, and would seem to shine with magical
intensity.

I've sometimes checked up on the lighting after a scene, because I
couldn't believe that a spotlight wasn't focused exactly where the Mask
was standing, or a chance beam of sunlight wasn't leaking through the
blinds. This was the quality that George
looked for in the full-Mask work, a sort of ethereal radiance---actually
I think a 'Gestalt' separation of figure from ground.
An actor would remove a Mask, very
shaken, and George would say 'Ah!
You felt something', with
[approval.
Such Masks he referred to as 'inhabited'---possessed by the tragic
spirit.]

He set exercises involving more than one actor, but the technique was
always the same. Here are five exercises that he
gave out on duplicated sheets to a class at the
Studio.

A. A statue---a mourner comes with
flowers---on leaving kisses the statues hand---it comes to life---gets
down from its pedestal---crushes the mourner as if still of
stone.

B. Two very old people dream of
themselves as young---he as a bird, she as a cat---they play---the cat
finally kills the bird.

C. Two young people in love---in the
sunshine---a storm rises---she runs away in fright---he makes to go but
she returns with a very old face on her still young
body.

D. A guilty person is
sleepwalking---is visited by a ghost of his or her victim---the ghost
pursues, sending the victim mad.

E. A young girl takes poison to avoid
a mismarriage---she dies on her bed---her mother or nurse comes in and
finds her dead.

George's Masks were stylised faces with an air of sadness about them.
They were beautiful objects to
look at and handle. I used them for several years
myself until the Theatre asked for them back.
Eventually someone stole
them.

I saw a film called _David_ some years ago.
It was made in 1951, and was a
Welsh contribution to the Festival of Britain---a documentary about the
life of a miner, a man called Griffiths, who had always longed for
education, and who had been injured in the mine and was now working as a
school caretaker. The part was played by the man
himself, and at a point when it seemed as if the dreams of the father
are about to be achieved by the student son, a telegram arrives.
We see the caretaker scrubbing out
the school hall; about one-third of it is done.
The telegraph boy crosses the
hall, gives him the telegraph and waits for an answer.
The caretaker reads the telegram,
which tells him of the death of his son; he expresses nothing, or rather
does nothing in _order_ to express anything.
He's changed, but it's impossible
to say how the change has been achieved.
Probably his timing alters.
The boy leaves, and the caretaker
returns to his job of scrubbing the other two-thirds of the
hall.

If an actor had played the scene he would almost certainly have tried
to display his grief. The caretaker, acting out his own
story, underwent the experience again, and it's not anything I'll ever
forget. It's difficult to be sure of
anything that one saw only once, many years ago, but my memory is that
it was like a tragic Mask exercise, and I use it as that.
A
[Mask
starts some action, the messenger interrupts.
The Mask reads the message and
waves the messenger away, and then continues the action.
What the message says is for the
actor to decide, but it has to be something shattering to
him.]

Something happens to people in moments of great seriousness.
When Annigoni was painting the
Queen she told him that usually she feels like an ordinary woman, but
when she wears the robes of state she 'becomes the Queen'.
We all know how a wreath should be
placed on a memorial during a great ceremony: we may have to be told
where to stand, and when to move forward, but the way we move and hold
our bodies is instinctive. We know we mustn't do
anything trivial or repetitive. Our movements will be as
simple as possible. Our bodies will be straight.
We won't hurry.
There will be a smoothness about
us. The people you see standing around
after mine disasters, or similar tragedies, have a stillness and
simplicity of movement. They rise in status.
They are straighter, they don't
make little nervous movements---not when the shock is on them---and I
would guess that they hold eye contacts for longer than
normal.

It is this high-status seriousness which is typical of the full Mask.
I teach people to be
_still_---if they can!---and I
explain the type of movements that diminish the power of the Mask, but I
also have to awaken feelings of grieving and seriousness.
In moments of awe, or of grief,
something takes over the body and tells it what to do, how to behave.
The personality stops doing all
the trivial things that help to maintain 'normal consciousness'.
Jean Dorcey's technique is clearly
intended to produce this sort of serious trance state; so was Michel
Saint-Denis's and so was George's.
A different kind of spirit is
involved from that which inhabits the half
Mask.

I now have a number of full Masks which I occasionally use, but at the
moment I prefer 'photo' Masks. These are photographs of
faces that I cut out of magazines, and stick on to plastic backing so
that the sweat doesn't ruin them.
In some ways these are the most
amazing Masks I've ever seen, and they're easy to make so you could
experiment yourself. Modern photography is of such high
quality that you can hardly believe that it's not a face you're
watching. Also each Mask has it's own
built-in lighting. People gasp when they see them,
and get frightened. Sometimes I've had to stop a class
because we've all felt sick. This happens if you work
for a long time, say an hour, during which the tensions can become
unbearable.

The students wearing the Masks feel completely safe, since they are
light, and don't even make the face feel confined.
The gasps from the
[onlookers
add to the wearer's pleasure. Normally we keep
altering our faces to reassure other people.
The effect is subliminal, but when
it's missing we can't understand the anxiety created in us.
We continually reassure people by
making unnecessary movements, we twitch, we 'get comfortable', we move
the head about, and so on. When all such
reassurances are removed we experience the Mask as
supernatural.]

I start the actors against the wall which they lean on for support.
This means that they don't wobble,
or shake. It's amazing how few people can
stand really still; yet nothing is more powerful than absolute stillness
on stage. The first Masks I let them try
won't have eye-holes. Being blind makes the actor feel
even safer, on the 'head-in-the-sand' principle.
I say things like 'Slide along the
wall until you find the actor playing the scene with you.
Freeze.
In your own time, make a gesture
and hold it. Slide down the wall.
Huddle together and be afraid of
us. Always keep the Mask held like a
shield between your face and us.
Laugh at us.
Stand up.
Get angry.
Come towards us.
Point at someone who has
mistreated you . .
.'
and so
on.

As the Masks approach the class its normal to see people scrambling out
of their chairs to get away. They laugh nervously,
but they _move_.
If I want to increase the power
then I set a scene in which the actors work out some fantasy that upsets
them. Then they look at the Mask, not
thinking about it, but remembering the image.
If they perform with the image of
the Mask in the forefront of their minds, then suddenly the Mask blazes
with power. In the old days actors in the Noh
Theatre might look at the Mask for an
_hour_.

When actors insist on 'thinking' about the Mask, I tell them to
'attend' to it instead. I say, 'Imagine you're
in a great forest and you hear a sound you can't identify quite close to
you. Is it a bear?
Is it dangerous?
The mind goes empty as you stay
motionless waiting for the sound to be repeated.
This mindless listening is like
attending to a Mask.' This usually works.
If you attend to a Mask you'll see
it start to change--- probably because your eyes are getting tired.
Don't stop these changes.
The edges crawl about, it may
suddenly seem like a real face in your hands.
Fine, don't lose the sensation,
put the Mask on gently and hold the image in your mind.
If you lose it, take the Mask
off.

A student at RADA worked out an elegant way of using the photo Mask.
He had the actors stand in a line
facing the audience, and act out a play in which a landlord raped a
woman who wouldn't pay the rent. Each Mask acted in its
'own space'. One Mask knocked at a 'door' and
another Mask answered a second 'door'.
We saw
_two_ mimed 'doors', but we
put them together in the brain. The rape was weird: the
landlord [tore
at the air in front of him, while the girl Mask two places away from him
defended herself from the imaginary attack.
As he sank to his knees, she sank
back, so that the rape was enacted by each person separately.
Another class heard about this
scene and wanted to try it. Their play went wrong,
the woman didn't react at all. Then we saw her Mask was
disintegrating. It only had a cardboard backing
and her tears were dissolving it.]

Four more actors tried the scene, but they chose a child Mask for the
woman, and then the actress knelt down, reducing her height, so they
decided to make it the rape of a child.
The four characters were the
landlord, child, father and social worker.
They went through the scene stage
by stage in hideous detail, the landlord finding that Mum and Dad were
out, getting himself admitted, and so on.
The actors couldn't see each
other, and the timing was often wrong, so that we were having to correct
the lack of synchronisation as well as the lack of space: the landlord
was making feeble copulatory movements while the child was still being
forced to the ground. When the landlord panicked he ran
on the spot, and then froze. When the father found
his daughter, the landlord's still figure was unbearable, even though he
was no longer 'in the scene'. My impression is that
everyone was weeping, but we couldn't really get the emotion out of us.
We couldn't really speak, or work.
It was as if we had seen the
actual event.

The actors could never have gone so 'deep' and been so serious if it
wasn't for the protection and anonymity of the Masks.
Everyone looked white.
We agreed to end the class; there
really wasn't any way to
continue.

You'll understand that these are students I knew very well.
At first no one will choose really
terrible scenes, because secretly they don't want to get upset---there's
a point beyond which they aren't prepared to suffer.
As the group becomes more trusting
and affectionate, they will eventually follow wherever the Tragic Masks
lead them.

**14**

**Dangers**

Many people express alarm about the 'dangers of Mask work'.
I think this is an expression of
the general hostility to trance and is unfounded.
The 'magical' thinking that
underlies the fear can be shown by the fact that the presence of a
doctor is thought to make things OK.
One of my first students was a
brain surgeon, and this made everyone very happy, although he knew no
more about [Mask
work than anyone else did.]

People seem to be afraid of three things: (1) that the students will be
violent; (2) that the students will go 'mad'; (3) that the students will
refuse to remove the Mask when instructed (a combination of the first
two).

It's true that there are many reports of violent and frightening
'possessions'. Steward Wavell describes a
ceremony in which Malayan men were riding hobby-horses and becoming
possessed by the spirits of
horses.

'One centaur had leapt towards a group of women gnashing his teeth,
pawing at the ground, kicking, snapping and biting, rushing backwards
and then leaping again. Men rushed forwards to
drag the centaur back, but his strength was phenomenal.
Three times he was grabbed and
restrained but managed to break himself free.
Two of the women had fainted.
One had been badly bitten .
.
.
Finally, the old
_pawang_, pressing forefinger
and thumb on the centaur's temples, gave a sharp jerk to the man's head
which must have given a severe shock to his spinal cord.
The man recovered, looked dazed
for a while, and the dancing continued as if nothing had
happened.

'The headman took the incident as a matter of course.
Such outbursts sometimes occurred,
he said. It was the bitten girl's fault:
she should not have been wearing a flower in her hair.
A flower on a girl was bound to
excite any _hantu_ (horse-god).'
(Wavell, Butt and Epton,
_Trances_, Dutton,
1966.)

Jane Belo describes 'violence' occurring during Balinese ceremonies.
A man entered trance while dressed
in a 'pig' costume of sugar-cane fibre; while incarnating a pig-god he
was insulted by someone who cried out 'To the market!'
The 'pig' attacked, and scattered
the crowd.

'Then the pig turned and leaped down again on to the ground, from a
height of at least five feet, landed on all fours with as much ease as
if he'd been all his life a four-footed
creature.

'Still angry, he attacked the overturned stone trough, butting it and
pushing it along the ground with his head.
Men, seeing that he was getting
out of control, hurried to restrain him.
Others brought great jars of water
which they poured in the centre of the court, making a wet and muddy
place, sloshy as a pigsty . .
.
By this time most of the fibre
covering had come off him, only the head and snout remaining.
Someone got close enough to him to
tear this off, as they called out, "Wallow,
wallow!"'

The 'pig' went into the mud and rolled about in ecstasy, and then a
crowd of men grabbed him, 'precipitating a fit of powerful
con [vulsions'.
They poured water over him, and as he grew quiet they massaged him.
Then they carried him to the
'sleeping platform' and he 'woke
up'.]

Another example of a 'pig-god' going out of control also resulted from
an insult. Jane Belo
writes:

'He \[the pig\ was rubbing himself along the wall of a building on
which dozens of people were standing.
Suddenly he fell over and began to
cry dreadfully, beating the ground with his legs and arms.
Five or six men jumped up and
tried to hold him. He was defending himself fiercely.
They put him on the mat and began
to massage him, but he cried and shouted and had dreadful
convulsions.]

'It seemed that one of the children standing on the pavilion had spat
at him . .
.
At last he became calmer and fell
asleep for a long time. There was no feed
brought for him and no mud bath, as we saw before, I suppose because of
this accident. The crowd was very annoyed by the
sudden end of it, and all went
home.

'G.N. noted that many people had called
out: "Who was that who was so very insulting?
.
.
.
It's not right for him to come out
of trance yet, he hasn't had enough of playing.
When he's had enough, as soon as
he's caught, he'll come out of trance."
'

Such scenes do not take place in Mask classes because we don't require
them. Notice that in the above examples
the 'pigs' remain pigs, and the 'horses' are still horses.
The violence is completely in
character, and is _approved_ and expected.
The rules are broken, the violence
occurs, and the group agrees that it's justified.
If the violence wasn't 'in
character' then the performer would be removed.
In the West Indies people who are
_really_ violent, that is, who
don't get possessed _properly_, are told to see
psychiatrists, just as they would be if they acted 'crazily' in any
other situation. The 'violence' is part of the
game.

Masks can be terrifying but the ability to inspire terror doesn't mean
they're actually _dangerous_, not even the cannibal
Masks of Vancouver Island. Here's Ruth
Benedict:

'That which distinguished the Cannibal was his passion for human flesh.
His dance was that of a frenzied
addict enamoured of the "food" that was held before him, a prepared
corpse carried on the outstretched arms of a woman.
On great occasions the Cannibal
ate the bodies of slaves who had been killed for the
purpose.'

This 'Cannibal' used to bite chunks out of the spectators---an
interesting example of audience participation: 'Count was kept of the
mouthfuls of skin the Cannibal had taken from the arms of the
[onlookers,
and he took emetics until he had voided them.
He often did not swallow them at
all.' (]_Patterns of
Culture_, Mentor
1946.)

Obviously this wasn't something the actor went into casually, but the
cannibalism was _planned_.
It's alarming to hear of people
going berserk and biting chunks out of people, but such behaviour had
complete approval, and there's nothing to suggest that the cannibal was
out of control.

Phillip Druckner, in _Indians of the Northwest
Coast_ (American Museum Science Books,
1963), surmises that the 'corpse' that was eaten may have been faked (a
bear carcass with a carved head).
As to the biting of spectators he
says: 'This was not a trick, although it is said that the dancer
actually cut off the skin with a sharp knife concealed in his hand.
The persons to whom this was done
were not selected at random---it was arranged beforehand that they were
to allow themselves to be bitten, and they were subsequently rewarded
with special gifts.'

It would be easier to argue that it's the Masks who are in danger, not
the onlookers. Ingrid once put on a Mask and a
fur coat at a party and someone came up and hit her.
Wild Pehrt, and Austrian 'Demon'
Mask, sometimes got torn to pieces by the onlookers.
(There are several stone crosses
around Salzburg where Wild Pehrts are said to be
buried.)

The violence that occurs is violence permitted by custom (in a way this
is true of all violence). Suppose I were to
introduce 'handlers' whose job was to control anyone who went berserk.
Violence would then be part of the
game, and permitted. Mask teachers get the kind of
behaviour that they prepare for.

I was told a horrifying story (in Alberta) of a schoolteacher who got
her class to make Masks. They put them on, and
picked up a boy and tried to throw him out of a window: 'Only the timely
arrival of a more experienced teacher prevented a tragedy.'
No doubt by now the story has
grown to include the mass suicide of the class after raping the teacher,
but in fact nothing violent seems to have happened at
all.

'Was anyone actually hurt?' I
asked.

'No, thank heavens.'

'Why did they pick on the boy?'

'That's the strange thing, he was the most popular boy in the class.'
'What exactly did the teacher say
to them?'

'She said that they were to do exactly what the Masks made them feel
like doing---ah, and that they were to hate
someone.'

'Did they get the boy out of the
window?'

'Fortunately, the other teacher came in in
time.'

[The
real story was obviously one of an inexperienced teacher panicking.
In fact they must have been a nice
group of children, since they chose to 'hate' the most
]_popular_ boy.
In my schooldays I remember boys
being hung out of high windows by their ankles.
These boys didn't even get anyone
_through_ the window.
No one was trying to murder
anyone. They had just been given
permission to misbehave, and that's what they were doing.
My advice is that if you
understand the nature of the transaction between you and the class, and
if you go into the work gently, Mask work is much less dangerous than,
say, gymnastics.

I did once have a Mask hold up a chair as if it was going to attack me.
I walked towards it, said 'Take
the Mask off', and held the chair while the actor took off the Mask.
My confidence stemmed from the
fact that there was no reason why the actor
_should_ attack me.
He relied on my authority to be in
a trance in the first place.

A teacher who is secretly frightened of the Masks will teach himself,
and his students, to avoid Mask work.
I know several teachers who say
that they'll 'never touch Mask work again', but they won't tell me what
happened! If anyone had got their arm
broken, or had been rushed off to a mental hospital, then they'd tell
me. What must have happened is that
the teacher's status suffered. He got himself into a
situation he couldn't understand or control, and it deeply disturbed and
embarrassed him.

I once saw a Mask cut its hand slightly because a mirror it was tapping
at suddenly smashed. That was
_my_ fault for not
anticipating the danger. I saw a girl hit hard on
the bottom by another girl who disliked her, and who obviously used the
Mask as an excuse---similar exploitations of trance states are reported
from Haiti. The only serious injury I've heard
of in a drama class occurred during a 'method' improvisation (Margaretta
D'Arcy broke her arm). I've never known physical or
mental injury to result from a _Mask_
class.

Masks may cause physical harm when the teacher is believed to be in
control, but in fact has been distracted.
The Mask may be depending on the
teacher to say 'Take the Mask off.'
When the instruction doesn't come,
as a rule the Mask turns itself off, but it might, I suppose, make an
error, and hit harder than it 'intends'.
We have the paradox that Masks are
safest when the teacher is absent, since the actors then operate their
own controls.

As for the fear of madness, I would answer that the ability to become
possessed is a sign of correct social adjustment, and that really
disturbed people censor themselves out.
Either they
_can't_ do it, or
[they're
afraid to even try. People who feel themselves at risk
avoid situations where they feel likely to 'go to pieces'.
Compared to marriage, appearing on
a TV show, family quarrels, playing rugby, being fired from one's job or
other stressful social experiences, the Mask is very gentle and makes
few demands. Ordinary people can face the death
of the people they love, or their house burning down, without having
their sanity threatened. The fear that the Mask
will somehow drive people out of their minds stems from the taboo
against trance states.]

In a paper on 'The Failure to Eliminate Hypothesis' P.
C.
Wason described an experiment in
which students were asked to guess the rule that had been used to
generate a given series of numbers.
One student offered no hypothesis
at all, but instead developed 'psychotic symptoms .
.
.
and had to be removed by
ambulance'. No one would suggest that Wason
shouldn't have continued his experiment, but I'm sure that after a
similar incident Mask work would have been stopped immediately.
When a student cracked up during a
summer school at which I was teaching, everyone went around saying 'What
a good job she didn't take part in the Mask
work'!

The truth is that in acting class, improvisation class, and Mask class
we meet opposition from people who believe, in the teeth of all
evidence, that emotional abreaction is 'wrong'.
Many other cultures have
encouraged the 'loose upper lip', but we even try to suppress grieving.
England is full of bereaved people
who have never discharged their grief and who sit around like stones.
We are even encouraged to
_hit_ people when they get
hysterical!

As for actors refusing to remove the Mask, it's never happened to me in
the way people mean, although I imagine it could happen.
There are reports of people in
clinical hypnosis who have 'stayed asleep' (though not for long!) but we
have to ask what people would gain from such behaviour.
If someone refused to come out of
a trance during a public hypnosis show, then he'd be put into a
dressing-room to sleep it off, and would miss all the fun.
In clinical hypnosis, the only
purpose of such an action would lie in the opportunity to embarrass and
confuse the hypnotist. If the hypnotist remained calm,
then there'd be no pay-off. In case of any trouble
with people refusing to remove the Mask, all you'd have to do would be
to say 'OK, fine, good,' and keep your status.
Then the refusal would be
pointless. Always remember that unless the
subject is crazy, or freaked out on drugs, then his trance has a
purpose, and it exists because of the support of the teacher and the
rest of the class. Go close to the Mask, put your arm
around its [shoulders.
Your physical proximity to an entranced person usually switches Masks
off.]

Sometimes a student will be very upset, and will keep the Mask on to
hide tears. Put your arm around such people,
lead them to the side and let them sit down.
I remember a man in his fifties
who turned into a 'monster' and obviously felt extremely violent.
He lifted a chair in slow motion
as if to smash it to the floor. I walked in towards him,
saying 'It's all right, take the Mask off', and he put the chair down
and leaned on it for support. I put my arm round him
and said 'It's all right, it's all right.'
He was shaking.
(When someone is upset it usually
helps to hold them rather firmly---the message you give is that you're
willing to be close to them and to support them.
Patting people who are upset isn't
really much use. It's more like trying to push them
away.)

Gradually this student relaxed, and then took his Mask off.
He explained that he'd always felt
that he was a gentle person, and that all his life he'd been unable to
understand how people could do violent things; I explained that this
Mask always made people feel like that, but he was insistent that the
feelings were 'his'. I pointed out that he couldn't be
_more_ violent than the rest
of us were, and that we all had great extremes of emotion locked away
inside us. I added, privately, that he should
remember the experience, and that maybe he ought to change his view of
himself a little. Surely it was less lonely to know
he was just like the rest of us.

During a weekend course a student went into a very deep trance, and
became a little old man consumed by paroxysms of lust.
He seemed to blaze with an inner
light. One of the old gods had returned
to earth. The student was shaken, but quite
calm until the other students talked to him during lunch and made him
appreciate how odd it had been. I had to reassure him
that he wasn't going crazy and that the Mask had been very
successful.

Good drama teaching, of any kind, threatens to alter the personality.
The better the teacher the more
powerful the effects. In any actor training we work in
the voice and the body, and feelings of 'disintegration' are likely to
occur. I remember asking an actress to
mime an animal with her eyes shut, and to let her hands just move 'by
themselves'. Suddenly she hallucinated a real
animal! It's more difficult to handle this
sort of situation. I told her that it did sometimes
happen to people, and that it meant she had become very absorbed.
At least in Mask work you can pass
the responsibility over to the Mask.
The problem is not that one's
students really do go crazy, but that they may
[withdraw
from work they regard as dangerous.
They judge the 'danger' by the
calmness, or jumpiness of the teacher.
In reality the work is very
therapeutic, but in this culture any irrational experience gets defined
as 'mad'.]

The Mask teacher has to develop a coolness, a therapeutic blandness.
There is nothing his students can
do that will surprise or disconcert him.
Like a meditation teacher, he
conveys the feeling that nothing really alarming is happening.
If he doesn't project stability
and confidence, then his students will be frightened away.
Here's the Zen Master Yasutani
talking with a distressed
student.

Student: (_Crying_) Just about five
minutes ago I had a frightful experience.
Suddenly I felt as though the
whole universe had crashed into my stomach, and I burst out crying.
I can't stop crying even
now.

Yasutani: Many strange experiences take place when you do zazen, some
of them agreeable, some of them, like your present one, fearful.
But they have no particular
significance. If you become elated by a pleasant
occurrence and frightened by a dreadful one, such experiences may hinder
you. But if you don't cling to them
such experiences will naturally pass
away.

Again, with another student:

Yasutani: If I were to cut off my hand or my leg, the real I would not
be decreased one whit. Strictly speaking, this body and
mind are also you but only a fraction.
The essence of your true nature is
no different from that of this stick in front of me or this table or
that clock---in fact every single object in this universe.
When you directly experience the
truth of this, it will be so convincing that you will exclaim 'How
true!' because not only your brain but
all your being will participate in this
knowledge.

Student: (_Suddenly
crying_) But I am afraid!
I don't know what of, but I am
afraid!

Yasutani: There is nothing to fear.
Just deepen and deepen the
questioning until all your preconceived notions of who and what you are
vanish, and all at once you will realise that the entire universe is no
different from yourself. You are at a crucial
stage. Don't retreat---march on!
(Kapleau,
_The Three Pillars of
Zen_, Beacon,
1967.)

[If
you were to use Mask work literally as 'therapy', and to try and
psychoanalyse the content of scenes, then I've no doubt you could
produce some amazing conflicts, and really screw everyone up.
Mask work, or any spontaneous
acting, can be therapeutic because of the intense abreactions involved;
but the teacher's job is to keep the student
]_safe_, and to protect him so
that he can regress.^[[1 2]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_4)^
This is the opposite of the Freudian view that people regress in search
of greater security. In acting class, students only
regress when they feel protected by a high-status
teacher.

When the students begin Mask work, and 'characters' inhabit them for
the first time, it's normal for everything to be extremely grotesque.
The spirits often seem straight
out of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (Bosch himself acted in plays
where Masks were used). Grotesque and
frightening things are released as soon as people begin to work with
spontaneity. Even if a class works on
improvisation every day for only a week or so, then they start producing
very 'sick' scenes: they become cannibals pretending to eat each other,
and so on. But when you give the student
permission to explore this material he very soon uncovers layers of
unsuspected gentleness and tenderness.
It is no longer sexual feelings
and violence that are deeply repressed in this culture now, whatever it
may have been like in _fin-de-siècle_ Vienna.
We repress our benevolence and
tenderness.

NOTES{.small}

**[[1 .]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_25)**
There are accounts of Chaplin's discovery of Charlie, and I've seen an
early film in which Chaplin plays 'Charlie' without the moustache, but
there's no doubt that Chaplin experienced the character as stemming from
the change in his appearance, rather than from a more intellectual
process.

**[[2 .]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_23)**
Nina Epton met a Balinese who told her that before he left to be
educated in Europe he could 'leap into the other world' of trance in
twenty seconds, but that even if he can succeed these days it takes at
least half an hour. (Wavell, Butt and Epton,
_Trances_, Allen and Unwin,
1967.)

**[[3 .]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_21)**
The psychologist Wilhelm Reich developed the idea of 'character armour',
which he said was 'a protection of the ego against external and internal
dangers. As a protective mechanism which
has become chronic it can rightly be called
_armour_ .
.
.
in unpleasurable situations the
armouring increases, in pleasurable situations it decreases.
The degree of character mobility,
the ability to open up to a situation or to close up against it,
constitutes the difference between the healthy and the neurotic
character structure.' (_Character
Analysis_, translated
by

V. R.
Carfagno, Vision Press,
1973.)

He might have been talking about good and bad acting.
Drama students who are 'tight' and
'inflexible' and 'alone' are able to receive and transmit only a very
narrow range of feeling. They experience muscle
tension as 'acting'. In
_The Function of the
Orgasm_ (translated by T.
P.
Wolfe, Panther, 1968), Reich
says:

[' The
facial expression ]_as a
whole_---independent of the individual
parts---has to be observed carefully.
We know the depressed face of the
melancholic patient. It is peculiar how the expression
of flaccidity can be associated with a severe chronic tension of the
musculature. There are people with an always
artificially beaming face; there are "stiff" and "sagging" cheeks.
Usually, the patients are able to
find the corresponding expression themselves, if the attitude is
repeatedly pointed out and described to them, or shown to them by
imitating it. One patient with "stiff" cheeks
said: "My cheeks are as if heavy with tears."
Suppressed crying easily leads to
a masklike stiffness of the facial musculature.
At an early age, children develop
a fear of "faces" which they used to delight in making; they are afraid
because they are told that if they make a face it'll stay that way, and
because the very impulses they express in their grimaces are impulses
for which they are likely to be reprimanded or punished.
Thus they check these impulses and
hold their faces "rigidly under
control".'

I remember my own friends 'changing' during their adolescence.
One grew an RAF moustache and
spoke with a phoney officer-type voice---in adult life he actually
became an Air Force officer and got a medal in the Suez fiasco.
Other friends modelled themselves
on sportsmen, or film stars, or adults they admired.
Props like a walking-stick, a
pipe, or an individual choice of clothing help support an identity.
If you shave off a beard you
'feel' different. A bride in her regalia is supposed
to 'become a bride'. Oscar Wilde dressed as a convict
on Clapham Junction was defenceless in a way that he would never have
been in his _own_ clothes.
The appearance, and especially the
face, fixes the personality. This is why plastic
surgery has been suggested as a way of reforming criminals--- the
opposite approach to outdated nose-slicing.
In Vietnam, terrible burns to the
body are reported to produce relatively little change in the
personality. Relatively minor facial burns have
severe consequences.

**[[4 .]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_19)**
Here is a description by Melvin Powers of how he introduces the 'eye
test'. It shows the nature of the
transaction very clearly.

'It is suggested to the subject that at the count of three he will be
unable to open his eyes. Let's say that you had
done this, and that the subject, in spite of this suggestion, has opened
his eyes. What is to be done?
.
.
.
He may feel that he is not a good
subject, or worse still, that you are not a good hypnotist, since he had
so easily opened his eyes, when he had been challenged to do so.
It is at this point .
.
.
that so many hypnotists lose their
subjects . .
.
To avoid this: after the subject
has closed his eyes, continue to give him suggestions that he is in a
deep state of relaxation, and that as you (the hypnotist) complete a
count of three, he, the subject, will move deeper and deeper into the
ease of the hypnotic state. Begin your procedure.
Take a great deal of time before
you finally use the "eye test" .
.
.
At this point, give the subject
the following suggestions: "When I complete the count of three you will
open your eyes, and look at the crystal ball.
Then after I give you the
suggestion and when I complete the count of three again, you will fall
into a very deep, sound hypnotic sleep."
'

If this doesn't work Powers says: 'Should the test fail for the first
time, or even the second, be certain not to show the least sign of
annoyance. After a pause proceed again in a
matter-of-fact and businesslike manner so as to ensure the fullest
co-operation on the part of the subject.
It is very important that the
subject be made to understand that the failure to close the eyes was not
an actual test but merely part of the induction procedure .
.
.
The subject feels that the
difficulty lies in the fact that he has not yet been adequately
conditioned. [The
conviction is a much healthier one than the recognition that the
hypnosis has been a failure, since he isn't aware that he has been
exposed to hypnosis at all . .
.
Tell him that at the next attempt
he will be more responsive.' (]_Advanced
Self-Hypnosis_, Thorsons,
1962.)

**[[5 .]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_17)**
Here's a fourteenth-century English meditation teacher describing the
'one word' technique. He says: 'A naked intention
directed to God, and himself alone, is wholly sufficient .
.
.
The shorter the word the better,
being more like the working of the Spirit.
A word like "God" or "Love".
Choose which you like, or perhaps
some other, so long as it is of one syllable.
And fix this word fast to your
heart, so that it is always there come what may.
It will be your shield and spear
in peace and war alike. With this word you will
hammer the cloud and the darkness about you.
With this word you will suppress
all thought under the cloud of forgetting.
So much so that if ever you are
tempted to think of what it is you are seeking, this one word will be
sufficient answer. And if you would go on to think
learnedly about the significance and analysis of that same word, tell
yourself that you would have it whole, and not in bits and pieces .'
(_The Cloud of
Unknowing_, translated by Clifton Wolters,
Penguin, 1961.)

Naming everything that you are doing also interferes with the 'voice in
the head': 'I am breathing. I am thinking about
breathing. I am noticing a bird.
I am feeling the weight of my arm
on the chair . .
.'
This doesn't suppress
verbalisation, but it diverts it.

Dancing to repetitive rhythms is trance-inducing.
People report that the body seems
to be moving itself as they move into a trance state.
Drummers at possession cults drum
louder and with more syncopation in order to 'throw people over the
edge'.

Other methods involve weakening the ego by drugs, by increasing the
excitement so that the subject is emotionally exhausted, by spinning the
person round and round and inducing giddiness.
One method reported from the West
Indies involves smashing people on the head with a sacred brick.
When Professor Eysenck says that
only such-and-such a percentage of the population can enter trance, one
wonders if he has really tried all the
methods.

**[[6 .]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_15)**
In clinical hypnosis a reluctance to perform has been observed, but this
is surely because there's no pay-off.
The hypnotist isn't suggesting
dramatic scenes to play, and there's no audience to reward them.
Hilgard
writes:

'I asked a young woman subject who was practising appearing awake while
hypnotised to examine some interesting objects in a box on a table at
the far end of the room and to comment to me on them as if she were not
hypnotised. She was quite reluctant to make
this effort, eventually starting to do it with a final plea: "Do you
really want me to do this? I'll do it if you say
so." '

Another subject of Hilgard said: 'Once I was going to swallow, but I
decided it wasn't worth the effort.
At one point I was trying to
decide if my legs were crossed, but I couldn't tell, and I didn't quite
have the initiative to find out.'
Another subject said: 'I panic in
an open-ended situation where I am not given
_specific_ directions.
I like very
_definite
suggestions_ from the hypnotist.'
Hilgard comments: 'Thus the
planning function, while not entirely lost, is turned over very largely
to the hypnotist, willingly and comfortably, with some annoyance being
shown when the subject is asked to take responsibility for what he has
to do.' (Ernest R.
Hilgard,
_The Experience of
Hypnosis_, Harcourt Brace,
1968.)

**[[7 .]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_13)**
There's something very odd about the idea that spirits enter at the
neck. This belief crops up all over the
place. For example, here's Ena Twigg, a
medium, [describing
how she enters a trance.]

'I get a sensation at the back of my neck, right at the top of the
spine. It's as if there was a blockage.
I may be sitting, giving
clairaudience or clairvoyance, and I feel myself gradually
subdued.'

**[[8 .]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_11)**
Morton Sobell found that the size of a mirror was very important during
his years of imprisonment on
Alcatraz.

'On the Rock we had only small five-by-seven inch shaving-mirrors;
there were no others. Somehow the size of the mirror
seemed to be critical in self-recognition, probably because the larger
mirror allowed me to see my face as part of my head and whole body.
Ordinarily we correlate all these
images, because they are available to us.
On the Rock this was not true.'
(_On Doing
Time_, Charles Scribner,
1974.)

**[[9 .]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_9)**
Here are some of Goethe's observations (from his
_Travels in
Italy_) on the astonishing way Mask
behaviour can be reinforced by the
crowd.

'The masks began to multiply. Young men dressed in the
holiday attire of the women of the lowest class, exposing an open breast
and displaying an impudent self-complacency, are mostly the first to be
seen. They caress the men they meet,
allow themselves all familiarities with the women they encounter, as
being persons the same as themselves, and for the rest do whatever
humour, wit or wantonness suggests .
.
.

'With rapid steps, declaiming as before a court of justice, an advocate
pushes through the crowd. He bawls up at the
windows, lays hold of passers-by masked or unmasked, threatens every
person with a process, impeaches this man in a long narration with
ridiculous crimes and specifies to another the list of debts.
He rates the women for their
coquetries, the girls for the number of their lovers.
He appeals by way of proof to a
book he carries about with him, producing documents as well, and setting
everything forth with a shrill voice and fluent tongue.
When you fancy he is at an end he
is only beginning, when you think he is leaving he turns back.
He flies at one without addressing
him, he seizes hold of another who is already past.
Should he come across a brother of
his profession, the folly rises to its height .
.
.

'The quakers show themselves in the character of tasteless dandies.
They hop about on their toes with
great agility, and carry about large black rings without glass to serve
them in the way of opera-glasses, with which they peer into every
carriage, and gaze up at all windows.
Usually they make a stiff bow,
and, especially on meeting each other, express their job by hopping
several times straight up into the air, uttering at the same time a
shrill, piercing, inarticulate cry, in which the consonants "brr"
prevail . .
.

'When four or five girls have once caught a man on whom they have
designs, there is no deliverance for him.
The throng prevents his escape,
and let him turn how he will, the besom is under his nose.
To defend himself in earnest
against such provocations would be a very dangerous experiment, seeing
the masks are inviolate and under the special protection of the watch .
.
.

'No coach passes with impunity, without suffering at the hands of some
maskers or other. No foot passenger is secure from
them. An abbot in black dress becomes a
target for missiles on all hands; and seeing that gypsum and chalk
always leave their mark wherever they alight, the abbot soon gets
spotted all over with white and grey.'
(Translated by A.
J.
W.
Morrison and Charles Nesbit, G.
Bell and
Sons.)

**[[1 0.]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_7)**
'What I will say is this: See that in no sense you withdraw into
yourself. [And,
briefly, I do not want you to be outside or above, behind or beside
yourself either.]

' "Well," you will say, "where am I to be?
Nowhere according to you!"
And you will be quite right!
"Nowhere" is where I want you!
Why, when you are "nowhere"
physically, you are "everywhere" spiritually.'
(_The Cloud of
Unknowing_---see note
5.)

**[[1 1.]](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_5)**
George had an extract from Saint-Denis's book
_Theatre: The Rediscovery of
Style_ (Theatre Art Books, New York, 1960) handed out to his students at the studio.
Here it is: 'This silent
improvisation culminated in the use of masks, full-face masks of normal
human size, simple and harmonious masks representing the four ages of
man: the adolescent, the adult, mature middle age and old age.
In getting the students to wear
masks, we were not aiming at aesthetic results nor was it our intention
to revive the art of mime. To us, a mask was a
temporary instrument which we offered to the curiosity of the young
actor, in the hope that it might help his concentration, strengthen his
inner feelings, diminish his self-consciousness, and lead him to develop
his powers of outward expression.

'A mask is a concrete object. When you put it on your
face you receive from it a strong impulse which you have got to obey.
But the mask is also an inanimate
object which the personality of the actor will bring to life.
As his inner feelings accumulate
behind the mask, so the actor's face relaxes.
His body, which is made more
expressive by the very immobility of the mask, will be brought to action
by the strength of inner feeling.

'Once the actor has acquired the elementary technique that is demanded
by wearing a mask, he will begin to realise that masks dislike
agitation, that they can only be animated by controlled, strong, and
utterly simple actions which depend upon the richness of the inner life
within the calm and balanced body of the performer.
The mask absorbs the actor's
personality from which it feeds. It warms his feelings
and cools his head. It enables the actor to
experience, in its most virulent form, the chemistry of acting: at the
very moment when the actor's feelings are at their height, beneath the
mask, the urgent necessity of controlling his physical actions compels
him to detachment and lucidity.

'Submission to the lesson of the mask enables an actor of talent to
discover a broad, inspired and objective style of acting.
It is a good preparatory school
for tragedy and drama in its greatest styles.
Scenarios using up to three actors
were drawn from striking dramatic movements in classical tragedies and
dramas. Further than this silent
improvisation cannot go.'

***[1](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_2)*2.(#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_2)**
I had to comfort someone who was a student of a student of
mine---neither of whom had been trained; the first had only been in a
play I directed. She writes: 'My Mask was white and
immediately grabbed my interest. As I stared I felt my
face changing into his, a mildly smiling, very open
face.'

She then played a scene together with another, rather frightening
Mask.

'I walked into the closet and shut the door.
Immediately my fear changed to
terror---I was trapped. I knelt down holding the
door shut tightly, but I knew his form would soon fill the window.
I couldn't stand that, so just as
his coat came into view in a corner of the window I pulled my head down.
I was screaming.
I did so for a long time till
finally I felt that surely by now my director would have stopped G \[the
other Mask\. As I stepped out I was grabbed by
that horrible-faced creature, it was still there till finally I ripped
my Mask off and screamed, "I'm taking the Mask off."
I was very happy with my Mask, how
simple
it was to get into (the easiest it's ever been) but very annoyed
otherwise. I was annoyed by not having
someone there who knew enough to save me, my Mask, from the fear, from
not having someone say "Stop! Take the Mask off .
.
."
The Mask was very open, and would
be anxious to take whatever was prepared for it.
It was vulnerable.
The other Mask fed on its fear.
The condition was like being
hypnotised yet not aware of the surroundings or real things but still in
the hypnotic state---doing very different things, moving, making sounds,
freedom to do things in another .
.
.
what?
Face?
State?
Can't find the
word.']

She was as upset as if the event had been real.
I would agree with her that she
should have been protected. It's the first time she
had worn the Mask. If she had been through other
emotional scenes, then it might have been OK to let her go through it.
She would have been upset, but she
wouldn't have felt hostile. The effect of allowing
her to experience the 'terror' is likely to make her more inhibited, not
less. All Mask work should be
_graded_.

---

[\*](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_id_1)Also
spelt Ghédé, Gheda, (Papa), Gueda, etc.
by different
writers.