Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Our masquarde: Masks and movement

Masks

Trestle masks
Are handcrafted, beautiful masks that are sold to teachers and schools across the world.
Working with and in the trestle intermediate and, they're very accessible and have a simple but familiar design; each mask has a specific expression that represents a character and character mood or implies the archetype a character might be for example; the virgin might have big but slightly dull eyes, small, famine lips and an upturned nose and the devil might have large, prominent eyebrows in a permeant scowl etc..

I found the simpler mask more charming than the more advanced masks; the complex masks gave me a sense of uncanniness because there was more to look at.

After some time we decided to use the collection of Strangeface masks and utilized the almost disturbing aesthetic they have for our performance, in my opinion it worked very well.

Movement


Soon I realised that I had to focus on my body and my mannerisms to portray the characterisation I desired to show the audience in my performance. Jack taught us about mime, commedia dell’arte and archetypes and how the movement of these different stock characters affected the audience perception of them, we also had the pleasure of receiving a workshop from a professional mask actress, who taught the class breathing techniques to better show emotion while in mask, unfortunately I was unable to attend this workshop but thanks to my peers and friends they gave me a run down on how to properly breath depending on what my character was feeling in specific moments of our performance, this helped me greatly and I created the illusion of strong emotion while masked up; during my performance there was a scene where I have to look very distressed, while sat on the floor I made sure my breathing was ever-changing rapid then slow, harsh and brisk and then I would let out a long sigh, I also twitched slightly with my upper body- this made it look to the audience as though I was weeping heavily.


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