The apprenticeship begins!

Finally, after days of wandering around the streets—and insomniac nights, wandering around the inside of my skull—the internship started Monday.

I'm studying maskmaking in the atélier of Stefano Perrocco, a noted master of Commedia and carnaval masks. Stefano won't be here until later this week, but his two assistants, Yohan and Carolina, have taken me under their wing. Here's Yohan, working on an experimental Brighella/Larval mask.

I spoke with Stefano on the phone on Sunday, and he said he had to go to a conference in Poland, but that I should go to the atélier on Monday, someone would be there. That someone happened to be Yohan, who gave me a 1-minute tour of the workshop (including the wall of Stefano's matrices, right) then handed me a bag of clay, a plaster face positive and told me to get started! So I did. I wanted to make a classic Commedia type, since I'm working with one of the the tradition's best practitioners... my friends at Dell'Arte will not be surprised to hear that I just started with a big nose and went from there. Six hours later I had a well-begun Capitano.

For those of you unfamiliar with the process, in creating a leather Commedia mask, you start by making a clay model, as I've done here. Then you carve an exact-as-possible copy of the model out of wood (this is the tricky part); this copy is called a "matrix." You can then work the leather over the matrix, and make many different iterations of the mask. Il Capitano is a traditional stock character of which Yosemite Sam is a modern example.. He's agressive, arrogant, and often violent, though he frequently turns out to be a coward. He typically has a long, phallic nose that he brandishes like a sword, and a mustache; he's one of my favorite types to play. I'm including several photos here showing this mask's evolution; Yohan had some pointed observations about the early versions which have helped enormously. Classical Commedia masks are often quite stylized and have bizarre geometry (as you can see from two of Stefano's Capitano matrices in the background of these photos) but it is essential not to lose the human structure underneath. In the end, I have adopted some nearly planar surfaces on the cheeks, nose and brow as my stylizations, hoping that they don't obliterate the human volumes underneath. the mustache and eyebrows will be made of horsehair and added later. Here are four chronological verions of the mask:


Tuesday was Armistice Day, a national holiday here, so the atélier was closed, and I went to the Musée d'Orsay which by lovely coincidence has a major mask exhibition at the moment. It turns out that there are almost no theatrical masks in the show, but rather many sculptures and drawings by artists like Rodin and Picasso and others who used masks as an idea for sculpture and ornament. There were, however, some original drawings by Edward Gordon Craig of masks he'd designed for theatrical productions—crazy combinations of Commedia and Japanese Noh masks. Really cool. Outside the mask exhibit there were, among the many mind-blowing Post-Impressionists, some particularly mind-blowing Toulouse-Lautrec pieces. He kind of built his own Commedia universe, didn't he? Also on display are several original puppets from the Chat Noir Shadow Theatre, which were triply mind-blowing.

I've now been to the Orsay and the Centre Pompidou and already feel like I have to go back to both of them, when I had only budgeted one-day visits to each. What am I going to do about the Louvre?!?! I'm sure you all feel really bad for me.

Today, Wednesday, I finished my clay model—it's as good as it needs to be before starting on the wood—and Carolina started me on leather work. She and I will be producing a dozen or more masks off Stefano's matrices in the next four weeks. The clay, I'll note, was accomplished in 11 solid hours.

So for the last three hours of today, Carolina showed me how to soak the leather and fix it onto the matrix. Honestly, it's a lot like projecting a globe onto a two-dimensional map, only in this case you're adapting the two-dimesnional surface directly onto the terrain of the face. But the same laws of distortion and interruption apply! I'll leave you with a couple of pictures of Carolina working the leather into the creases on the matrix with a tool made from a cow's horn, and the brass nails—which don't oxidize and blacken the leather—fixing the leather onto the matrix. Tomorrow, we start the hammering...