...who might be reading this:
If you're studying mask design with Bruce, I would be extremely cautious about taking design advice from this blog. In fact, don't take design ideas from me at all. Stefano's work diverges in certain tricky, subtle ways from what we're taught at Dell'Arte and you'll be better served, right now, by listening to Bruce and the faculty around you. Know also that I think Stefano has serious doubts about the design of my mask, but that he's willing to let me try it and fail (or succeed, as the case may be.)
Thanks for listening.
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3 comments:
Would love to know what those tricky and subtle things are, and also why Stefano had doubts about your mask....
Stefano's main comment was to joke that if my mask didn't work, I could hang the matrix on the wall and use it for a coat hook!
I took that to mean that he was dubious about how the nose turns up at the end, though I don't know if he saw that as an aesthetic issue or a practical one (it certainly made it very difficult to work the leather onto the matrix.) He didn't like all the forehead folds and eventually made me shave one of them off. And he thought the whole thing was too big--and he was right about that. A bunch of wood had to be taken off the back of the matrix. Ultimately I think he thought the mask came out well (he asked me for a copy of it), though my leather work is not up to his standards yet.
Looking just at their masks, I can say that Bruce and Stefano have very different approaches to anatomy; Bruce has a rather naturalistic take, if veering toward caricature, and his surfaces feature very curved volumes and folds of skin. I think of Bruce as very focused on a sort of "anatomical verisimilitude;" he's quite concerned with the humanity of the face and its features.
Stefano has stylized the features and lines of the skin into a system of overlapping and interpenetrating surfaces that has a pronounced cubist/futurist/constructivist/Art- Deco feel to it. Lines are often sharp but clean; I think Bruce would characterize a lot of them as "Spirit" masks. Stefano rarely shadows or highlights his color jobs. The underlying volumes, though, are quite human, and the traditional Commedia characters are instantly recognizable.
Bruce's approach is, I think, an essential component of mask design, in the way that learning Realist drawing is essential for painters—even ones who work mainly in the abstract or non-representational. Understanding the Humanity of a face is critical for establishing the boundaries of style. And it brings into question the aesthetics and spirituality of the theatre practitioner. With specific reference to Commedia, it gives a grounding to the issue of Lecoq's discarding the "dell'arte" label in favor of the "comédie humaine." But Philip Gerstner once casually commented that the Commedia archetypes are really ancient Gods, and I tend, more and more, to see the old archetypal masks as Spirit masks as much as human characters. For those of us in the PTP '06 class, who were taught by Giovanni Fusetti, the emphasis was really on discovering our own human characters and not worrying too much about where they fit the old archetypes. For us I think it brought an immediacy to the work and the themes of our performances that often goes missing when students try to conform to the older archetypes. At worst, the old archetypes are museum pieces, and are as vital as a taxidermied buffalo in a old Natural History diorama. I think often of the magical "Shabamm!" character that one guy created in Giovanni's summer session two years ago; he was utterly alive and immensely entertaining, but also both fresh and recognizable. Giovanni later pointed out privately that the student had really created a new face within the ancient territory of the Capitano. But he wasn't trying to be a Capitano per se...
Showing a couple of Stefano's masks to D'A students at home has instantly brought complaints that the eyes are too small, both on the Pantalone I brought to Blue Lake and the Pulchinella I gave to Leila. I think the eyes are a pretty strong element of the overall design, so I'm hesitant to criticize them; I haven't had a chance to see how they play.
I put this post on my blog to discourage D'A students from copying me and my interpretation of the Capitano, and to keep them focused on Bruce's instruction. I certainly didn't think Bruce or other D'A faculty would support the way I stylized the cheekbones; I was consciously trying to move my own designs out of Bruce's naturalistic influence and toward the kind of stylization I was seeing in Stefano's matrices (note that I designed the mask in clay the first week I was there, before Stefano arrived and before I had a chance to really examine his matrices up close for a long time.) I now think that there are geometric disconnects between the brow, the cheeks and the nose, and I almost certainly wouldn't make this same mask over again--for both aesthetic reasons and practical ones.
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