Working with Masks
David Wiles, Royal Holloway College, University of London, UK

I want to argue for the mask as the key to understanding classical Greek theatre performance, the defining convention which separates theatre from other cultural forms in the C5th. When working with drama students in the 'laboratory', I regard the mask as the best tool for guiding the student to see what is different and important about Greek plays. A book on the classical theatre mask rests somewhere on the back-burner, awaiting sufficient study leave. I shall value responses from colleagues to this paper as contributions to a research project.

I gave a paper on masks to Lorna's conference at Milton Keynes in January. There I examined Stephen Halliwell's essay 'The function and aesthetics of the Greek tragic mask' Drama 2, 1993, 195-211. Halliwell dismisses three prevailing accounts of the mask (i) religious, (ii) related to doubling, (iii) related to the scale of the theatre, in order to argue for an approach through aesthetics, linking the non-expressivity of the mask to the impassive gaze of classical sculptures. The essay begins promisingly with the perception that masks in the contemporary theatre are normally bound up with a Brechtian V-effekt, and it would be dangerous to project back from contemporary practice to ancient practice. It ends in confusion, with Halliwell unsure whether the mask is essentially mobile, because the spectator projects movement onto it, or essentially immobile, in a vaguely heroic way. He states at the end that a major aim has been 'to demystify the power of the mask, and to suggest that its function in the classical Greek theatre will not bear the gaze of scrutiny which a modern imagination may too easily incline to give it'. I suspect that what Halliwell really wants to challenge is the argument that performance is primary and text secondary. There's also a strong anti-ritualist agenda - but perhaps he should be enlisted in this debate to answer for himself ….

When students tackle Greek plays, the question is often posed in simplistic terms: 'masked or unmasked?' This begs the question of the many different ways in which masks can be used, and tested experimentally.

1   the alienating mask: theorized by Brecht, exploited to some extent by the half-masks      of Koun, though here there was a folk/ritual overlay, and by Hall/Harrison with their account of pain one can bear to watch

2   the neutral mask: theorized by Lecoq, emphasizes the body, and discovery of the world ex nihilo

3   the acoustical mask: a Roman theory long ridiculed but now revived by Thanos Vovolis, who points to head resonance rather than the megaphone mouth as the key

4   the mask as product of a culture centred on body not head: much comparative material available from eastern modes of performance

5   the mask as tool for doubling: the aesthetics of doubling bound up with the notion that the basic dynamic is actor-chorus, not character-character

6   the Dionysiac mask: Keith Johnstone has theorized to some extent the way masks     induce an altered state of consciousness in the wearer; anthropological evidence on    possession relevant here

7   the mask as sacred object: Dick Green's work on dedicating masks is important, and comparative eastern evidence

8   the mask and ritual alterity: if Winkler is half right about choral dancing as a rite of passage, then the mask helps the youth become a woman, or an old man, as a part of forming his social identity as a citizen (masking thus crucial to debates about gender and impersonation)

9   the mask and the gaze: an approach developed by francophone theorists like Caillois, Vernant, Calame, Frontisi-Ducroux, but tending to conflate Gorgons or vase paintings with the different phenomenon of performance (Lacan a cultural influence here)

10 the mask and sophrosyne: as Dick Green noted at Milton Keynes, classical culture championed the control of emotion (i.e. not the public release of emotion à la Stanislavski)

11  the mask and scale: pace Halliwell, large spaces need simplified faces, because you can actually hear better if you can fix your eyes on what looks like a mouth; Toph Marshall (forthcoming) has started to explore the semiotics of the classical mask

12  mask as symbol of mimesis: Halliwell goes for this one, but I think it's Hellenistic

This is a pretty random list. I hope that it indicates the danger of just putting a mask on and imagining you are being authentically classical. There are too many variables. Greek theatre is too complex a phenomenon. Different experimental conditions will yield radically different conclusions.

I would value reflections from colleagues on what you have learned from working with masks, or viewing productions with masks, or examining comparative evidence on masking. Does my list above have some important omissions? Can we elaborate these points into a set of hypotheses? More generally, do you want to accept or challenge my contention that the mask is the defining convention of the form? (E.g. It could be argued that the defining feature is mimesis - when the rhapsode dissolved into the voices of the poem, the mask was just a convenient piece of kit to mark the change.)

What of the comic and satyric masks? Do these need a different mode of explanation? Was their function a licensing of taboo behaviour? Was this conceptually different to the taboo upon males expressing feminine emotions in public (= tragedy)? Is the comic mask the inversion of the tragic, or do we need to develop a trinary model to embrace the satyr? Can we take seriously the notion of a portrait mask? The last is an old chestnut, and I'm more interested in the methodological rider: should we bother about the difference between what different spectators saw from the front row and the back, or should we think about the face the actor saw before donning the mask? This leads on to the semiotic issues Toph is currently exploring: how many signifying elements are being manipulated? Toph argues that the basic distinctions are of age and gender, not class and genre. What C5th evidence do we have?

What of changes between classical and Hellenistic masking? In Masks of Menander I argued that the Hellenistic actor performed in shadow, allowing the detail of his mask to be discerned, but the classical actor played with the sun behind him, so tragedy relied on choreographic patterning and silhouette. The issue of the mask is bound up with controversies about high and low stages.

How do masking conventions relate to costume conventions? Except in the satyr play, theatre seems to eschew naked flesh. Why?

Finally, it would be good to hear about recent and current work in the field. A bibliography is inevitably going to start with Gould and Lewis (Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2nd edition), and Webster (Monuments Illustrating Tragedy and Satyr Play, 2nd edition, 1967). I have developed a number of points that I have sketched here in a short introduction to Greek theatre to be published by CUP in a year's time. My bibliography of significant publications would go on to include, in addition to Halliwell cited above:

Walter F.Otto Dionysus: myth and cult (Indiana UP, 1965)

T.B.L.Webster 'The poet and the mask' in Classical Drama and its Influence ed. M.J.Anderson (London, 1965)

John Jones On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (Chatto & Windus, 1962)

J.R.Green 'Dedications of masks' Revue archéologique (1982) 237-248

J. Michael Walton The Greek Sense of Theatre (Methuen, 1984)

Claude Calame 'Facing otherness: the tragic mask in ancient Greece' History of Religions 26 (1986) 125-142

J-P.Vernant & F.Frontisi-Ducroux 'Features of the mask in ancient Greece' in Vernant & Vidal-Naquet Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (Zone Books, 1988) 189-206 [F-D's subsequent book on masks seems curiously unrelated to theatre practice]

J.R.Green 'On seeing and depicting the theatre in classical Athens' Greek,Roman & Byzantine Studies 32 (1991) 15-50

D.Wiles The Masks of Menander (CUP, 1991)

Nurit Yaari 'The mask in the ancient theatre' Assaph C 9 (1993) 51-62

C.W.Marshall 'Some fifth-century masking conventions' Greece and Rome 46 (Oct.1999)

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RESPONSES

Professor Marianne McDonald , University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

This will be a very brief response to David Wiles provocations about the mask. I certainly agree that the mask was a defining convention of the fifth century B.C. classical Greek drama. I also think that it is occasionally very effectively used in modern drama, e.g., by Brecht. Guthrie's Oedipus was interesting, but deadly when reproduced on video. I also lecture frequently on the similarity and differences between Japanese Noh drama and Greek drama. The best masked performances that I personally have seen are all Noh plays. I considered Peter Hall's use of masks in his Theban plays appalling. They interfered with the actor's speech, and were distracting. Same thing in a production by Arrowsmith of Medea (performed in ancient Greek and available on video) which I showed to my classes, with lamentable results. Tony Harrison is the first to admit how the video made of his Oresteia, not only destroyed the sound elements, but the visual ones. It would ridiculously zoom in for close-ups on the masks...we could see wagging tongues....rather hypnotic (same in the Arrowsmith's video). Harrison's masks were much more effective in the live performances. The occasional use of mask by Wanamaker in Electra was simply silly and pretentious (not necessarily in that order...it was on a par with the water dropping continuously throughout the performance: boring and irritating). In general, I believe one needs skill in dealing with masks, and too many directors minimize the training period. The Japanese don't minimize this, and the results can be spectacular. I think that if we do not have an open-air theatre seating around 15,000, or a Noh theatre, and the skill to direct actors wearing masks, we should accept the rich resources of the human face which now can be seen and appreciated by the audience.

Professor Stephen Halliwell, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, UK

As I think DW isn’t quite fair to the thrust of my article, 'The Function & Aesthetics of the Greek Tragic Mask', Drama 2 (1993) 195-211 (appallingly printed, by the way, for reasons beyond my control), let me clarify my position here. My main contentions were:

(1) theatrical masks have become irredeemably strange and perplexing to us, and this has fostered theories of masking which map poorly onto what we know of tragic masks in Classical Athens (my only immediate concern);

(2)  to have any hope of understanding the latter historically (and I certainly don't rate such hope very highly) we need to reconstruct something of the 'visual culture', the 'habits of seeing', within which masks were used (and to shed, among much else, distinctively modern ways of thinking about the face);

(3) the standard explanations of tragic masks as ritual/Dionysiac, designed to facilitate multiple role-playing, or serving to improve the visibility of actors, all fail to meet the tests of what evidence we have for masks, and for attitudes to them, in Athens;

(4) theatrical masks functioned as markers of impersonation and as artistic representations of the face, and in both these respects counted as mimetic;

(5) our evidence suggests tragic masks typically lacked explicit expressiveness, in a way which paralleled the treatment of the face in contemporary visual art;

(6) masks nonetheless incorporated representation of essential features (the ‘stamp’, charaktêr) of age and gender;

(7) masks were probably perceived not as a discrete item but as part of the actor’s overall physical 'Gestalt' (in Greek, schêma/ schêmata);

(8) audiences may have projected emotional expressiveness onto masks;

(9) it is equally possible that tragic masks were designed, again like the faces in much Classical painting/sculpture, to convey something like an ethos of heroic elevation (and here I invoked, obliquely, Nietzsche's notion of the mask as an Apollonian 'deflection' from underlying Dionysiac reality).

In direct response to DW’s comments on my article, let me say: first, I see no 'confusion' in the later part of my argument, just the exploration of different possibilities (clearly demarcated as such, = (8) and (9) above); secondly, I never entertained the idea that masks were 'essentially mobile' (quite the reverse, where mobility of facial expression is concerned; actors’ gestural mobility is a different matter); thirdly, the idea of masks as mimetic is demonstrably classical (see Aeschylus fr. 78a.7, with, of course, Aristoph. Thesm.156 for impersonation as mimesis); finally, my arguments had nothing to do with the doctrine of the primacy of performance over text (a separate issue).    

 I’m all in favour of experimenting with masks in theatrical 'laboratories' (including theatres); I look forward to learning more of the results. But there are deep cultural reasons for doubting whether the reactions of modern performers and audiences to such experiments can recover Athenian experience of masking. The cultural interpretation of Athenian tragic masks needs to be historically specific.

C. W. (Toph) Marshall, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada 

I want to start by thanking David for raising this issue, and for kindly making reference to my forthcoming article in his remarks. I have been thinking about masks and experimenting with them in some recent productions, and the article represents an initial foray applying the results of these researches to the fifth-century. The classical community has not been concerned enough with how masks functioned, and many modern productions fail to use the masks effectively partly because we as classicists have not been rigorous enough in defining the how ancient masks made meaning. In this respect David's list of 'many different ways in which masks can be used' marks a set of variables that may be relevant for a particular time and place, and which have variously been appropriated to explain the Classical Greek mask. Though there are many ways of understanding masks, not all will be relevant to the classical theatre: pitfalls of comparative methodology generally are discussed at EMC/CV 11 (1992) 309-331, by Mark Golden. So with what cross-cultural comparisons can we better understand fifth-century theatre? I would argue that #2 in David's list (LeCoq's 'neutral mask') and #8 ('the mask and ritual alterity') cannot both be true; however, either might be commensurate with #9 ('the mask and the gaze'). 

Space restrictions do not permit argument, unfortunately, but I believe it is possible to narrow the field somewhat, if only to make space for other possibilities in the 'random list'. I agree with Halliwell that #1 ('the alienating mask') is not operating in the Greek theatre. I suspect masks as pictured on vases would inhibit projection somewhat (contra #3, 'the acoustical mask'), yet they were used anyway. I have suggested elsewhere - most recently in CQ 47 (1997) 79 n.6 - that #5 ('the mask as a tool for doubling') is not operating in the Greek theatre. Significant objections have been raised to Winkler's ephebe-hypothesis by Csapo and Slater, Context of Ancient Drama (Michigan University Press, 1995) 351-352, that would need to be answered for #8 ('the mask and ritual alterity') to be maintained. 

One of the biggest theoretical influences on my understanding of how theatre works generally has been Keith Johnstone's Impro, and I find his status-analysis a particularly useful tool to give students, cf. Text and Presentation 14 (1993) 57-61. I have come to the conclusion, however, that most of what he writes and teaches about masks is not commensurable with Greek scripted theatre (#6, 'the Dionysiac mask'): actors in the trance-like state he documents do not possess the self-control required for the scriptedness of Greek theatre. (Johnstone has become a primary model for my understanding of masks in Plautus and the fabulae Atellanae; but that is another discussion.) 

Some other issues David raises (e.g. portrait masks) I discuss in my Greece & Rome article. There is much that needs to be learned and (particularly) tested in modern performance aiming to reproduce Greek production effects. Yet to discover the ways that Greek masks made meaning is a fruitful exercise. 

J. Michael Walton, University of Hull, UK

A contribution to David's thought-provoking piece on Masks. 

David raises a whole host of hares here and I hope that he will now move in the direction of the Symposium on the subject which he talked of last year. 

A few personal responses to working with masks:

A. Playing is very different for the individual and for a chorus.
B. Choral reaction can be one of the factors that implant an expression onto the static, i.e. receiving, actor.
C. Masked acting is most legible when it is reciprocal. Listening in the mask is as important as speaking in the mask.
D. Masked and non-masked traditions can work together, even when the mask is a full one (as with Noh); with the half-masks of the Commedia too.

A few random responses 

1. Is there a universal 'mask language' which feeds into traditions as diverse as Noh, Topeng, Commedia, Lecoq, Johnstone? If so, is it any more than David's 4 "the mask as product of a culture centred on body not head"? 

Whether or not, the range of factors affecting performance in the Greek theatre might suggest that the cheironomia which developed impinged on audience perception as gradually as did all the other developments we can note from Persai to Samia. In other words the language of masked performance became more detailed, if that is the word, as the plays did and as the characters did. 

2. Greg McCart's excellent work at Cyprus last September did suggest that an unfamiliar tradition can quickly become accessible. Various movement-based theatrical forms, especially from India, but up to and including the rhetorical gestures which Joseph includes in his book on Elizabethan acting [Joseph, B. L. Elizabethan Acting. London: Oxford University Press, 1964 (1951)], point to the possibility of audiences of varying levels of sophistication becoming engaged by gestural performance. 

3. '...when the rhapsode dissolved into the voices of the poem, the mask was just a convenient piece of of kit to mark the change.' 

I do still have a hankering for this, though with a slightly different emphasis from that implied by 'convenient piece of kit'. Hobbyhorse it may be, but the growth of a performance tradition which does not see the actor as emerging from the chorus, but always independent of it does have some arguments in its favour (secular as well as religious; bardic as opposed to dithyrambic). It also seems to me to pose a more interesting dynamic between actor and chorus, at least in Aeschylus and probably beyond. 

4. The way in which the mask is 'seen' is one fascinating aspect of all this. Richard L Gregory points out that when we look, particularly at something a long way away, sensory signals give way to 'intelligent guesswork'. In masked theatre, I would argue, the brain works overtime for us. I want to pursue this elsewhere, partly with reference to David's own comments on the effects of light. 

5. A few personal responses to working with masks. 

A. Playing is very different for the individual and for a chorus. B. Choral reaction can be one of the factors that implant an expression onto the static, IE receiving, actor. C. Masked acting is most legible when it is reciprocal. Listening in the mask is as important as speaking in the mask. D. Masked and non-masked traditions can work together, even when the mask is a full one, as opposed to the commedia where it happened all the time. 

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Final Response from Topic Leader David Wiles

Many thanks to my four respondents for their valuable contributions. 

Marianne : I agree with your comments on Hall’s use of masks, though wonder how far the problem lay with Hall’s principles and how far with the execution which bore little relation to those principles. I cannot, however, go along with your pessimism about incorporating mask-work in our pedagogy. Even without Japanese training and within the constraints of a black box environment, it seems to me that students learn valuable things from working with masks. Fundamentally, that Greek tragedy is rooted in situation, not character. It seems to me that facial acting tends to encourage the outpouring of personal emotion at the expense of dramatic form, which is why I find the whole issue so fundamental. 

Stephen : I’m grateful to you for responding, and appreciate the way your article put masks on the agenda. It was surly of me to use the word ‘confusion’. I should have said something like ‘constructive uncertainty’. There is a real matter for debate here: are masks (8) designed so that distant spectators can form the impression of a mobile face via the ‘intelligent guesswork’ which Mike Walton describes? Or (9) are they designed so that spectators can form an impression of facial immobility? It seems to me that this is the kind of issue which can be tested experimentally by theatre practitioners. I would be interested to know what sort of experiment you would consider to be pertinent, and not invalidated by relative cultural modes of perception. (You have my E-mail.) 

As to the text/performance question, I was expressing myself provocatively, but there is a serious point at issue. You ended your article with the remark ‘the nature of tragedy was not to be read directly in the features of the tragic mask’. If the nature of tragedy is located elsewhere, I take you to mean that the elsewhere is the author’s text. You say in your response that ‘masks have become irredeemably strange and perplexing to us’. I cannot accept your ‘irredeemably’, though Marianne rightly points to the difficulties involved. I think (following Lecoq) that the right actor in the right mask with the right gestures can create what I recognise as ‘the nature of tragedy’, as much as any text. 

Toph: In the matter of ritual alterity, we have to start by considering the experience of the choral performer rather than the experience of the spectator. I think spectators can operate on two levels simultaneously, engaged with the dramatic fiction whilst knowing (though no signs of this may be offered during the performance) that the performer is undergoing a certain kind of experience. In the matter of trance versus control, I think again that matters may be more complex. People in different cultures learn through an act of will how to alter their state of perception. Though he is too mystical for my taste, John Stone does evoke vividly the way masks encourage the performer to function in specific ways, and this is a process that can then be controlled. 

And Mike : You call my attention at the end of your piece to a point I omitted: the chorus convention is bound up with the mask convention, because the mask allows absolute uniformity. The Saxe-Meiningen chorus/crowd of massed individuals is something profoundly different. As to your first point and the question of gradual evolution, my own thesis is that there was a sharp and radical change when the actors moved from the orchestra onto a high stage, the acting became frontal, and the actors of New Comedy were able to offer gestures that read the same way from all parts of the auditorium. 

Let’s keep talking. I’m about to sign up, if I can clear the time, for a course with The Mask Studio (mask.studio@virgin.net) on ‘Greek Tragedy: mask as musical instrument’. See you there?