GREG:  (walks in with coffee to see everyone else working) Hey...sorry I'm late.

CHRIS & JEREMY:  Hi, Greg. Hi, Ben.

STEVEN: Well. look who decided to show up.

B: (under his breath, but audible) Dictator. (He sits)

G:  Listen, Steven, It's 5:30 at night and I haven't eaten since breakfast. Don't make me crush you. (Sits and looks at J's book, opened to masks) What are those?

J: This book of masks is expansive. It covers just about every culture and time period from the earliest shamans up to Darth Vader.

G: OK..so, you are doing Greek...I know Chris is doing Elizabethan...What were you doing, Steven?

S: (S1) It's mask theater of the Kerala region of India, that's South Western India. The theatrical form is called, Krishnattam. It is a cycle of eight plays which depict episodes from the life of Krishna. The performers are elaborately costumed and masked and present the gods, to good Hindus, usually of higher caste. The play cycle is intended to recreate the "divine dream" of God, to allow the performers and audience experience that "divine dream." In that way, it is like western presentational theater. But it's more than ideas, it's about spiritual moods. The play cycle is done once a year and only in a single temple, and it's a long play, the cycle can last for a few days; it's length is supposed to induce a spiritual stupor. 

J:  (J2) That's similar to masks in Greece as well, which grew out of the origins of Greek theatre itself.  It started out as ecstatic worship of Dionysus, the god of nature, wine, orgies, you know, good things.  The "performers" would dress up like satyrs, wear goat-like masks and dance and chant, working themselves into a sort of divine frenzy, until they identified with, or became one with, or rather became Dionysus.  At some point, one of the chanters stepped out from the group and entered a dialog with the others, telling tales of Dionysus and eventually more performers differentiated from the group, embodying more characters in these Dionysian tales until it was "theatre."

G:  That sounds familiar... (G1) Noh started in the same way, but was strictly for the upper class. It was a form of prayer and celebration, but very stripped down. The aristocratic audience knew the stories, so the performances were more metaphorical... they only suggested drama through movement and appearance. That's why the masks were so important...to represent gods and spirits.   2 of the 5 categories of Noh masks are Gods and Goddesses. (G2) (G3) The others are Elders, Goblins, and Devils.

C:  Yea, (C1) the Brit's mainly wanted to spend a lot of money to look pretty, but in the beginning, they also started out just dancing in masks representing gods and telling stories about the gods with no words.  Elizabethan Masques, that's m-a-s-q-u-e as in a type of play, were brought to England from Italy in 1512 and continued through Elizabeth's rein.  It started out as people just dancing and singing with lavish costumes and masks mimicking gods, then slow stories began to emerge.

S:  Hmmm...seems like there is a common thread through this, rooted in religion, our schools of theater originate in the desire to emulate gods. The Krishnattam has remained that way, and it intends never to change. It views itself as preserving the folk tradition of ancient India.

J:  The Greeks, rather than preserving, flipped god-worship on it's head.  Around 450 BC, These early dramas were turned around and instead of honoring Dionysus, theatre was used to attack the entire system of Greek religion.  Slowly, they dealt less with the gods and turned to profound human experiences, like comedy and drama.  (J2) Eventually the average spectator saw nothing divine, only himself and his friends on stage.  At this point, the masks changed function, from mimicking or embodying a god, to the more mundane.

G:  That's kind of how Kabuki started; a woman began it, a dancer named Okuni, as a way to lampoon the traditional Buddhist prayer ceremonies.  Then it began to satirize the upper class, a way for the common folks to express themselves.  It still kept it's religious roots, though.  A lot of performances were FOR something...in Noh, for continued blessings and longevity to the ruling class, and in kabuki, for peace to the country.  It's funny...a woman started it, and then women were banned from it in 1629.  The shows became too suggestive.  Anyone else have anything on the role of women?

J:  Women were excluded from theatrical performances as well, though performances were for people of all castes.  It was the only time both the rich and educated sat side-by-side with the lower classes.

B:  My mask is all about women. I thought it's be fun to look into an African mask so I chose the Sowei mask of the Mende tribe from Sierra Leone. (B1) (B2) They use the representational art of masks during various ceremonies and I think I'm gonna talk about the initiating ceremony for women in Mende society. They use the sowei mask to represent female water spirits who teach women how to harness the power of their beauty, wisdom, and self control in order to better support their multi-generational, polygamous families. This stuff is all done when a girl of group of girls reach puberty.

C:  Actually, the only roles women were aloud to play in my time period were in masques, in regular plays it was illegal for women to act.

S:  Around 1600 A.D. ... Krishnattam is highly stylized and intricate and was born out of the synthesis of hundreds of ancient folkways of the Kerala region, that can be traced back to at least the middle of the first millenium. So there's another theme: the origins of our more highly stylized theatrical forms grew out of ancient forms.

C:  So... about 400 years ago?

S:  Yes.

J:  OK...so, during the presentation I'll go first...

G: Then me...though, Noh is the among the oldest forms of theater, Kabuki came around in the 1620's-

(C2) Yeah, Elizabethan masques were first introduced to Britain in 1512, by King Henry the 8th, Queen Elizabeth's father and went through the early 1600's. 

B:  Damnit, I didn't think to figure out the exact time when the Mende people started doing these ceremonies, I just know that it's an ancient part of their culture and it is still used today which is crazy for me to think about because the circumcise these poor girls at the same time!

S:  OK, so we have a time line we can structure this around. Anything else?

G:  Jeremy...what were those masks made of?

J:  What? Oh, eventually the Greeks got smart and made them from the much-lighter terracotta, but the earliest masks seem to have been made from stone.

G:  Cheese and crackers! Stone!? The Noh masks were usually made of laquered wood (G4)...Did they cover just the face, or the head?

J:  (J3) It would seem the whole head.  How they ran around a stage with a giant stone bucket on their head, I'll have no idea.

B:  (B3) Sowei masks are carved out of wood and often times cover and elongate the neck as well as the head of the woman wearing it.

C:  (C3) The British made their masks out of the most expensive materials they could afford; rare cloths, feathers, and jewels.  This was all so that they could show off their wealth.  It was like fashion contest.  The theater, and it's masks, functioned in the same way as many cultural artifacts of the age: as status signifiers.  

S:  How so?

G:  Well...(G7) (G8) for example...deep red symbolized anger, rage, or obstinancy; pink, for youthfulllness, coyness...indigo for melancholy, or to represent the villain. Noh has 125 kinds of masks, and they are rigidly traditional...kabuki makeup was mask-like, too...the symbolism was there, and the fixed expression from the exaggerated makeup represented the main trait of the character. (G9) Also, the performances had some kind of moral to them...usually that the virtuous were rewarded and the wicked punished.

J:  Oh, just like real life.

S:  The Krishnattam also uses a rigid color structure for the meanings of their masks.  (S3) There are some obvious connotations such as black meaning evil and red meaning violence, but there is a level of complexity that is difficult to understand, unless you are a practitioner.  The juxtaposition of colors, colors being set next to each other on the mask, denoted meaning and usually the character, as in a certain organization of black lines on a green mask would tell the audience that they were looking at Krishna and not some demon.  (S4) This is very important because the dance and movements are even more complex and often indistinguishable, to the untrained eye, so the masks allow for a level of comprehension of the character that might not be otherwise possible.

B:  (B4) The Mende liked to exaggerate and highlight the facial features they like big foreheads for wisdom, long necks for beauty, hair is made wavy to represent water, but the eyes however are narrowed and hard to see out of so the woman leading the pubescent girls on this spiritual journey must be led by another trusted woman in their society.

G:  Kabuki theaters weren't large...they were set up so that the audience could react with the performers. Most performances were day-long things...with a progression.  They started with an historical play, then a dance and comedy interlude...then there was a domestic play followed by a final dance sequence.  People were expected to come and go through the day...and they even served food during the performances.  So, the actors had to contend with noise from the crowd, more than distance...

B:  Are we done here?

J:  I was just thinking, too bad we can't just do a sort of play, like this - the group sitting around a coffee shop, discussing what we've learned.  It's  a more interesting way to present the information, since we pretty much just discussed everything we would want to present anyway.

S:  Wait, why can't we?  Because... that's a good idea.

J:  We'd have to streamline it and trim it down to fifteen minutes instead of the hour we've been sitting here.

S:  Piece of cake.

B:  Hells yeah!

J,G,S,C,B:  CRUSH THEM!!!