Make Your Own Commedia Masks
It was early March and I was in Berlin the day that Covid-19 broke out there. The school I was teaching at was in Mitte, the site of the outbreak… it was abruptly closed and my Commedia masks went back into the suitcase… me and a case load of commedia characters raced to get back home before the world locked down around us…. I knew then that using performance masks would have to go on hold for a while.
Lockdown conversations
I started conversations early in lockdown with the designers at Wintercroft. I’ve known about their fantastic paper-craft masks for sometime and for a while now, even before Covid, I’ve been thinking how great it would be to have commedia style masks that students could make with ease and minimal resources in class. Since Covid-19 everyone is rightly nervous about putting something on their face that could potentially carry infection, so if ever there was a right time for this, it’s now!
What we have are performance masks that can be made by a student as their personal mask and then used in performance. No infection risk, no huge cost implication, no time-consuming process.
“Thrilled” is an understatement of how I felt when Fletch from Wintercroft emailed me on Friday to say “They’re ready”. So, now, here they are: four make-your-own Commedia dell’Arte masks:
Four of the key archetypes: the braggart, the trickster, the fool and the miser.
Meet Capitano, Arlecchino, Zanni and Pantalone. At the moment they are blank canvases but I’m about to embark on making my first set and once I have them painted, detailed and adorned I will be sharing the images far and wide. The fantastic thing about this mask set is that the masks are so easy to make with Wintercroft’s printable templates and guides. All you have to do is mount the printouts on card, cut them out, match the numbers and join the tabs, then you can finish them to give them a greater authenticity.
Hand-crafted leather .v. Paper-crafted cardboard
Commedia dell’Arte masks are traditionally made of leather. Renaissance performers had beautiful, hand crafted masks made specifically for one actor to use. The advantages of leather: it moulds to your face, it’s pliable, comfortable and it soaks up the sweat that otherwise runs in your eyes! The disadvantages: making leather masks is massively time consuming and there’s a real art to it. Leather masks are therefore expensive! Very few educational institutes can afford sets of leather masks.
A spiritual process
Some 25 years ago when I began my theatre career, I met Mike Chase, a fabulous mask maker who, at that time, had a studio in London. He took me under his wing and taught me mask making techniques, initially using celastic and then paper mâché. I also learnt to craft from leather under Mike’s tutelage. There is nothing quite like the mask making process - it’s truly spiritual - you connect with the character you are creating, you mould the contours, you see the shapes take form in your hands and you feed it with energy. Taking a mask right through from sculpting in clay to eventually using it, is magical. If there were time, space and money in a school year to take students through this whole process, the experience would be invaluable to them, but there is rarely time or space or money for even part of that. So schools need to find what is achievable within the confines that they have to work. And now, Covid-19 is restricting what is achievable still further…
From celastic to plastic, to double-sided sticky tape
In recent years, off-the-shelf plastic and latex versions of the commedia dell’arte masks have become available. I generally use plastic versions, made by my friends at Strangeface. Their masks are ideal - they can be cleaned, they’re pretty robust and they convey the characters effectively. But even plastic masks work out expensive when you have a small drama department budget.
Admittedly, cardboard is not the ideal material to make lasting masks from, but these are ideal for schools: They are cheap, Covid-19 safe, quick to make and they provide a basic mask making into using process, so that a meaningful cross-curricular scheme of work on mask making and using can be embarked upon with pretty much any age group from KS2 upwards. The cardboard can be strengthened, it can be painted, varnished and performed with. Even with just four characters, these could evolve into 8 or even 12 with slight variations in finishes. There are so many characters in the Commedia dell’Arte and I had to think very carefully about which four I would advise Wintercroft to create. I think these four are the perfect springboard - they can of course be used beyond Commedia dell’Arte; these archetypes could be a stimulus for devising… they could be used with Shakespeare… or could be a stand alone design project.
What are you waiting for? Book your Making & Using Commedia Masks with me now and we’ll get crafting!
