When I was a freshman, with bright eyes and a can-do attitude, I sat down with my orientation guide in order to learn everything I could from her. She was a strong Christian, sweet, sincere, and studious. But with all her good intentions, she told me two things that almost scared me away from some of the most unique and formative experiences of my life.
She begged me to wait until sophomore year at least to rush a Greek house. My school follows a delayed recruitment system, not allowing freshmen to rush until January. But once recruitment ended, as she explained, tensions would rise as girls felt jealous for not getting into their top choice or rejected by friends who looked down on them for not also “going Greek.” Although I took her warning into consideration, my heart was set on joining Pi Phi and I could not miss even one semester with such an encouraging and supportive group of girls.
The other advice she gave was to avoid Acting III. Until this year, the dance department functioned as a subset of the theatre department, and so almost half of the dance minor requirements came from theatre classes. Acting III relies heavily on movement, and so it is part of the dance minor. The reason she told me to avoid it was because of the mask work. From her description, it frankly sounded demonic. ‘You become the mask’ and ‘You might tell the mask to do something, but the strong-willed ones won’t listen.’ She even told me some existed that were not allowed to be used, because they were so dark and evil.
I’ve carried that fear of mask work with me since then, until last night. Thanks to the encouragement of my Big and my roommate (also a Pi Phi sister), I auditioned for my first play. A week ago, I was cast as a Fury in The Eumenides, in which most of the actors will be masked. For rehearsal, we underwent a crash course in mask work, the very thing I was dreading. And, yes, the terminology still sounds cultish at times. But I found that each mask did, in fact, have a sort of personality that emerged easily. One had a garishly wide mouth that looked intensely terrified, skittering away when anyone got too close. Another was twisted with a grotesquely off-kilter nose, reminding me of Quasimodo. My favorite looked almost like a cartoon chameleon, with ridges over the eyes and flat but cheery cheeks. That one wanted to walk around with its chest high and spirits lifted, learning how to shake hands and then enthusiastically pumping a grumpy mask’s hands up and down.
To be sure, other people in the rehearsal caught on much more quickly to mask work. But I relished using my experience in dance choreography to figure out how each mask might move and how to embody the persona. Learning to be comfortable with the uncomfortable and unfamiliar has enriched my life beyond belief. Learning what's behind the mask helped me to act deeper than ever.
