The Mask: a fixed point in Tradition.
The mask beats to the rhythm of a heart.
Whose is it? It is the heart of a person, of someone who wants to heal. From someone who loves or someone who is afraid.
Someone who seeks other worlds to give meaning to the world they are in.
It is the heart of an animal that walks and runs alongside us.
It is the heart of a plant that regenerates the earth.
It is the heart of a community where each individual can establish its identity.
It is the heart of a deep time, of the origin of our existence; and the mask brings all this together with our present.
It is a shot of thunder, a cry, an interrupted silence. A constant rhythm.
The Mask: Alchemy between life and death.
The mask shows us a door, a step, a threshold.
Who or where? Of a world, a soul, beyond the past, beyond the future.
In many cultures and traditions, the mask gives access to the encounter of that which we do not know but that is there: energies, spirits, sensations, images...
For many people they are objects considered of little value but in reality they are objects capable of revealing personal universes... coming to consider them as revelatory amulets.
Once the mask appears we could say that the fog dissipates and the actor cannot use his common sense to continue.
We are on the border between being awake and dreaming; between a visible body and an invisible body; between different times of our existence that the mask brings together as in a chorus.
It becomes our meditative refuge.
The mask appears just before or just after things happen.
The meanings come together in a suspension where the pure state of the emotion is: the essence.
Everything that happens through it has a nostalgic force for what was and revealing of what is to come.
This force, in that moment, we can only touch it, catch it in the lightning-fast, ephemeral moment of the here and now. Just at the moment it is in front of our internal and external gaze towards our consciousness.
In that moment of living presence of the mask we perceive everything around us differently and we unconsciously question our origin. We think about the world in other ways.
What do we want? What do we long for? What are we missing?
The mask begins to appear without words but with music like a song without words.
This music tells us things.
It is not us who sing... the mask serves as a channel for a force, an energy that is neither yours nor mine to sing to us and enchant us.
That strength comes from the connection of everything that is alive... the global, the collective through an extraordinary dramatic tension that connects different worlds, giving them meaning.
The mask is between us and what we love.
The mask helps us leave space for others to have their freedom and for us to enter into that freedom of our inner space, that of emptiness, of intuition, of dreams and to be able to question our individual and, by extension, collective consciousness.
The mask changes with us and we with it.
The mask reminds us that every end is a beginning and that every beginning is the end of something. It is cyclical.
It is the fascinating encounter between the dead object and the soul, spirit and living body of the actor. The Alchemy between life and death.