Life Behind the Mask by Mouturat Didier Lipsey Roger

Author:Mouturat, Didier,Lipsey, Roger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: International Specialized Book Services
Published: 2016-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

Seeker planted in the heart of the world Disappear!

Let the world be …

ON STAGE

Learning to Walk

The first apprenticeship is “to walk.” Nothing is possible without that and Cyrille assured us that to learn it would take at least an entire year. It was hard for us not to consider this a provocation. Why would we dedicate an entire year to something that had been second nature since childhood?

Entering the world of walking and the attempt to refamiliarize ourselves with an axis moving through space proved, however, to be the first step into an unfathomable world. Every morning was dedicated to that. Moving back and forth across the stage reminded me of the period in my adolescence when, as a young hopeful of French swimming, I would toil through endless laps in the pool. How to become interested in endless repetition? It took me a long time to understand that the challenge was just there: to become interested… Interested in every step, making every step the first. That is the goal of the training, it comes before technical apprenticeship and the education of the body: the first concern is the exercise of attention.

One category of Cyrille’s masks—those he called complete—reflects the formal structure of Japanese Noh masks although they don’t draw on the characters of Noh drama. Their quality obliges you to carry them forth, to present them, to offer them to the public as one presents the image of a god or saint, “as one carries the Holy Sacrament,” Cyrille told us. The rigor, the finesse, the purity of their forms inspired that kind of respect on the part of the “officiant.” Just as naturally, with no need for subjective decisions on our part, they also imposed walking in a straight line without hesitations. The passage through space of the mask must take place like the slow or rapid flight of a bird. Everyone who witnesses this exercise cannot but acknowledge that precisely this is needed. One of the exemplary characteristics of this work is its objectivity. Everyone sees when it’s right or isn’t, everyone is stirred in the same way by the being who awakens and springs forth from the presence of the mask. And, inversely, when “things aren’t working” everyone feels it in the same way.

To walk, you have to forge the technical apparatus, you have to acquire a new mechanism while at the same time being very careful not to “mechanize” it, and you have to leave an opening so that it can be animated by awareness. Without searching for it, we discovered the basis for the characteristic walk of masked figures in Noh theater. The aesthetic may be different, but the conscious relation with the ground, the distance between the verticality of the spine and the horizontality of the movement forward, the circulation of energy in the arms all the way to the fingertips—all of this imposed itself in the same way.

In fact, you have to learn to walk, to deconstruct walking in order to understand organically what it is made of.

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