Masquerades are performance art, and dialogue with the audience (including future performers) is paramount. A mask must elicit reinvention or it will disappear. The continuing interest and reformulations of future generations distinguish the great masks.
Z. S. Strother1
The “Carnival of Masks” in February 2010 at the Central High School, a public secondary school devoted to the Visual Arts, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, displayed the creation of at least 200 masks by students between the ages of twelve and eighteen. The three teachers who organized the event took mask workshops with me in May 2009 as part of an innovative project in art, education, and the improvement of language skills designed and organized by the College of Education of the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras.2 The workshops offer the teachers hands-on experience cutting, painting, and finally acting and playing mas’3 (masquerade) in their masks. The carnival-like process intends to reinforce the need, first, to transform the normative learning environment—its form, structure, and perspective—to insure that the classroom assumes a new identity and dimension as an open space of creative expression, even if only periodically and for brief periods. Second, the process urges the teachers to take advantage of materials and resources that already form part the students’ everyday life and the immediate social conditions that surround them. Even at elementary and middle school levels, through research and fieldwork, students, teachers, and key members of the community become living textbooks and actively participate in the writing or re-writing of curricula that evolve by integrating their personal and collective archives of images and experiences. The emphasis falls directly on visual, plastic, sonorous, and corporeal expression as important not only in informing learning processes in art, music, and drama classes—classes that are now being offered with less frequency—but transversally in languages, math, history, and science. This is captured in the notion that “if creativity and invention emerge as the [author’s emphasis] salient qualities of culture, then it is to these that our focus must now shift.”4
The “Carnival of Masks” was a resounding success that demonstrated remarkable degrees of participation, enthusiasm, and commitment on the part of teachers and students. Yet I felt an uneasiness as I left the event that went beyond the relative conditions of privilege of this school of the arts and its mainly middle-class student body. These masks were and, at the same time, were not the masks that I proposed to create in the workshops with the teachers (and here I disregard the fact that the students had the freedom to utilize techniques and materials not covered in my workshops5). In fact, the masks at Central High reflected one of the principal and most controversial issues concerning festival and carnival arts in Puerto Rico: the substitution of local cultural specificity —for example, the Euro-African masks of Puerto Rican cultural performance—for globalized images of mass-media culture reflected in the commercially manufactured, rubberized masks of Halloween, cable and satellite television, Hollywood films, and cybernetic games. Similarly, in spite of their astounding plastic-visual-aesthetic qualities, the horned and menacing Vejigante (diablo-trickster) and other Puerto Rican carnival and festival masks served as visual referents in only a few of the student masks. The sources for images recorded in the masks were films such as Avatar and not the Fiestas de Santiago Apóstol in the town of Loíza, the pre-Lenten Carnival of Ponce, or other forms of cultural performance that do not reach them through a digital filter. Their masks demonstrated, almost without mediations, the characteristics of what Guy Debord described more than 40 years ago as “the society of spectacle,” a society self-absorbed in media images it has no active role in creating, or precisely what the workshops attempt to interrogate and contest. They also demonstrated that my workshops for the teachers, although far from being Luddite in design or intention, had not sufficiently considered the over-valorized social and academic position of electronic knowledge and, especially, the impact of global mass-media as the nearly exclusive anchor of contemporary culture and expression for many of these students. If, as Claude Lévi-Strauss claims, a “transformation set” reveals itself in the analysis of each mask, these student masks suggest a reassessment of my practice as a student of Caribbean performance and as a mask-maker.
Puerto Rico, much like the rest of Caribbean and Central and South American Caribbean-rim societies, displays a brilliant tradition of masks and masquerade. A fuller version of this study explores the aesthetic and social functions of those masks within the transcultural practices of Caribbean performance and responds to a number of pertinent questions: what or who do the masked performers represent, both in their physical-corporeal and metaphorical-discursive characteristics?, who makes masks and how are they made—their materials, mass, form, colors, and construction techniques?, what is the mask’s relation to costume, music, movement, and the social conditions of the location or setting in which it appears?, does it represent a specific trope, type, symbol, or character, whether human, animal, or mythical?, and what can masks tell us about cultural and aesthetic rhizomes that seem to undergird the diversity of Caribbean societies?
These mainly aesthetic issues suggest others of an educational nature that focus on how instrumental the mask and mask-making could be in tracing the relationship between human creativity and knowledge. They include (A) the promotion of activity-based—student, teacher, and community—innovation, creativity, and expression through popular arts, such as mask-making, as a means of enhancing current methods for teaching language skills, especially reading and writing, but also in other subjects such as History, Social and Physical Sciences, and Math in elementary and secondary schools; (B) the reinsertion of the local historical and cultural specificity associated with masks, masquerade, carnival, and festival arts traditions in teaching methodologies; and (C) the justification in terms of academic advancement for introducing or increasing the use of such methods for Puerto Rican students.
The Way of the Masks by Claude Lévi-Strauss remains among the most influential studies of the relationship between the aesthetic, the mythic, and the social in the creation and use of ritual masks. Its focus is not Caribbean, but by describing the plastic elements of the aboriginal masks of the British Colombian coast of North America, it also offers a possible description of Vejigantes and other masked Antillean, Central, and South American diablo-trickster-heroes:
This dithyrambic gift for synthesis, this quasi-monstrous ability to perceive the similarity between things which other regard as different, give … its unmistakable stamp and genius … it is as if one were transported from Egypt to twelfth-century France, from the Sassanids to the merry-go-rounds of suburban amusement parks, from the palace of Versailles, with its arrogant emphasis on crests and trophies, its almost shameless recourse to plastic metaphor and allegory, to the forest of the Congo.6
In his approach to the mystery and myths of these masks, Lévi-Strauss also offers the underlying suggestion that the most detailed, expressive, and dramatically complex masks appear to correspond to the epoch, beginning in the later nineteenth century, of contact with Anglo-Europeans. Although cautious of exclusive associations between aesthetic virtuosity and cultural “resistance,” Lévi-Strauss signals that the masks of the Northwest tribes show that they turned increasing to foundational legends and the myths of their ancestors as a means of self-preservation when faced by the aggressive presence of the new European population. The art of carving masks, totem poles, ceremonial boxes, canoes, and other artifacts demonstrates a multifaceted process of concealment and revelation, of regression and transformation; a process of creating masks and performing masked dances with costumes and music as much to protect themselves inside myths inaccessible to the foreigners as to project over-arching meanings that they felt were too opaque, transcendent, and omnipotent for the newcomers to understand or appropriate for their own purposes. The official ban on potlatch ceremonies—an interesting counterpoint to bans on carnival in nineteenth-century Caribbean societies such as Trinidad—serves as a case in point of a ritual performance either misunderstood or, perhaps, too well understood by Europeans. In the cases of carnival and potlatch, European authorities understood the political dynamics, which they attempted to control, if not the specific cultural content.
These creative processes and their aesthetic products—in this case, the masks—leave records, although partial ones, that capture the nature and force of the repression instituted by the “contact” of cultures. They also record the profundity of the discursive and performative—legends, myths, rituals, ceremonies, visual and plastic arts, music, dance, etc.—religious and secular forms they invented or renovated to resist and survive inside the new sphere of uncertainty introduced by colonial domination.7 In a similar fashion, the Africans forced to journey to the Caribbean as enslaved laborers to, at first, occupy the work spaces left vacant by the quickly depleted Arawak and Carib population and, later, to constitute the majority workforce and population of the plantation society, brought with them legends, myths, and stories as well as, in varying degrees, the aesthetic forms in which to tell and represent them. Enclosed in the linguistic and cultural slave quarters of plantation life, they were forced to find new ways to re-inscribe, record, conceal, transform, and re-tell them in new and precarious environments.
In that way, as much for the Native Americans of the Northwestern as for Africans in the Caribbean, as well as the pleasure and possible escape from the work and risks of everyday life, the rituals, celebrations, dances, stories, and other dramatic and corporeal expressions had the efficacy of maintaining a generational memory, the genealogy, and the history of the nation, clan, or tribe. This seems very close to the early sixteenth-century description given by Fernández de Oviedo, “Chronicler of the Indies,” of the areito ceremony of the Caribbean taínos:
these hymns stay in their memory, in place of record books, and in this way they recite the genealogies of the chiefs and kings or lords that they have had, the works they did, and the bad and good seasons that have passed8
In oral cultures as well as in scribal ones, the act of performance can function as “orature”9 that communicates between generations, between the young and the old, the living and the dead, between flesh and blood beings who walk the earth and their ancestors who no longer have bodies but have left their imprint on the lives of their descendents. Metaphorically, at least, those past generations temporarily return to life through, on the one hand, the stage and actors10 and, on the other hand, the sacred and profane carnival or masquerade of masked characters.
At the risk of over-simplifying complex processes, the dramatic, musical, corporeal, and ritual expressions throughout the Americas, both aboriginal and immigrant, especially African, whether celebratory or of mourning, religious or secular, have incorporated masked characters of two or more identities that conceal as well as reveal codes and meanings that change and contrast in relation to the identities and understandings of the spectators who attend, experience, and/or participate in them. Whereas the “outsider,” master, or oppressor receives one message, the “native,” slave, or oppressed understands something different. Recent work in cognitive theory locates this kind of layering, complicity, and double (or triple) consciousness as the basis of human creativity, not only as useful political strategy,11 but as the basis for the pleasures of “orature,” including performance and its reception. If these theories of the relation of cognition and creativity, the arts, languages, reading, and literature—using the “hard science” of brain data obtained via MRI—are correct, then fundamental notions of complexity, representation, metaphor, analogy, and symbolic and analytical thought inform all human intelligence, all forms of knowledge, investigative and creative, and stimulating one apparently reciprocates in the stimulation of others.12
Where do masks fit in this dynamic of creativity? The fact that something—identity, codes, meaning—remains concealed or only partially revealed suggests the first functional characteristic of every mask, which is to protect the mask wearer, at times, in real ways, at times, in metaphorical ways, and at times, in both. For example, the medical or public health mask worn by hospital personnel but also popularized socially in the recent swine flu epidemic and in combating asthma and other respiratory contaminations can assume aesthetic and textual elements—a kind of “transformation set.” When a solitary passenger wearing a medical mask passes through an airport, as observers we began to create a narrative and imaginary context in which to place her. Gas masks, goalie masks, catchers’ masks, ski masks, etc., all protect the wearer, but they also assume other functions—goalie masks in horror films and as Halloween costumes and ski masks for political protesters in repressive society serve as clear examples.
The one-layered function of covering the face to hide an identity is also an act of self-preservation—the Lone Ranger, Zorro, the bank robber, the street activist, the Carnival, Halloween, or social trickster, and Romeo crashing the Capulet family party where he meets and dances with Juliet are examples of hiding behind a mask for protection. Although they also reflect multiple other meanings and responses—surprise and fear might be the two most common of these—this function of hiding or concealment, with all of its characteristics of efficacy and aesthetic values does not fully explain why we “invent” masks and continue creating, innovating, and renovating masks and acts of masquerade.
A second function of the mask is the replication or imitation of the features and traits of a character, symbol, or identity. In some cases, the exactitude and multiplication of the imitation—the popular Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot mask, for example, replicated in the film V for Vendetta—accounts for much of the pleasure of identification, belonging, democratization, and equality. The mask permits uniformity and the repetition of stereotypes but also invites variations. In the case of the Commedia dell’Arte, the stereotyped masked characters display such variation in their representations of the same or similar themes and characters to the comic delight of their audiences. In Loíza, the Afro-Puerto Rican the characters of the Vejigante (diablo-trickster), Caballero (knight or gentleman), Loca (male cross-dressed as a mad woman),13 and Viejo (old man or mad man) are reproduced annually by craftsmen and mas’ players as part of a popular tradition that partially conceals but also re-creates a memory of resistance and survival of the community as the seat of Afro-creole culture. Fortunately, the Vejigantes reformulate and reinvent themselves without losing their specific local and historical references.
Along with protection and replication, the act of creating and using masks provides the opportunity to live “otherness” through the appropriation and projection of different identities. This constitutes the mask’s principal function in plastic and thematic terms. Making and using masks permits the exteriorization of hidden others and even offers the opportunity to transform the internal and external environments that we inhabit. An example is the “transformation” mask of the Northwest traditions studied by Lévi-Strauss. One Haida mask represents an exterior male only to divide and reveal an inner female mask. In other masks, similar changes take place not with gender but with symbolic animal figures. At times, miniature masks surround the central mask. This multiplicity combines with the Janus quality of many masks, which indicates that the eye of the beholder determines the variation or constancy of meaning. Although not part of all masking practice, this sense of meta-representation marks “aesthetic” masks, sacred and secular, even when they don’t open to reveal an inner face or symbol. The internal-external dimension reveals the hidden “other” through the visible external expression that the mask captures.
Wearing a mask also means asking, what do I look like? A specific creature or character—a deer, an antelope, a bear, a raven, a wolf, a god, a hero, demon, an elephant, a monster, a wild woman, a foolish doctor, an arrogant politician, a maniacal street sweeper, a dragon?—or do I look like the imagination itself—forms, colors, features, perhaps mythical, but not necessarily a result of the imitation or literal representation of external perception? Of course, the deer is never just a deer: these animals are parts of myths, ideas, stories, and “transformation sets.” This representation is not imitation, is not only pretending to be the “prey” pursued by the tribal hunters, just as the hunters become more than simply “men of the tribe.” A rite of survival is portrayed but it also represents a myth of sacrifice and heroism. Masks honor and ennoble the prey, just as they celebrate fertility and their cyclical rebirth. Similarly, they celebrate (or castigate) the hunter who replenishes human life and guarantees its regeneration. To “dance” with masks, as Barbara Ehrenreich so eloquently comments, constitutes a fundamental act of joy that confirms our humanity:
banded together and enlarged through the artifice of masks and sticks, the group can feel—perhaps appear—to be as formidable as any nonhuman beast. When we speak of transcendent experience in terms of “feeling part of something larger than ourselves,” it may be this ancient many-headed pseudocreature that we unconsciously evoke.14
The exploration of the art of the mask begins at this point. Historically, the mask remains tied to the evolutionary moment of original artistic representation. Mask-making as symbolic and metaphorical expression is among the oldest forms of human “creativity” at the very basis of notions of the pleasure and necessity of memory, history, and story-making by representing the other—animal and human—and experiencing those representations. As such, the mask also serves as the basis for one of the earliest documented models of education. Whether ancient humans first re-enacted the memories of their hunts, representing the hunter as well as the hunted, or first painted those images on the walls of caves (and other less permanent surfaces) may be debatable. They did both, and perhaps simultaneously, creating memory, history, fantasy, and fiction.
Masks function as living storyboards. Along with storytelling, cave paintings, carved statues, totem poles, medicine belts, necklaces, hieroglyphics, and a myriad of similar oral, visual, and tactile records, they constitute one of the alternative or non-alphabetic languages of human history, even when we can no longer read or visualize all their precise meanings. The Vejigante15 mask of Puerto Rico and the rest of the Hispanic Caribbean, as well as similar variations such as the Cowhead and Horsehead masks of Jonkonnu in Jamaica and other Anglophone Caribbean islands, projects such a mythical origin. Stimulating the imagination to create the kind of mask that reflects metaphorical characters also engages symbolic intelligence that relates perhaps most immediately to language—reading and writing—learning activity but also to learning in social and physical sciences as well as in math and the arts.16
Even though the workshops with teachers and students utilize the Vejigante as one of the principal patterns, at no time are students encouraged to imitate or replicate another mask. Caribbean, African, Latin American, Asian, and aboriginal North American masks are introduced to suggest or provoke new versions and interpretations. This usually results in a relatively abstract original creation that makes no attempt to represent in specific form a realistic or exact human or animal face or a particular character, image, or icon. Students frequently want to create media characters: the example of Spiderman—perhaps Avatar will soon replace it—comes up frequently. The recommendation is to paint the spider-man or man-spider of their imaginations rather the mask of the film, television, or commercial reproduction. Every mask begins by replicating something, general or specific, and my uneasiness about the masks of the Central High students seemed to responded to the absence of creative transformation or reinvention in that act of replication.
If, as argued here, mask-making taps impulses for creativity, growth, learning, and memory as old as the human race, it also seems capable of stimulating the imagination in ways that can impact positively on learning performance in all academic fields. The study, construction, and use of masks, along with other popular and formal arts, provides the structure of an “educational anthropology”17 that shares basic pedagogical elements with Paolo Friere’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and Augusto Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed.”18 That structure facilitates the connection of cognition, universal human history, the specificity of local social and cultural conditions, and the participatory skills of citizenry as part of curriculum of the elementary, middle, and high school classroom.
Unlike other societies such as Trinidad or Brazil (although they cannot excluded from this consideration), in Puerto Rico "folklore" and popular traditions, including carnival and festival arts and cultural performance, in general, tend to be trivialized and treated as static, one-dimensional commercial events without any fundamental relation to "real life" situations or to the historical conditions that have shaped contemporary society. They are marketed to attract tourists with colorful and exotic customs, costumes, music, and dance and as mindless excuses to party with excess drink, food, and sexual energy. Faced by the intimidating imaginary of modernity, with all its political and economic implications, popular traditions that through decades represented survival strategies now suffer systematic degradation and commercialization. Can popular arts such as mask-masking and traditions such as the Vejigante be reinvented and reformulated in ways that inform creativity and cognition?
Of course, I use mask-making metaphorically, as an example of one of many creative and participatory arts that can stimulate learning, because I’m a mask-maker who studies masks and masquerade and also makes masks in workshops with children, young people, and adults. This activity combines with creative writing exercises, poster painting, costuming, creative drama, movement, music, festival and protest processions, digital photography and video, and computerized slideshows. At the end of the completed process, students are masked, costumed, speaking lines they have written, photographing themselves in the creative and performance process, and reflecting critically via computerized imaging on their process and participation. Commercial digital applications such as Photo Shop, Movie Maker, Power Point, Garage Band, etc. and the near universality of digital cameras and cellular phones with still and video camera functions further contribute to the process. However, that is the “frosting on the cake,” the way of, mixing metaphors, “breaking the ice” with students already hardened by media and peer pressure against manual creativity and in favor of prefabricated commercial culture and representation. The “cake” is the creative act itself—mask-making or painting or creating drama or writing poems or telling stories or all of these in the same process and experience—that taps the pleasure of multiplicity and complexity, of metaphor, of creative intelligence.
The Puerto Rican educational system frequently projects the statistical and experiential image of being bureaucratically static—nearly paralyzed—in its administration and rigidly entrenched in borrowed, outdated, and ineffective curricula and teaching methodologies that impact negatively on the academic as well as the social and cultural learning of its graduates—without mentioning the high percentage of students who abandon the school system before finishing. Against this negative image, it should also be noted that a large percentage of students do graduate, and significant numbers of them perform well enough on college placement exams to enter and successfully finish university degree programs in Puerto Rico and abroad. Yet the statistics demonstrate an overall decline in levels of knowledge across the curriculum and especially in language—Spanish and English—skills.
Even though innovative and creative techniques that incorporate artistic expression and new technologies across have demonstrated the capacity to effect significant improvements, for ideological, religious, and social reasons both public and private school systems have frequently resisted non-normative changes and interdisciplinary approaches to curriculum development and revision.
1 Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende (Chicago: U. Chicago P., 1998): xix.
2 Amarilis Rivera, Cynthia Nieves, and Gladys Arguinzony teach at the Central High School, and Drs. Annette López de Méndez (director) and María Antonia Irizarry (co-director) coordinated Professional Training for Teachers of Diverse Learners: Strategies for Language Enhancement, sponsored by the Council of Higher Education of Puerto Rico.
3 I use the West Indian phrase “playing mas’” for masquerade or masked and costumed carnival or festival performance at several points in the paper. The rough Spanish equivalent would be “comparsa.”
4 Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture. Ed. rev. and exp. (Chicago: U Chicago P., 1981), 16.
5 The workshop materials are common corrugated cardboard and plastic gallon water jugs. The eco-friendly principle of re-use and recycling unused portion of the cardboard and plastic always plays a significant role the workshops.
6 The Way of the Masks [1975, 1979], trans. By Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: U Wash P., 1982): 8.
7 The plastic, visual, oral, and also written creativity of this process finds documentation in numerous studies. The aesthetically astounding colors and designs of articles of everyday of the Maroons—the Saramakas—of Surinam are meticulous recorded in the work of anthropologists Richard and Sally Price, Maroon Arts: Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora (Boston: Beacon, 1999). J. Edward Chamberlin titles his study of the aboriginal cultures in North America with the question, If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2003) that a tribal chief directed toward Anglo-Canadian landowners during litigation over rights to the land where the tribe had lived for centuries.
8 Quoted in Angelina Morfi, Historia Crítica de un Siglo de Teatro Puertorriqueño (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1993): 4.
9 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia UP., 1996): 11, cites the term “orature” of Ngugi wa Thiong’o in contrast to writing or “literature”: “Orature comprises a range of forms, which, though they may invest themselves variously in gesture, song, dance, processions, storytelling, proverbs, gossip, customs, rites, and rituals, are nevertheless produced alongside or within mediated literacies of various kinds and degrees.”
10 According to Roach (92-118), the live representation of the dead through the actor’s body functions as a live effigy. It also serves as a metaphor for acting in Western theater. In the case of the classic works of that theater, the dead have been historical characters, usually kings, princes, heroes, mythical or biblical characters, etc.
11 See Funso Aiyegina and Rawle Gibbons, Orisa (Orisha) Tradition in Trinidad, Fac. of Social Sciences, U of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad: Research and Working Papers Series 2000.
12 For a brief introduction to recent studies see Patricia Cohen, “Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know,” NY ed., New York Times (31 March 2010): C1 or http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/books/01lit.html?pagewanted=1&ref=general&src=me.
13 The Loca wears no mask, although shoe polish or other blackening is employed to darken facial features. The costume also exaggerates the bust and buttocks.
14 Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006): 30.
15 The word vejigante, which appears in Don Quixote de Cervantes, derives from the vejiga or inflated bladder the character carried to castigate spectators. However, instead of the usual notion of the diablo-trickster, the Vejigante with its horns, crests, colors, teeth, and long sensual tongue appears as likely to be an imagined or legendary anthropomorphic beast probably more African than European in origin.
16 In the workshops, five specific cultural masks serve as points of reference: the Vejigante de Loíza, the Wooden Man of the Mapuche people of Chile, a carved wooden mask from Nigeria, a carved wooden theater Clown mask from China, and a Wolf mask from British Columbia.
17 I adapt here Eugenio Barba’s term “theater anthropology”: Beyond the Floating Islands, trans. Judy Barba, et al. (New York: PAJ., 1986): 114-156.
18 For the most recent editions see The Pedagogy of the Oppressed [1968] (New York: Continuum, 2007) and Theatre of the Oppressed [1974] (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 1985).
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