Masks

Demonstrates adapting Topeng acting styles and techniques to Western productions, with John Emigh.

This film looks at a theatre group who specialise in prison remedial work. By turning hardened criminals into actors, they challenge them to reveal human emotion from behind their masks of hardness.

The video presents a comprehensive overview of masks: what they are, their origin, design elements, making masks and wearing them. The origins and uses of masks in theaters are discussed, and both professional and student actors are interviewed about using masks in performance. Also, a demonstration of how to make a mask is shown.

One day in Valfloriana, one day in Grauno in Val di Cembra, one day in Palu del Fersina in the Val dei Mòcheni, following three (and a half ...) of the most significant traditional carnivals that still take place in Trentino. Far from the now prevalent format of the parade of masked wagons, these carnivals actually correspond to as many winter fertility rites as they are found in folklore throughout Europe.

Explores the folkloric carnival of the Dominican Republic and examines "the island's creativity through its carnival customs, traditions and music, its elaborate masks and costumes, and the many unique manifstations of the satirical Diablo Cojuelo"--Container.

Shot in Cameroon and Brussels, Je ne suis pas moi-même examines the complex network surrounding the international market of African antiquities, and the contradictions in a European art market hungry for new tribal objects. Where do the African masks come from? What journey do these masks make before their unveiling in the windows of the biggest galleries or art collections in Europe? Who determines the economic and aesthetic value of these objects now that colonialism is supposedly dead? And then there's a continent called Africa, in need of economic resources and therefore willing to sell its cultural heritage or, if need be, to fake it. The authenticity of the objects becomes blurred when the people that once adored them start to sell them.

"This introduction to Kathakali dance-drama gives a clear and fascinating overview of the basic principles of the Keralan art form. It includes footage and an explanation of: all the basic character and make-up types ; the performance context ; the process and technique of training ; the preliminaries of performance"--Container.

'Transformation, Part 3A' is the 3rd of 4 videos in a series called Neutral Mask: A Foundation for the Theatrical Experience. It has been devised to establish a foundation for the creative theatrical experience. The mask is sculpted to be simply the human being at the moment of change through discovery. It is intended as a metaphor. The purpose is to permit the mask to come to life, to be animated, by a process of identification. The sense of first time is essential to the performer and the creator. It is essential for the young artist to experience this first hand. The mask provides the means. This video will take you through the learning process, as it was actually experienced by the students participating in a professional program in London. The film, including the commentary of Ron East, master teacher at the School of Physical Theatre, provides a thorough foundation for an exploration of the neutral mask.

Award-winning filmmaker and producer Caroline Yacoe's documentary explores the Tubuan, a secret male society of the Talai people of Duke of York Island in Papua New Guinea. Tubuan is also the name of the masks that are worn by the initiates. Because of the secret nature of the rites, the film only depicts the ceremonies and dances viewed by the entire village, not the forbidden ones. The narrator is Melanesian, and a female Talai villager tells of the threat of death to any female who witnesses the rituals of the society. A male villager explains the symbols painted on a Tubuan house, and a Christian priest relates what an initiate has told him about the importance of the ritual to him. These commentaries, along with ample images of the masks, give us an idea of how the ritual underlies Talai society. 'There is a man inside the mask,' goes the saying in Tokpisin.

The parade for the patron saint of the parish of Gran Poder is the largest city-wide folklore event in La Paz, Bolivia, in which tens of thousands of indigenous Aymara and mestizo residents of the city participate in dances that tie them to the nation's indigenous past. The sequences of images discussed in this article focus on a dance fraternity composed of members of the prosperous urban Aymara middle class (or cholos ) who use their indigenous costumes and dance movements as vehicles in which they enter and display their modernity. Using harshly exaggerated masks that relate social subordination to racial difference, the performance of the Morenada by today's well-to-do Aymaras revisits the cultural marginalization and hardship they experienced in their own migration to La Paz from the rural countryside.