Leather mask workshop: 11 - 20 June 1999

Welcome

Welcome to our coverage of the 10 day (90 hour) workshop in the design and construction of leather performance mask.

This workshop is being run by Paolo Consiglio, a master leather mask maker and teacher from Florence, Italy. It is being held at The Crago Mill Regional Arts Centre, Piper Street, Bathurst, NSW, Australia. It has been financed by a Visiting Artists' Grant from Charles Sturt University and is open to the local community and students from CSU.

It is being covered on the Net by staff and students of the Communication School at CSU's Bathurst Campus. You will be observing the processes of casting the the makers' faces to obtain a positive face mould on which the masks will be designed in clay. A positive plaster mould of the intended mask will be carved onto a wooden block. Over this block leather will be stretched, beaten and smoothed to create a performance mask. As part of this workshop there will be readings from Dante's "Divine Comedy" and various other Italian cultural delights.

Please enjoy the processes involved in the fine art of leather mask making. Masks have been used throughout the history of theatre. They were a significant part of the the Western World's first professional theatre, the Commedia dell' Arte, which developed in Italy in the 16th Century.

The stock characters from this theatre grew and developed over two hundred years and significantly influenced Shakespeare, Moliere, the Russian Theatre through Meyerhold and our contemporary, Dario Fo. We know some of them from English Pantomime as Harlequin, Panteloon, Scaramouche, Columbine, Punch and Pierrot.

In Italian these characters are tougher, richer exaggerations of real life people: the impoverished servant, Arlecchino; the grasping merchant from Venice, Pantelone; his young, gold digging wife, Signora; her sycophantic servant, Pedrolino; the people hating Neapolitan baker, Pulcinella; the scheming Brighella; the braggart Spanish Capitano; the know it all academic, Dottore, who founded the University at Bologna (or so he says). Often performed in the piazzas at market time the function of this theatre was to make its audiences laugh; laugh at themselves, laugh at pretension, laugh at life.

In the rapidly changing world of the Italian Renaissance, where wealth accumulated in the hands of the skilful and lucky and adventurous, laughter, real communal laughter, prevented the Italians from taking themselves and their successes and failures too seriously. The masks of the Commedia dell' Arte grew out of this desire as an aid to the comic aspirations of the actors. This workshop explores the processes of developing masks for the individual purposes of the participants.

Watch, enjoy, reply.

Bill Blaikie
Workshop organiser
Coordinator BA Communication Theatre & Media
Charles Sturt University

Paolo Consiglio's website can be visited at: www.webitaly.com/personae/welcome.html