The Mask of a Place

Using Theater Techniques in My Day-to-Day

Whenever I start something new, I like to enter the space of said new thing with the pedestrian form of a “neutral mask” on.

Side bar: I am speaking in theater nerd. Pedestrian means what you think it does, a person just walking along. In theater-verbiage, it is contextualized as ordinary, commonplace, lacking in performance quality. Neutral mask is a practice of stage work with a particularly non-descript mask that sharpens the awareness of a performer and reveals their unique projection of self.

In my pedestrian practice of neutral mask, I tone down whatever personality bits of mine might otherwise express themselves on any given day to achieve a state that receives the world and extends into it from a neutral framework.

Well, as neutral as can be. A bit of the point of neutral mask is that there isn’t such a thing. With the effort of it, though, I can best receive a new place I am in as the elaborate mask it is upon my most undefined self. This way, I can most clearly experience the place–and me in it.

It is said that masks reveal bits of us. Truths of us. I like to see what a place and circumstance feels like as a mask in and of itself. What parts of me it carries out and buffs up to shine.

When we use literal masks upon our faces to perform on stage, we find ways to move our bodies to hold them that align with the mask's shape. We seek successful means of using our body language to extend the mask into a fulfilling story component. In doing so, we discover how our unique selves can best portray the mask to convey the information to seek to share.

Imagine getting on stage with a detailed mask and fleshed-out character already at a height. And then imagine trying to put on a new mask to discover its nature when in tandem with you. Over the one you’re already operating under. Would you ever really find the new one? Or just experience the old one, trying to wear the new one?

A mask on a mask.

Starting in a new job, class, or circumstance while in neutral helps one avoid getting attached to ideas, people, or communication styles that serve elsewhere but perhaps not in said new place.

By engaging from a place of ZERO, one gets to feel the inside hollows of a space as they begin to put it on.

I’ve been working at this dad-bar style of a restaurant for four months now, and the mask of the place is starting to have a presence in place of my neutral. I’ve absorbed it from a neutral state for some time and felt the isolation of that. Without volunteering my favorite bits of me into a space, it can get rather dull. But that’s the juice of this practice. It isn’t about doing away with boredom. It’s about staying sharp within that boredom, not getting pulled toward unconscious self-entertainment. This common tendency allows the world to craft you and your personality without your proper consent or ideal construction. And then you wake up one day not liking what you said or did or how you show up in the world.

It feels nice to know how I want to wear this place. To feel which parts of me expand to hold it.

How do you enter new spaces? How do you wear the mask that is your home? Your work? Your parents’ place? How do you let them wear you?

A hui ho,

Julia

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