Masks, as well as puppets, were often incorporated into the theatre work of European avant-garde artists from the turn of the nineteenth century. Alfred Jarry, Pablo Picasso, Oskar Schlemmer and other artists of the Bauhaus School, as well as surrealists and Dadaists, experimented with theatre forms and masks in their work.
The modern effort to restore the mask to the stage derives from Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966) who in A Note on Masks (1910) proposed the virtues of using masks over the naturalism of the actor. [2] Craig was highly influential, and his ideas were taken up by Brecht, Cocteau, Genet - and later by Arden, Grotowski and Brook and others who "attempted to restore a ritualistic if not actually religious significance to theatre". [3].
The first real sustained and developed use of masks in contemporary theatre can be traced back to the work of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, founded in 1959, and to Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Theatre, which was established in New York in the early 1960’s. Schumann, born in Silesia in 1934, combined aspects of European festival masks with a highly distinctive American sensibility, and his strongly humanitarian and anti-war polemic has continued to exert an influence on the use of masks in theatre, especially on street-theatre.[4] Other US and Canadian companies, inspired by Bread and Puppet, developed including In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater of Minneapolis; Arm-of-the Sea Theatre from New York State; Snake Theater from California; and Shadowland Theatre of Toronto. These companies, and others, have a strong social agenda, and combine masks, music and puppetry to create a visual theatrical form.
In Europe Schumann’s influence combined with the early avant-garde artists to encourage groups like Moving Picture Mime Show and Welfare State (both in the UK). The practice of performing with masks is also studied by many performers, often derived from the Commedia dell'Arte traditions. The work of Jacques Lecoq has been particularly important in the revival of interest in this discipline.
Mask-based theatre has been taken to high levels of narrative sophistication by Horse and Bamboo Theatre (founded in 1978), and Trestle Theatre Company (1981), although Trestle Theatre has now abandoned its commitment to mask theatre.
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