Examining 'The Masks' Through Dance

This weekend at the Middlebury College Dance Theatre, masks were worn, washed off and fashioned as the Dance Company of Middlebury, under the direction of Assistant Professor of Dance Christal Brown, performed “The Meaning of the Masks.”

The performance began unravelling cultural “masks” of convention before viewers even settled into the theatre. House lights remained lit and ushers pointed people to seats as the audience gradually became aware of the nearly immobile forms of the dancers who had appeared onstage. With eyes closed and faces painted various shades of white, grey or green, the seven members of the Dance Company of Middlebury — Hai Do ’14, Amy Donahue ’13.5, Cameron McKinney ’14, Jill Moshman ’14, Rachel Nuñez ’14, Isabella Tudisco-Sadacca ’13.5 and Chelsea Chuyou Wang ’16 — glided around the stage, each step slowly dragged forward.

The audience, conflicted between the cultural expectation that they should be silently attentive of performers onstage and the confusion that the show was not supposed to start for another few minutes, settled into an uncomfortable silence as the last few audience members shuffled into the remaining seats of the dance theatre. This initial upset of what is understood culturally as the beginning of a performance raised the question for the evening: What is cultural convention, and how do we mask ourselves to conform to or break from such convention?

Under this frame of mind the first piece, “Fly Catching,” choreographed by visiting artist Shizu Homma, could be interpreted as an escape from the confines of conventional working life. The dancers, sporting painted faces, closed eyes and office attire, moved as puppets directed lethargically forward until the strings began to be cut. Dancer by dancer, body part by body part, the imagined lines went slack, and the dancers slumped a shoulder, a hip or a torso. Occasionally, the lines tightened again and the dancers righted themselves, until finally the strings were severed and dancers fell to the ground. The remaining few strings unsuccessfully attempted to revive them, but eventually all dancers collapsed. Once all the strings were cut, all seven dancers rose and began to laugh hysterically as they skipped around the stage — in this writer’s interpretation, freed from their puppet existences.

This puppet segment created a lasting image of all the dancers standing in a line facing the audience after righting themselves from various slack movements. McKinney stood as an exception, raising his head last. As the only movement onstage, the audience was invited to focus on that incrementally slow motion, somehow making the movement incredibly personal.

Once free of their puppet strings, the dancers presented a fascinating contrast between primate rituals of grooming and their human parallels. Moving as primates, the dancers pounded the ground and picked imagined insects off of each other’s backs; in the human parallel dancers offered each other fruit and fixed each other’s make-up and clothing.

“Are rituals, games and structured society really culture, or more complicated systems of animal instincts and hierarchies?” Homma asked in her choreographer’s note.

The second piece, “Paperdoll,” choreographed by Ayo Janeen Jackson, smoothly transitioned from the first, but began distinctly with a bathing ritual. Wang got into a metal tub and cleansed herself of her paint mask as McKinney and Do brought out water and poured it over her. She chose a red sheet of butcher paper out of several red dresses that the female dancers presented to her. Performed by Moshman and Nuñez for the Saturday matinee and evening performances, respectively, on Friday evening Donahue lay down on the paper to perform the solo, clad only in nude underwear.

The piece clearly became one of bursting through a self-created mask as Donahue traced her body onto the paper and fashioned herself a dress out of it with scissors and duct tape — notably, with a tail. Her fiercely determined movements were lent a defiant and powerful feeling by Madonna’s “Give it 2 Me” pounding through the theatre, with empowering lyrics such as ‘Nobody’s gonna stop me now’ emphasizing Donahue’s actions.

As the song shifted to “Hurricane” by Grace Jones, Donahue embodied the force of a hurricane with stunningly executed spins in the air reminiscent of a figure skater’s jumps. The leaps and repeated falls seemed to become more painful as Donahue kept on, until at the close of the song she wrapped her paper tail around her neck — and it snapped.

She ran from the stage as McKinney entered wearing ragged, dark strips of cloth and exploring a movement that felt richly primitive in its honesty. The rest of the dancers soon joined McKinney onstage for the beginning of “Collecting Carnival,” choreographed by Brown as “a movement menagerie of the African Diaspora,” according to the program.

As the seven members of the Dance Company of Middlebury moved together onstage, the connection between this group of artist-creator-performer-dancers felt vibrant and richly satisfying to witness.

The dancers gradually pieced together their personal masks as the work progressed, each donning intricate individual costumes of feathers, black paint and colors and a particular movement quality that they chose in order to expose a part of themselves. In what Donahue called in the program “experiential performance practice,” the dancers explored how their chosen masks allowed them to delve into experiencing a part of themselves not otherwise obvious or exposed — and raised the question for the audience to wonder about their own masks as well.

Near the conclusion of the Carnival piece, all the dancers moved in sync in a stationary running motion with their arms pumping but their feet firmly planted on the ground.

“It is the human race and an individual race,” Brown said, referencing our own masks of cultural conformity.

As students, we have much to gain from reflection on the topics explored through dance in “The Meaning of the Masks.” We all wear many masks to conform and blend in with the flow of our culture as students and as members of our various individual cultures, and those masks are not necessarily a negative part of our interactions. However, to understand what lies beneath those masks and what influences their formation, perhaps we should take the time to explore ourselves behind the masks.