Mask-making and Creative Intelligence in Transcultural Education

Abstract

Masquerades are performance art, and dialogue with the audience (including future performers) is paramount. A mask must elicit reinvention or it will disappear. The continuing interest and reformulations of future generations distinguish the great masks.-Z.S. Strother, Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central PendeTo begini have made masks from recycled materials for theatre and performance art and as educational tools for more than twenty-five years. However, during the past eight years, directing mask-making workshops for children, young people, teachers, and student and professional artists has occupied an increasingly central position in my creative and academic life as a professor of drama, theatre and performance at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. The workshops take me all around Puerto Rico as well as to Vieques and Culebra, but they have also led me to El Salvador, New York, Pittsburgh, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Barbados, Anguilla, Jamaica, Tobago, Cuba to participate in the Mayo Teatral festival in May 2012,1 and Suriname for Carifesta XI in August 2013. They offer the participants the hands-on experience of designing, cutting, painting and personalising masks, and then performing or playing mas by moving, singing and speaking as masked characters of their own creation.This essay2 focuses on mask-making in education, where the carnival-like process of the workshop intends, first, to reinforce the need to transform the normative learning environment - its form, structure and perspective - to ensure that the classroom assumes a new identity and dimension as an open space of creative expression, even only periodically and for brief periods. Second, the workshops urge teachers to take advantage of materials and resources that already form part of the students' everyday life and the immediate social conditions that surround them. Even at elementary and middle school levels, through research and fieldwork, students, teachers and key members of the community become living textbooks and actively participate in the writing or re-writing of curricula that evolve by integrating their personal and collective archives of images and experiences. The basic workshop materials are common corrugated cardboard, plastic gallon water jugs, newspapers, white glue, and acrylic paints, and the eco-friendly principle of re-use and recycling - including what remains unused - plays a significant role in the workshops (see Figure i).The emphasis falls directly on visual, plastic, sonorous and corporeal expression as important not only in informing learning processes in art, music and drama classes - classes that, in Puerto Rico, at least, are now being offered with far less frequency or not at all in some schools - but transversally across the entire curriculum. The mainly aesthetic issues suggest others of an educational nature that focus on how instrumental the mask and mask-making could be in tracing the relationship between human creativity and knowledge. They include:1. the promotion of activity-based innovation, creativity and expression through popular arts as a means of enhancing current methods for teaching language skills, especially reading and writing, but also in other subjects such as history, social and physical sciences, and math in elementary and secondary schools;2. the reinsertion of the local historical and cultural specificity associated with masks, masquerade, carnival and festival arts traditions in teaching methodologies; and3. the justification in terms of academic advancement for introducing or increasing the use of such methods for Caribbean students - summarised in the notion that if creativity and invention emerge as the salient qualities of culmre, then it is to these that our focus must now shift.3A theory of masksPuerto Rico, much like the rest of the Caribbean, as well as Central and South American Caribbean-rim societies, displays a brilliant tradition of masks and masquerade. …