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Deborah Bell

After twenty-five years of designing award-winning costumes for musicals, operas, and theatre, Deb Bell of the Department of Theatre has found a new way of looking at the relationship of design and performance through her research on masks and mask makers. Bell’s interest in masks was ignited several years ago when she and colleague Marsha Paludan team taught a class entitled “Mask in Performance.” Her continuing interest in commedia dell’arte, which traditionally incorporates masks, folds into her current research. Now she is in the process of interviewing twenty-four mask makers for a book about mask makers around the world. Bell has already published several articles based on the interviews and hopes the book will be completed in the coming year. “There are lots of books about masks, but none I can find about mask makers.”

She has traveled to interview mask makers in Northern California, Italy, Sweden, Mexico, Japan, Bali, and South Korea. She watched the Korean artist from 11 pm to 4 am. He was a chain smoker—and a millionaire. As a young man he was a laborer. But at night he taught himself to carve masks after studying the masks in the Seoul mask museum. Then he hit on the idea of making tiny copies of the “Flirtatious Widow” mask for tourists. The trinkets were such a hit that he began his own factory to accommodate the huge demand. When Bell asked her standard question—“What is your idea of a successful mask?”—he replied that he had never made one, because his own works never equal those of his ancestors.

Our own culture values specialization in the theatre, but mask makers are often their own performers—as well as choreographers, technicians, and directors. “The mask—its making and performance—has so much integrity,” believes Bell who has participated in several conferences and workshops about mask making and performance. At one three week workshop Bell found herself on stage for the first time in decades. She was terrified, but back home she found she had a new found empathy with the actors for whom she designs. “They’re out there, soul and body. Designers are not.”

The inevitable borrowings among mask makers now are global rather than local. Thanks to the internet, mask makers can study masks from around the world. The gain in sophistication is great, but something is also lost. Provincial masks are often eloquent expressions of a single culture. Still, as one prominent mask maker, Bruce Marrs of Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre said to Bell, “I hold that your particular culture embarrasses you more than supports you. Get over it. Honor your ancestors, but get over their silly cultural limitations. Be a cultural traveler, a borrower, a wanderer, an artist of evolution.”

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Page updated: 14-Feb-2005

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