Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre

Rating:
Summary: A richly complex yet accessible book.
Review: John Emigh in his book, Masked Performance, has himself created something of a one-man masked performance like the Balinese masked drama, topeng pajegan, he describes. This book is revealing, beguiling, and pleasantly bewildering for the multitude of voices, roles, and masks that he presents. Emigh writes as an actor, anthropologist, director, dramaturge, and Asian theatre scholar and while each one of these roles illuminates a realm of masking and playing, at the same time, they obscure some other realm. The result does not produce a grand universal scheme of masking in performance (à la Gordon Craig) rather a richly complex yet accessible smorgasbord of ideas that are intended to inspire a sense of wonder about the human occupation with masking and performing. The book is a joy to read because it is not beholden to any single genre of academic writing but is part scholarly record, part personal memoir, part philosophical treatise. By departing from a purely descriptive analysis Emigh attempts to probe the function and purpose of masking in performance. The fundamental premise that he explores is that masking represents on many levels an encounter between the self (the performer) and the other (the character). What comes of this encounter is a performance that lingers somewhere between the ontological idea of me and not-me. Unlike most modern dramatic performances based on a script, a masked performance often implies the relationship between the mask and the performer is unstable and may even lead to a loss of self. In a candid and refreshing way Emigh does not assume that masking is in and of itself a valid subject for research, but rather, he actually attempts to explore questions concerning the necessity for masks in performance: what value do masks have for our own society that is so enthralled by realism and escapism? By revealing what brought himself to this exploration is as much an aesthetic interest as an academic one, Emigh opens up the subject of masking to problems with artistic responses in multi-cultural performance. For those who are already familiar with Emigh's previous articles on the Orisa Prahlada Nataka, Balinese topeng pajegan and the Rajasthani Hajari Bhand, this material has been greatly expanded and revised according to his larger theme of masking in performance. All in all the arguments are stronger, developed in greater detail, and accompanied with fine illustrations and photographs. There has also been included a useful appendix of basic questions concerning performance that I was grateful to have with me when I was doing my fieldwork a few years ago. Theatre students will find this book a good introduction to Asian performance practices, but also Asian theatre scholars will find this is good introduction to post-modern theory, and anthropologists will find this is a good introduction to how dramatic theory might apply to cultural performance. It has been a long time since a book on Asian theatre has had aspirations to conduct an analysis beyond an encyclopedic description of performance detail. Such a search for aesthetic meaning tends to enter a subjective territory, which lies very near the end of our own ability to formulate coherent scientific principles. As Emigh reveals in this book, masking also lies in such a region between the known and unknown and does not have a wholly rational meaning. Masking is a mode of experience and feeling that approaches the boundaries of our capacity to know ourselves and our consciousness.