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1987 » Switzerland » Stage and costume design
Švýcarsko
When presenting his work on theatrical masks, Werner Strub cites a quotation from a book by Eduardo Sanguineti, Maschere e Choc, which is devoted to the work of Benno Besson, with whom Werner Straub collaborated, among others also on a production of Sophocles King Oedipus, adapted by the same Eduardo Sanguineti: „The theatre is a mask. It is reincarnation in the broadest sense of the word. The actor is created by this transformation, which occurs when playing a role; he seems to put aside his own every day identity, his own civic status, to become someone else. Structurally, for him it means that, 1 am another'. By impersonating a character he creates and defines it on the stage and thus clearly articulates a previously accepted and agreed upon alienation. A mask, costume, make-up are signs, fraudulent but transparent, of replacing a person. When Besson chooses a mask it was because he likes to stress this system of clear falsification upon which the theatre is based with evident provocativeness and to remind us of the ritual origins of the word. This is our first paradox, in which a presented reincarnation, which aims at creating a delusion, makes itself manifest and at the same time transforms characteristics of a magic ceremony into a cultural and playful convention. In a theatrical reincarnation we cannot separate the aspect of enchantment and the aspect of overt pretension. And this reincarnation is of course just as valid for an actor, for a time and a space. It also finds its way into the text. The here is also elsewhere, the now is also long ago. This character is exactly the same as that person. What he is saying is a direct quotation of his words."
