Dario Tangelson, International WOW, Museo del Barrio

When focused on political, economic, and socio-cultural situations, theater becomes a very malleable and rich research context; it can serve as a laboratory or an observatory. The theatrical form can humanize and dramatize the effects of certain economic and political conditions, allowing both audience and the artist to inhabit situations of the “everyday reality” where these policies are felt. Concrete facts can be experienced and magnified through the use of their personal, sensitive and poetic aspects, which might be “off limits” in a more academic or political context.

Dario Tangelson of International WOW and the Museo del Barrio will teach “neutral mask” and story-telling techniques. Participants in this workshop will be presented with opportunity to deconstruct their socially-conditioned responses and to re-structure their ideas, concerns and opinions into a conscious theatrical form.

In the first part of the workshop, participants will learn how to use their own faces as masks by focusing on the way our expressions are reflected through our faces. Through exercises that are aimed at achieving “neutrality” of expression, participants will be challenged to discover the automatic expressive responses that are part of our social response mechanism. Using the neutral mask as the only form of expression, participants will be able to experience a truly alternative way of approaching their own learnt forms of expression and behavior.

The second part of the workshop will work on the “expressive” mask that will encourage participants to use their own range of facial expressions as their theatrical material. After neutrality has been established, this second phase emphasizes on the value of facial expression as a tool to communicate to others the core of a character. The characters created through the use of the expressive mask will then be given a voice, so they can tell their stories.