Epics can be identified as a cultural tool to condition and modify collective consciousness of people across civilization to transcend the mainstream values, morals and norms over generations through larger than life tales that structures the cultural behavior of the community. If we enter the structure of the epics, it is possible to identify characters, plots or situations as the “masks” that are being effective for this purpose. However, banal or contradictory they may seem to our ‘contemporary’, ‘radical’ understanding, they are generally in the common consciousness of people that they associate easily with or refer to – while understanding ‘something unknown’.

As a phenomenon, this association leads to the understanding of cultural identity that champions the ‘mainstream’ as its political outcome. The epics justified the conquerors – and regulated the behavior of societies that are not just an understanding but visceral memory – essentially of the ‘audiences’ across the globe. 

Coming from the lineage of a predominant oral culture, I experienced the necessity as well as the usefulness of locating the ‘masks’ of epics as well as restructuring them for intended expression with an audience-body through a common place of familiarity. The ‘masks’ and the ‘archetypes’ are generally known to the population with its common notion. Identifying those and re-adjusting structure(s) according to the context of the artist/ creator’s politics or intention through a psychosomatic process and praxis is useful and effective to create new performance language that has its familiarity to the viewer(s) for having the ‘known’ components, but challenges the notion for the context it is given through re-adjustment of the ‘mask’.

Based on this hypothesis, I have developed a laboratory process to identify, recreate and embody the ‘masks’ from the epic that helps us rewrite the history from our perspective.

In the introductory module of 8 hours distributed over 4 working days in a month, the laboratory works with a tiny bit of an epic of the participants’ respective cultures. This module starts by locating the position of the part of epic in our respective bodies, understand the literary progress of structure and how that culminates to a “mask”. In the later half we experiment with re-adjusting and recreating of the mask by exploring the contradiction of our respective current sensibility with it through embodiment and also document and write a performance that started from the original departure point of the chosen epic. 

For creative students interested in conceiving in their original work. 

Module Structure