Conversations with Tara Cariaso

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tara Cariaso.

Hi Tara, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I grew up just outside of Baltimore city in the suburbs with my mother’s side of the family. I’ve always been fascinated with the energy created by live performance. In the first 20 years of my life, I was focused on being a composer and vocalist, performing rock, jazz, and sacred music.

Eventually, I ended up at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County and got my undergrad degree in theater. It was there that I became passionate about physical theater practice and political theater practice.

Also around this time, I started to notice how difficult it was for me as an Asian-American to be casted in shows. There simply were no roles for people who look like me. In order to work, I had to develop not only my technical performance skills, but also my skills in sharing and being an educator, and skills in facilitation, and authorship.

After getting my undergraduate degree, I lived with the San Francisco Mime Troupe for about a year and watched how this collective of political theater-makers navigated what is usually a commercial theater environment, and made work that spoke to power, as well as entertained.

I eventually got an MFA from the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre and moved back to Baltimore with my spouse and our daughter to start my own business, Waxing Moon Masks, (a theatrical mask fabrication and performance education company). Over the last 11 years, I have built my career as a mask maker and consultant for physical theatre and masked performance.

I think my aim as an artist has always been to be in relationship with other creators and to uplift in us what feels unheard, unknown, or misunderstood, to give all parts of ourselves validity. Music allowed me to speak my own vulnerability out loud. Mask performance education allows me to engage in shaping cultural education practices to help meet the needs of theatre makers in a challenging industry field.

In both examples, I’m focused on making visible what feels invisible.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
Being a second-generation Filipina American with no roots in the Philippines and a majority white family here in the US, I’ve struggled hard with matters of identity. Being Asian in the US, I’m expected not to have a strong point of view, and when I do assert myself, I’ve found it often met with frustration and indignation.

But that reaction is not my problem. It’s taken time for me to develop confidence. I’ve always been talented enough, skilled enough, and easy to work with. I’m not lacking a point of view. But confidence has helped me recognize when a circumstance is too deeply stacked against me; to understand truly, “It’s not me, it’s you.”

Asian women, especially darker brown women presenting bodies, and fat queer bodies like mine, encounter a lot of dismissal and invisibility. That doesn’t mean we should stop talking, but it does mean that we have to navigate the spaces our bodies encounter very carefully.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am a theatrical mask maker and physical theatre performance educator. I specialize in creating theatrical masks for individuals, companies, and institutions of learning to help actors access greater versatility and embodiment in their performance.

My specialties would be the “embodiment” pedagogies that I have honed over 20 years of being an educator in this field. Our company’s theatrical masks reflect the diversity of actors who do mask performances. There tend to be a lot of mask makers who make faces reflect European features, but not as many who reflect faces of people from the global majority.

As an Asian American practicing a European derived theater practice, (much derived from the Lecoq tradition of physical theater,) I found that the trend in my field was making masks that looked more like my white clients than of folks who look like myself. And that representation left me and the diversity of people with whom I work, largely the students and the other actors of color, unrepresented. So our new masks (necessarily) present features from folks of the global majority.

I’m probably best known for my work towards re-imagining the theatre form known as Commedia Dell’Arte, an improvisational theatre form that uses theatrical half masks and satirizes human social structures. Having a lot of Commedia training in my career, and having made a lot of original designs for Commedia masks.

I have an inside perspective on the harms that can come from this practice, in companies and classrooms, if it is not broken down into contemporary, intentionally anti-oppressive components for modern actors. I’ve been developing pedagogy and original masks for this evolved approach to Commedia for the last two years, and my partner company in this work just premiered their first show in this style this spring. So I’m really excited to finally see the fruits of my years of labor out in the world!

I’m most proud of my staying power, how I’ve persisted despite the many toxic partnerships I’ve encountered over the years. I’ve learned that as a woman of color business owner and architect of new liberated practices for an old theatre form, resistance to my ideas is the norm.

I don’t have expectations of being welcomed with wide-open arms into the theatre education cannon, ha, because this is a largely unconsidered territory of oppression, and it’s in a very niche field. To make it more complicated, this niche field of theatre likes to think of itself as”progressive” already. But often progressive leaders who are not doing the work of decolonizing their own practices are blind and very resistant to perceiving the ways in which they unwittingly perpetuate harm.

So I keep my eyes on doing my own work, working on myself and what is honest and urgent for me to share. That kind of focus has kept me afloat in a field of majority-white men for ten years, and I’m proud of that. I’m proud that after ten years of being a business, I’m getting better and better at choosing supportive, genuinely committed collaborators who are also devoted to reducing harm in the theatre world.

Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
I have encountered many mentors in the forms of the theater in which I studied, but remarkably few mentors who could meet me eye to eye as a woman of color and help me navigate the difficulties of the theater field. I did not encounter many mentors who knew the challenges that I uniquely faced because my field has a real absence of people of color.

Networking was never a successful endeavor for me. Where I found strength was in joining intentional communities, communities for women in the arts, and specifically women of color in the arts. The organization WOCA (Women of Color In The Arts) embraced all of me and gave me my first mentor at age 40!

And I’ll tell you, even being a mid-career artist, that WOCA mentorship changed the whole game for me! I can’t recommend connecting with an organization like WOCA strongly enough.

Pricing:

• $130 dollars

Contact Info:

• Email: Tara@waxingmoonmasks.com
• Website: www.waxingmoonmasks.com
• Instagram: @waxingmoonmasks

Image Credits
Cat_RicePhotography and Kintz