Mask Makers and Their Craft – Rob Faust: Mask Messenger

Mask Makers and Their Craft – By Deborah Bell 2010

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

Quoted from Page 189 – 190

Photographer: James Croker

Rob Faust’s superb work as a mask maker and masked performer vividly blends the traditions of this ancient art form with hip, contemporary vision. He easily adapts to modest or elaborate performance spaces while humorously integrating a range of provocative topics that explore the pathos and yearnings of our human condition. He encourages reflection at both elementary and sublime levels with seemingly effortless skill. Faust personally developes and makes all of his expressive masks and is equally comfortable working with wood, leather and neoprene.He has also experimented with fiberglass, papier-mache and bronze.

As an American expatriate living in Toronto since 2001, Faust has continued to perform with Faustwork Mask Theatre, a company he created as a one man show in 1983. He has trained over a dozen masked performers to present his acclaimed, long-running touring shows, The Mask Messenger, Little Big Frog, and Faustwork in Concert, taking these productions throughout the United States and Canada and beyond to countries in Asia and Europe for over two decades. He has toured theatres, festivals, universities, corporate events, and schools in England, Australia, Italy, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, Israel and Brunei. Examples of significant venues where he has appeared include the Sydney Opera House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kennedy Center, and the Maui Arts and Cultural Center. His original, provocative, and frequently humorous work has a level of sophistication that goes beyond most masked performances. He enjoys substantial commercial success, although this has never been his primary objective.

In addition to a company manager and outreach coordinator, Faust currently commissions six performers; four tour the United States and two tour Canada. He himself performs frequently and over the years has used these performances as laboratories in which to hone his craft along with the original masked personalities created for The Mask Messenger.

This long-standing experience in masked performance work has served as a foundation for Faust’s current corporate entertainment and speaking engagements, along with workshops that focus on a variety of themes, such as leadership, non-verbal communication, and sales techniques. When communications master and celebrated speaker Nido Qubein first saw Faust’s performance at a corporate event, he declared Faust not “just” an entertainer, but an innovative speaker who uses masks. Qubein encouraged him to develop more of these inspirational guest appearances for business corporations, focusing on entrepreneurial activity and leadership skills, using masked role playing and character development as workshop exercises. Rob Faust still manages to tour with Mask Messenger while also offering his successful corporate presentations, which he has entitled Behind the Mask.

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The Mask of a Pleasant Smile

Leadership titles like CEO, CIO, President or Manager are MASKS that can be used to conceal or reveal our strengths and weaknesses. The most effective leaders are those who use a variety of leadership styles and can change ‘masks’ as needed to meet different demands in different situations. And it’s not about being insincere; it’s about bringing more of our inner masks, different aspects of our personalities to the table. I believe that to become truly excellent at anything – healing, leading, selling – we can’t simply rely on a mask of neutrality, the mask of a pleasant smile, or a power tie. We must be willing to reveal more of ourselves and connect.

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A Beautiful Problem

Carl Jung’s work was all about bringing what is unconscious into consciousness, exposing the shadow aspects of ourselves, which are both positive and negative. Jung would say that life is duality, a world of opposites: masculine and feminine, black and white, night and day, life and death. He would encourage us to go deep inside and become more conscious of the issues that seem like “life or death” to us, to get out of child consciousness and black or white thinking. Jung would say that black AND white is better than black OR white. Exposing the shadow, accepting duality, can yield conflict, and conflict, with grounding and awareness, is “a beautiful problem.” It gives the opportunity for being in reality, being more connected with oneself and others.

Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell, and Rob Faust

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A Bit of Faustwork Company History

“Stunning … indefinable … somewhere between the sculptural fantasies of Mummenschanz

and the precision mime of Marcel Marceau.”

The Montreal Gazette

F A U S T W O R K M A S K T H E A T R E  is committed to exploring and celebrating the art of the Mask, to challenging and delighting audiences of all ages with a unique synthesis of theatre, physical comedy, music, dance and poetry.

Since 1983, we have appeared worldwide at a variety of venues, including The Sydney Opera House in Australia, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., The Kentucky Center for the Arts, and The Maui Arts and Cultural Center. Faustwork’s solo and duo shows tour annually to theatres, festivals, universities, corporate events, and schools primarily in the United States and Canada.

We offer performances suitable for a wide range of venues, from larger performing arts centers, to festival tents and school gymnasiums. We conduct arts residencies, workshops; we seek opportunities to collaborate with other artists and companies.

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Rob Faust Bio

Speaker – Performer – Director – Artist – Teacher

Rob Faust, native New Orleanian, is the founder and artistic director of Faustwork Mask Theatre. Since 1983 he has produced and created six shows that have toured to theatres, festivals, corporate events, and schools. Faustwork’s two symphony shows, Face the Music and The Halloween Show, were created in 2006 and 2007 respectively. Faustwork has appeared worldwide at a variety of venues, including The Sydney Opera House, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, The Kennedy Center in D.C., The Kentucky Center for the Arts, and The Maui Arts and Cultural Center. The company has performed in 48 U.S. states, Canada, Italy, England, Germany, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Brunei, Israel, and South Africa.

Mr. Faust has also collaborated and performed with Jules Feiffer, Martha Clarke, The Paul Winter Consort, and Pilobolus Dance Theater, with appearances on Broadway and The Johnny Carson Show. In 2006 Mr. Faust played the roles of Oberon and Theseus in Motus O Dance Theatre’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Mr. Faust designs and creates the masks used in Faustwork performances. His masks and sculptures—made from wood, leather, celastic, neoprene, or bronze—are primarily used on stage, but can occasionally be seen in galleries, and have been commissioned by the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, Pilobolus, Momix, Harvard University, The Paul Winter Consort, and David Kirk/ Callaway Editions, Inc.

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