Honor Hoskins, Creative Producer Vamos Theatre

This blog post was originally written for National Drama, the UK’s leading professional association for drama teachers and theatre educators. A slightly revised version is published here with their permission.

In this post I’ll share how mask and non-verbal drama can be a liberating experience and a powerful way for drama students to enhance their creativity and communication skills.

Behind the mask

I have been delivering full mask workshops with Vamos Theatre for 15 years and I recently had a moment in a school that took my breath away. It’s happened hundreds of times, but it reminded me why I have stayed so connected to working non-verbally in full mask for so long. 

Partway through the workshop, after fast paced warmups, starting to look at what natural assets were in our tool bag to communicate without words, and creating the physicality of mask characters, I asked for a volunteer to take to the stage to be ‘hot seated’. This is where the facilitator asks questions of a performer in mask, who has to respond non-verbally. 

Hands shot up, and I picked someone who had been reticent to engage fully, someone who seemed shy. For the benefit of sharing this tale, let’s call her Farah. I hot-seated Farah and she flew; she had clarity of character, genuine responses, instinctive pauses and stillness; she was naughty and cheeky. The rest of the class clapped, laughed, and gasped. I asked Farah to turn her back on the audience and take off the mask. She came out from behind that mask a different person – she was beaming. I asked her how she felt. ‘I felt great behind there, I felt free, I felt I could do anything,’ she said. At the end of the workshop, the teacher caught me before dashing to the next lesson and said, ‘I’ve never seen that side of Farah before, she was incredible.’

A real equaliser

There is a beauty in watching a child quietly grow a couple of inches when they take off the mask and their peers (the audience) tell them that they completely embodied the character, that they disappeared, that they were funny, moving and understood. 

From the breadth of schools and settings in which Vamos Theatre works, I’ve learned that mask work and non-verbal theatre is liberating for many of the young people we meet. Working non-verbally means we are speaking in a common language that transcends any barriers to engaging. For the student where English is not a first language, for the neurodivergent child that finds words on the page overwhelming and needs to be ‘in their body’, for the student who is D/deaf or hard of hearing, and for everyone who needs more confidence, mask theatre is accessible. It is an equaliser which students can come to on their own level.

Working in schools

As well as being an accessible way into drama, devising in mask lays the groundwork for producing thoughtful, creative, and well-conceived work at KS4-5. We all know those Year 10 conversations, when suddenly the bus explodes, there is a suicide, and someone is pregnant! Mask performance is not about epic plot and at Vamos Theatre we devise all our shows from lived experience and events. We don’t shy away from these big ‘epic’ themes, quite the opposite, in fact. We take a big topic, such as dementia, end of life, PTS (no D please) and being a teenager living with ADHD, for example, and we look at them through the micro details of relationships and human interactions. 

In schools, we create playful ways to devise character-driven work that hones in on minute detail of day-to-day life. It is work that challenges students to always have clarity and intention as an actor and asks them to react truthfully to a situation on stage. For students, the restraints of keeping the crux of the story simple, and to tell it without words, often brings a freedom and creativity they didn’t know they had.

Join in!

So, next week I head into a new project with another school, using play and mask to unlock their stories and ask them to share them with the world. I am always on the look-out for the next ‘Farah’ moment! But, before this blog comes to an end, I urge you to dig out that box of masks from the back of the store cupboard, blow off the dust and have a play. 

We all know that drama lessons, and the process of making theatre, gives young people so much more than the skills to be wonderful actors; I challenge you to give young people the chance to share their voice and stories without words and see what happens.

Stay connected

You can see Vamos Theatre’s latest touring work Boy on the Roof online from 1 May to 19 July. Boy on the Roof is a full mask theatre show exploring ADHD, loneliness, aging, connection and community, performed in their ground-breaking, wordless style.

As always, if you need any advice on OCR’s drama qualifications you can contact us on drama@ocr.org.uk, call us on 01223 553998 or message us on X @OCR_PerformArts. 

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About the author

Honor Hoskins is the Creative Producer with Vamos Theatre, leading the company’s Creative Learning and Engagement Programme. Vamos Theatre is the UK’s leading full mask theatre company, taking its funny and fearless brand of wordless theatre across the length and breadth of the country and beyond since 2006. As an Arts Council NPO, Vamos Theatre delivers workshops in schools, colleges, SEN settings, care homes and health setting nationally and internationally, as well as providing a wide CPD provision for teachers in the company’s full mask devising methods. Vamos Theatre’s digital learning resources, mask.ED and Mask Library, were the winners of a Music and Drama Award in 2023.