Six Masks

After losing a job and moving back home, the narrator jumps into an intensive Vancouver clown course that asks students to sculpt six clay masks that together reveal one’s fragmented self. The training riffs on Richard Pochinko’s Canadian “Mask Method” but is led by David MacMurray Smith, a contrarian teacher who strips away some of the indigenous-spiritual framing and adds his own bodywork: Biokinetic Release (inspired by Wilhelm Reich), Grotowski-derived “rivering,” and an explicit rejection of the red clown nose. The cohort is eclectic - lawyers, therapists, dancers, a nomadic filmmaker - while the setting is low-rent and improvisatory: a run-down Elks lodge for classes and a muraled condemned house for housing, emphasizing DIY ethos and ritualized play over polish.

Experience-heavy scenes show the course as physically brutal, oddly intimate, and emotionally exposing. Exercises force breathwork that triggers animal-like shaking, crawling and falling drills, partner face-mapping, blindfolded clay-sculpting on whispered prompts, and repeated pattern work intended to push impulses into new shapes. The narrator struggles with fatigue, transient housing, cheap food, and the humiliation of “failed” masks, while noticing the course’s low cost ($1,100 CAD for 186 hours), the teacher’s theatrical oddness, and a mix of earnest spiritual language with postmodern theatrical practice. The result reads as a messy, persuasive account of a demanding craft that is part therapy, part physical theater, and resolutely unconventional.