Mardi Gras Sessions: Get your Mask On with Alexa!
đź“… DATE: Tuesday, June 8, 2021
🕑 TIME: 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
🏟️ VENUE: Livestreamed online
đź’µ PRICE: FREE
To donate and help support the festival:
Donations to the TD Niagara Jazz Festival (Registered Charity: #80107-7033-RR0001) help us continue to bring live music to Niagara and beyond. Thank you for supporting the arts!
ABOUT THE SHOW
Join St.Catharines-based puppet and mask artist, Alexa Fraser, to create your own one-of-a-kind Mardi-Gras mask! Using inexpensive craft supplies, you can create a fabulous mask to help you celebrate Mardi Gras in style!
Materials Needed:
- Paper half mask (store bought or cut out of paper plate, bristol board or cardboard)
- Acrylic paint in your desired colours
- Paint brushes
- Dowel or chopstick for mask holder or thin elastic to fit around your head
- Hot glue or white glue
- Optional: white glue, Gloss Mod Podge or hairspray (for sealing glitter)
- Optional: small pieces of felt (for joining groups of feathers)
- Decorations for your mask (depending on the style you choose):
- Feathers
- Glitter
- Sequins/rhinestones
- Braided or sequin trim
- Paper or fabric flowers
- Jewels, brooches or parts of broken jewelry
- Ribbon
ABOUT ALEXA
Alexa Fraser is a Puppet and Mask Maker and Puppeteer, Costume Designer and Seamstress and Textile and Installation Artist, from St.Catharines, Ontario. With a B.Des in Fashion Design from Ryerson University, Alexa has worked as a Technical Designer for Abercrombie and Fitch Co. in Columbus, Ohio (2006-2008), in the Tailoring Department at the Shaw Festival (2014 and 2015 seasons), as the Head of Wardrobe for Carousel Players since 2015 and as the Wardrobe and Props Coordinator for the Foster Festival’s 2019 Christmas show. Recent costume design credits include Lig and Bittle (2020), The Incredible Adventures of Mary Jane Mosquito (2019) and iChild (2016) for Carousel Players, the NOTL Sesquicentennial Committee Canada 150 Play (2017), and Antigonick at Summerworks Theatre Festival (2014, co-design with Clelia Scala). Alexa has displayed textile and installation art in many solo and group exhibits, teaches textile art, puppet and mask making workshops and makes and performs puppets. Some recent puppetry performances include Concrete Cabaret #7 A VERY SPECIAL Holiday SPECIAL (2020), Essential Collective Theatre’s Quarantine Cabaret and Va-Va-Vaudeville (2020 and 2019), In the Soil Arts Festival (2020 and 2019), the Niagara Falls Night of Art (2019), St.Catharines Culture Days (2018 and 2019), the NOTL Sesquicentennial Committee Canada 225 Play (2017), and Vaux-De-Ville at the St.Catharines Performing Arts Centre (2016, co-puppet creation and performance with Clelia Scala). Alexa has studied puppetry construction and performance with David Lane at the New England Puppetry Intensive, the Puppetmongers and CLUNK Puppet Lab at the Humber College Puppetry Intensive, with Frank Meschkuleit and Mike Petersen at the Toronto School of Puppetry and online with Mark Down of Blind Summit Theatre (England) and Bernd Ogrodnik of World of Puppets (Iceland) and mask making at the Off the Wall school of theatre production in Stratford, Ontario. Alexa is looking forward to teaching the Carousel Players’ Puppet and Mask summer camp in August, 2021.