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Mask maker outfits a symphony Photo by Jim Craven Working in his Ashland garage, Jamie Peck paints in details on a rooster mask to be used in a performance of "Carnival of the Animals." Saint-Saens' `Carnival' plays Sunday By BILL VARBLE Photo by Jim Craven Masking the concert - Jamie Peck, wearing the paint-spattered clothes he wears while making masks in his Ashland garage, models a mask of an old woman he made for a Rogue Valley Symphony Discovery Concert performance of "Carnival of the Animals" Sunday. In his day job, Jamie Peck creates characters. Out in the garage he's creating characters of a different sort. As an actor with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Peck creates characters such as Montano in "Othello." As a mask maker he's filled his garage with creatures from Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals." Performance Who : Rogue Valley Symphony What : Discovery Concert, featuring Saint Saens' "Carnival of the Animals" When : 2 p.m. Sunday; meet the musicians and enjoy refreshments at 1 p.m. Where : South Medford High School Tickets : $4 all ages, $12 per family at the door, or call 770-6012. Website : www.rvsymphony.org Fanciful donkeys, chickens, frogs and other creatures loll about in various stages of completion. The creatures are waiting for Sunday, when the Rogue Valley Symphony and conductor Arthur Shaw plan to stage Saint-Saens' famed extravaganza. Peck and Bridgette Loriaux will be featured as masked dancers, and Alexander Tutunov and Kristina Foltz as guest pianists. It's one of the Symphony's Discovery Concerts, with special prices for families. Special performances for students are set today throughout the performance at South Medford High. Camille Saint-Saens wrote "Carnival of the Animals" in 1886 as a series of piano sketches to entertain friends at parties. Each sketch went with an animal. Cuckoo, tortoise, fish, elephant, donkey, rooster and dinosaur would parade to the delight of guests. In time, Saint-Saens, as renowned as a pianist as he was as a composer, scored the pieces for a full orchestra. Shaw has staged the "Carnival" twice before, but with narration, not masked dancers. "It's just not the same," he says. "Jamie's masks are absolutely fantastic." Only a day before debuting the show, Peck says he's yet to complete eight of the 22 masks planned for the production. Each can take many hours to create. An elephant took a month, complete with latex, cotton and vacuum cleaner-hose trunk. Peck starts each mask with a sculpture, then makes a clay mold. Working with industrial latex, he pulls masks from their molds and dries them before painting them with gesso and latex. After applying a base coat he finishes the masks with brush and airbrush. "The last thing is the eyes," he says. Armed with a degree in acting from Northwestern University in Illinois, Peck studied masks in 1991 at the Del' Arte School in Blue Lake, Calif., and in 1992 and 1994 in Bali, Indonesia, where mask carving is a traditional art. He created masks for a symphony production of "Peter and the Wolf" last year. He's taught and worked with masks in Rogue Valley schools, the Veterans Affairs Domiciliary in White City and throughout Europe and Asia. He's not above staying up half the night making a mask. All this makes a certain rapidly approaching day sort of a busman's holiday for him. "Halloween is like, yeah, yeah, I've been doing 'em all year," he says, laughing. He says masks work their magic on actors as well as audiences. "They get actors moving," he says, acting out the exaggerated movements of a masked animal. "It moves you into dance." Shaw says the power of combining music and image came into focus for him last year after he showed a sailing video he'd made and set to Mahler's First Symphony. A man who saw the video and later heard the symphony on public radio said, "Hey Honey, they're playing Art's sailing song." Peck wears black sweats onstage, so the essence of the animal must be communicated through mask and movement. "I want the audience to complete the picture mentally," he says. "I didn't want the animals to be like mascots." Saint-Saens became increasingly conservative, railing against the experimentation of younger composers. He didn't consider "Carnival of the Animals" serious music and didn't permit the lion's share of the pieces to be performed in his lifetime. Oddly, many of his more ambitious works are forgotten today, and he's best-known for "Carnival." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA