You are in a meeting with all the Faculty of your department and the representatives from the Graduate Students Advisory Committee during a particularly tense time, when there are several disputes and challenges facing the departmental community.
You have included a topic called Masks on the agenda (following an update on the budget by the Chair and before the evaluation of the Graduate students). When you reach your agenda item, you give everyone in the room an apple.
The faculty and students sit, in pairs, opposite each other eating their apples and you ask them to look at each other’s faces while eating.
They begin to respond to their own faces and the way the altered face made them feel and behave, to react to people around them with their faces. At his point, all of the tables (except one) are removed from the room and you ask everyone to move their chairs to the center. They turn to face the remaining table, on which is placed a computer with a camera. You start to record on a streaming program (e.g. Periscope) the actions in the room, the faces of the Classicists. You tell them that you are about to take a photograph and ask everyone to freeze their faces in an altered position.
Between the filming, the photographing and the performing for each other, there is much humor, laughing and tremendous enjoyment with one another. It is almost as if, through this experiment, we have forgotten all of the past problems and current tensions and have learned how to work together again.