Meron Langsner
  • Home
  • About Meron
  • Blog: Taking Note and Taking Notes
    • Most Popular Blog Posts from Taking Note & Taking Notes
  • Playwright
    • Plays Available for Production or Development >
      • Playwriting Press/Book Covers/etc
    • Slippery Slope Podcast
    • Selected Videos of Short Plays from the Gi60 Festival
  • Theatre & Performance Scholar and Dramaturg
    • TEX Talk: "The Impossible Body" (Tufts Idea Exchange)
  • Fight Director/Movement Specialist for Theatre, Opera, & Film
    • Photos of Combat & Movement Compositions >
      • Press Quotes for Stage Combat & Movement Work
    • Stage Combat Resources >
      • Martial Arts Resources for Fight Directors
      • Cautionary Tales: Stage Combat Gone Wrong
  • Educator
    • In-Class Group Exercise Based on MARISOL
    • In-Class Group Exercise for CLOUD NINE & BLASTED
    • Class Exercise: Muppets, Casting, & Shakespeare
    • Sample Assignment: Towards a Dramaturgy of Stage Combat
    • The Cinematographer Exercise: Introducing Non-Contact Blows
    • Dramaturgy Prompt Assignment
    • Selected Comments from Student Course Evaluations
  • Contact Meron

On Muppets, Casting, and Shakespeare

10/26/2011

8 Comments

 
As both the Muppets and Shakespeare are on many people's minds these days for various reasons (especially with the new movie about to be released), I thought I'd share a classroom exercise that I've used at both Tufts and Emerson that uses our furry friends to articulate the effects of casting choices on the execution of a play.

It goes like this:


Read More
8 Comments

The Same Thing, Only Different: On the Mutability of the Play Text in Performance

10/25/2011

3 Comments

 
I've been thinking lately about ephemerality of performance and mutability of texts.  And how a play is completed not on paper but in performance.  All of this is very Theatre 101 of course.  But as theatre on the whole is not performed for "'experts"  but for audiences, it bears repeating. 

A few of my current and recent fight directing projects are plays that I've done previously in other venues (or, in the case of Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, contain pieces of plays I've done in other contexts).  In the case of Romeo & Juliet, I've done that play so many times I can pretty much recite the dialogue around the fight scenes as well as all the commentary about how the characters might fight that takes place in other scenes.

A question I've been getting a lot is whether I just recycle choreography when I repeat plays.

That would be a resounding No.

The actors are different, the space is different, and most importantly, the director's vision is never the same.  Then there are also the logistical factors.  How much time are they planning to spend composing and rehearsing the fights?  A production with a three month rehearsal period, plenty of time to train, and a commitment to rehearse diligently will have different ambitions for a fight scene than a company with less time and money for the same play.  A production set in the Italian Renaissance will very likely have Mercutio and Tybalt face off with rapier and dagger, where the post-apocalyptic version may go with chainsaws (I am waiting for that version to happen). 

Context shapes the presentation of text.  This is something you learn in any branch of theatre.  As a writer, if you're fortunate enough to see multiple productions/workshops/readings of the same play, you get a feel for what has fluidity and what has consistency. 

By way of example, here are three videos of the same monologue.  Two are performed by my friend and collaborator Zillah Glory, the third was performed at Brooklyn College as part of the Gi60 short play festival a little over a year ago:

Read More
3 Comments

Something Remixed This Way Comes...

10/14/2011

0 Comments

 
    Words in the theatre are but a design on the canvas of motion. - V. Meyerhold

This is the graphic for a little something I have in the works with Whistler in the Dark Theatre and Imaginary Beasts as part of the Double, Double Toil and Trouble: A Witches Brew of Shakespeare Remixed series that's coming up (this is in addition to  my participation as fight director of Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, which has been a great time so far). 

I am creating a piece as part of this:

Read More
0 Comments

The Physical Dramaturgy of Metatheatrical Violence

10/2/2011

0 Comments

 
I'm posting here to put down some early thoughts about how stage combat that occurs "in quotes" is choreographed and perceived.  Somewhere down the line I'll be expanding these thoughts into an academic paper. 

About a week ago I came into rehearsal for Whistler in the Dark's production of Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, for which I am composing violence.  Both sections of the script involve a play-within-a-play, (Hamlet and Macbeth, respectively).   In one case it is a group of schoolboys putting on Hamlet at their school, in the other it is famous actors putting up an illicit performance of Macbeth in someone's home in a totalitarian regime.  Both metatheatrical sections include the famous duels of the Shakespeare plays that their characters are putting on.  Which means we are seeing an actor playing one character, who is in turn playing another character, who is in turn engaging in a duel.  The task of a fight director in a case like this is not to choreograph the character of Hamlet per se, but to choreograph a schoolboy playing Hamlet.  The character of Hamlet is an early-modern image of a Danish prince who would have had extensive training and familiarity with dueling.  In a production of said play with professional actors, the fight director would be working to articulate the conflict of the duel within these (and other) parameters.  The character in Dogg's Hamlet however, is a schoolboy playing said prince, which adds a whole other filter to the physicality of the fights.  The movement must be believable for a schoolboy moreso than for a prince.  And of course must remain safe for the actors, engaging for the audience, and continue to advance the story.

Read More
0 Comments

    Taking Note & Taking Notes

    Meron Langsner, PhD

    Playwright, Theatre & Performance Scholar, Fight Director/Movement Specialist, Director, Educator

    Archives

    June 2020
    May 2019
    December 2018
    February 2018
    January 2017
    October 2015
    October 2014
    August 2014
    April 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    May 2013
    January 2013
    August 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011

    Categories

    All
    9/11
    Acting
    Adaptation
    Anthropology
    Boston
    Business
    Christie Gibson
    Collaboration
    Comic Books
    David Gram
    Directing
    Dramaturgy
    Edward Gordon Craig
    Fight Directing
    Filmmaking
    Freelancing
    Gi60
    Godot
    Hamlet
    Imaginary Beasts
    Internet
    Israel
    Israeli Stage
    Jewish Theatre
    Justine
    Lark Play Development Center
    Lmda
    Macbeth
    Marketing
    Marquis De Sade
    Martial Arts
    Merrimack Rep
    Metathearicality
    Mitx
    Muppets
    New Hampshire
    Opera
    Pedagogy
    Performance Theory
    Playwrights Commons
    Playwriting
    Psychology
    Puppets
    Romeo & Juliet
    Rory Miller
    Scholarship
    Shakespeare
    Silvia Graziano
    Skydiving
    Small Theatre Alliance Of Boston
    Social Media
    Social Sciences
    Stage Combat
    Stagesource
    Ted
    Tex
    Tom Stoppard
    Tufts University
    Vagabond Theatre Group
    Violence
    Whistler In The Dark
    Writing
    Youthplays
    Zeitgesit Stage
    Zillah Glory

    RSS Feed

    Follow @MeronLangsner

Resources

Plays Available
Stage Combat Resources

About Meron

Playwright
Fight Director
Scholar
Educator

The Blog

Taking Note & Taking Notes
Most Popular Posts

Contact & Press

Links to Press
Student Testimonials
Contact Meron
All content Copyright Meron Langsner 2011-2020 unless otherwise specified