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The Fight Director's Bookshelf: What Early Career Fight Directors Should Be Reading

10/6/2015

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As some of you know, I recently had the privilege of teaching a dramaturgy workshop to the Choreographers' Track students at the 2015 Summer Sling NYC Regional Stage Combat Workshop. 

One topic that came up repeatedly during the entire program and was of special interest during my workshop was what early career fight directors should be reading.  

I submit the following list as what I might call, "a good start" as this list would hopefully serve as a launching point towards further study, and would also give one enough general knowledge to put that further study into perspective.  




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Script Analysis for Fight Directors

4/5/2014

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PictureFrom BURNING UP THE DICTIONARY
Like any other design discipline, fight directing begins with the text.  I'd like to take a moment to discuss approaching a text as a fight director and/or a movement specialist.  While it's obvious that the play must be read before any other work is done, what one is looking for when they read and how one's findings are utilized hasn't had a whole lot of public discussion.


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Why You Might Want To Think Twice Before Putting "Stage Combat" On Your Resume

8/14/2012

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PicturePETER PAN @ Tufts University - Photo by Elizabeth Herman
Attention Young Actors:  You don't always know what you think you know. This is especially true when it comes to stage combat.  And you may want to think twice before you claim it on a resume.  This is true even if you took a workshop or two and/or performed fights onstage a handful of times.

I'm talking mostly about the "Special Skills" section of the resume.  As many of you know, common wisdom dictates that you should not put anything down on there that you cannot do on short notice.  I want to work on the assumption that people are making their claims in good faith (liars are a whole other issue).  That one would not put down a language that they do not speak, an instrument they do not play, or claim a degree that they have not earned.


But unfortunately, sometimes stage combat ends up on an acting resume when it really shouldn't be...



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We're All Dramaturgs Here (And just a bit more Fightaturgy)

3/11/2012

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Picture
This past week while I was the guest-tweeter for the LMDA Twitter Project an undergrad from a school in Utah contacted me as part of an assignment for a dramaturgy course she is taking.  She was tasked with finding a dramaturg and asking them a series of questions about what they do, their methodologies, and how they interact professionally with their various collaborators. 

My first thought was that it's been a little while since I was last billed as a dramaturg on a production, so maybe I should refer her to someone else who regularly holds that job description.  But then I thought about my favorite recurring discussion at the LMDA Conference I attended at the Banff Centre a year and change ago, where the consensus was that dramaturgy is as much a way of thinking as it is a job description, and that ideally everyone involved in a production should be thinking in dramaturgical terms.  Along those same lines, most of the better designers I know across various disciplines generally speak in dramaturgical terms on many levels, so I decided to answer her questions primarily from the perspective of how I apply dramaturgy to fight directing. 

Below are my answers (with minor edits).  I'd also like to thank the student, as her questions made me articulate some stuff I'd been thinking about for a while.  Anyway...



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A Bit Of Fightaturgy

11/5/2011

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    "Be well versed in the arts of pen and sword."  -  Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

I recently joked that on principle,  scholars of John Milton and Paradise Lost should all skydive.  In part because the opportunity to fall screaming from Heaven like Lucifer himself would be wonderful fieldwork.  And also because the study of great literature should be visceral.

This was because not so long  ago I went skydiving to celebrate my graduation from my doctoral program, and also because lately I've been having more and more realizations about what I've come to call "fightaturgy," or, the dramaturgical revelations of the analysis of violence and movement implied in a performance text and their effect on character development in a play.  I brought this up in a recent conversation with my friend and colleague Ryan Hartigan, which led me to realize that I need to write about this if I'm going to keep talking about it. 

A few of my current projects have some great examples:


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

10/25/2011

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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:

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The Physical Dramaturgy of Metatheatrical Violence

10/2/2011

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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.

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On the September Small Theatre Alliance Readings...

9/21/2011

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This past Monday I took part in a  Small Theatre Alliance of Boston Open Mic Night at the Charlestown Working Theater.   I brought in a section of a new full length play I'm working on called Burning Up the Dictionary, which I'm billing as "a story of language, love, lust and loss."  I'll be having a round table of the entire thing at the Lark Play Development Center in New York City next month, so this was a great opportunity to test-drive a section of it in front of an audience and see how things play in front of an audience as I work on it in preparation for the Lark.  I've been developing it through the Playwrights' Commons/Company One Playwrights' Playground this past summer (which was quite a blessing), but this was the first time I'd heard it in front of an audience as opposed to workshop participants.


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Despite All of his Contributions to Modern Stage Combat, Capo Ferro Was Not a Fight Director

8/23/2011

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PictureA plate from Capo Ferro's Treatise
Curating information is a task that demands that one think carefully about how various types of material are being presented.

As some of you may have noticed, I recently started working on a page of Stage Combat Resources for this site, as I feel that there is a need for such a thing.  (I also started a more modest one for Playwriting & Dramaturgy, but that is more to guide people to the more established resources that are already out there).  On the stage combat page I've listed (among other things): links to professional organizations, weapons suppliers that I can vouch for, some teaching organizations in NYC that I've trained with, and links to a bunch of stuff by & about me (including my recent McSweeney's interview, which I have to admit made me feel mildly famous).  And perhaps most importantly, a selected bibliography. 

The bibliography is where I am having some trouble.  While books by B.H. Barry and J. Allen Suddeth are obvious and required reading, I don't quite know what to do with Ridolfo Capo Ferro. Or Vincentio Saviolo.  Or Morihei Ueshiba for that matter.  Let me explain... 


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    Taking Note & Taking Notes

    Meron Langsner, PhD

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

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