In the past few days I've had three major projects come to fruition: my round table of Burning Up the Dictionary at the Lark Play Development Center, my devised piece, Ghosts of Hamlet in Something Rotten: Hamlet Remixed at the Boston Center for the Arts, and my talk as an alumni speaker at TEX: Tufts Idea Exchange.  In the middle of all of this, I did the fights for The Nutcracker at Stoneham Theatre and continued my work on The Miracle Worker at Salve Regina University.

TEX will most likely get its own blog post some time after the videos are posted online.  So I'd like to discuss the new plays, Burning Up the Dictionary and Ghosts of Hamlet.  One piece is a fairly straightforward full length play, the other is a short piece of devised experimental theatre.

Let's start with the less conventional of the two:

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:

    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:

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.