Meron Langsner
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Being On "Stage" for EXPERIMENT AMERICA @ The ICA

6/26/2012

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Picture
The ICA in Boston, MA
This past weekend I had the pleasure of performing in Experiment America 2012 at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) in Boston.  My director was Mikhael Tara Garver and the event was part of the Emerging America Festival.  

During this process I also had the opportunity to work closely with Will Pickens, the sound designer and voice director, who directed and recorded me in an A Brief Guide, an "audio tour" written by Jason Gray Platt, as well as with Jeff Stark, who guided me through the suitcase installations (more on those later on).

Experiment America was a large immersive theatre experience  utilizing the entire museum.  It was a big project.  Really big.  The sort of thing that falls under Richard Schechner's concept of Performance of Magnitude; that is, a performance that is too large for any one spectator to experience the entirety of.  Keeping that in mind, I cannot hope to describe the event as a whole.  My own small part, however, was interesting and fun enough to give me plenty to write about.



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In Which I Write About Writing About Books

11/18/2011

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In order to maintain some momentum in the aftermath of my dissertation defense and subsequent graduation, in the past few months I did a couple of book reviews for scholarly journals.  Both reviews will be appearing in the next few months.

My review of Eugenio Barba's latest book, On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House (Routledge: 2009) will appear in the next issue of New England Theatre Journal, and my review of John Donohue's Kage: The Shadow (YMAA: 2011) will soon be appearing in The Journal of Asian Martial Arts.

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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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    Taking Note & Taking Notes

    Meron Langsner, PhD

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

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