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:

This past weekend I attended two seminars taught by Rory Miller.  Rory is the author of Meditations on Violence, and more recently, Facing Violence, both of which are among the best books I've read on the subject (and both of which I ended up citing quite a bit in my dissertation).  In this post I'll be discussing some of his teaching and methodology as well as some of the implications.  I'm responding from the perspective of a theatre and performance scholar who specializes in the representations of violence as much as from the perspective of a martial artist, self defense instructor, and fight director.