{"id":23,"date":"2008-02-15T21:51:09","date_gmt":"2008-02-15T21:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidmccormick.wordpress.com\/?p=8"},"modified":"2012-02-16T08:57:34","modified_gmt":"2012-02-16T08:57:34","slug":"romeo-juliet-fd-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/playfighting.ca\/combat\/stage-combat-2\/romeo-juliet-fd-notes\/","title":{"rendered":"Romeo & Juliet FD Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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    The role of fight choreographer, like any other designer in the theatre, is to augment the director’s vision of the story.\u00a0 The essential elements of violence in Romeo & Juliet show that the stakes are high, that the conflict between the two families is a life and death struggle.\u00a0 Tybalt and Mercutio die in the course of the play, tearing the lovers further apart by Romeo’s banishment.\u00a0 In productions that are set in Shakespeare’s day, these are swordfights.\u00a0 In one famous movie adaptation, they were gun fights.\u00a0 The director’s vision for this production involved two special restrictions: theatre in the round and no weapons.<\/p>\n

    Theatre in the round is a challenge for every aspect of design, especially for movement on stage, since every spectator should have an equal view of all the characters as they speak, move and interact.\u00a0 Some of the secrets of stage combat that keep it safe but believable only work when the audience is on one side.\u00a0 When the audience is all-around, it is like seeing a magic trick from behind the curtain.\u00a0 Therefore, it was important to only use attacks and defenses that would be believable from every side, which makes it very challenging and fun to design.<\/p>\n

    In a production that tries to be very realistic, strangulation is just about the only way for one character to kill another without resorting to weaponry. In our Romeo & Juliet, the director not only stipulated that there should be no weapons, but also that he wanted the conflict to be expressed with grace and a certain amount of surrealism. This gave us many opportunities to experiment with many techniques from Tai Chi, Wing Chun and other Asian marital arts that in the popular consciousness include such feats of magic.<\/p>\n

    In short, creativity is often greatest under the strictest constraints. Painters who only allow themselves to use dots, in pointillism, can create amazing works of art.\u00a0 Similarly, if I cannot incorporate weapons and\u00a0 yet I must play for a theatre in the round, I am given a great opportunity to expand my creative potential by expressing the necessary story elements of a play within tight strictures.\u00a0 I have relished this opportunity, and I appreciate the hard work and creativity of the cast in their cooperation with the staging of the fights.\u00a0 I hope you enjoy it too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The role of fight choreographer, like any other designer in the theatre, is to augment the director’s vision of the story.\u00a0 The essential elements of violence in Romeo & Juliet show that the stakes are high, that the conflict between the two families is a life and death struggle.\u00a0 Tybalt and Mercutio die in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stage-combat-2","tag-stage-combat-3"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/playfighting.ca\/combat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/playfighting.ca\/combat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/playfighting.ca\/combat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/playfighting.ca\/combat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/playfighting.ca\/combat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/playfighting.ca\/combat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3451,"href":"http:\/\/playfighting.ca\/combat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/3451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/playfighting.ca\/combat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/playfighting.ca\/combat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/playfighting.ca\/combat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}