This is my final reflection paper for my capstone project. Some of it is rehashed from the blog, but if you're interested, give it a read. It has been quite a ride, and this is not the end of my blogging days. Enjoy!
I Came; I Saw; and
I Learned
To
say that this senior capstone project was a learning experience would be a
complete and total understatement. From it starting out as something completely
different and walking in not knowing what exactly I was going to be doing, to
the difficulties that arrived as the project went on, I think I’ve learned and
grown more from this project more than anything I’ve done here at BW. And while
the end result is also something that is difficult to define, I’m very proud of
the work I did, and really hope to apply the lessons I’ve learned to projects I
take on in the future.
This
project started out as a completely separate job within a completely separate
production. Initially, I wanted my senior capstone to be serving as fight
captain for Romeo and Juliet. While
not getting that position was a difficult pill to swallow at first, it lead to
this great opportunity I was given—to choreograph myself for the first time in
my life. When Anjanette asked me fight choreograph for Performance Ensemble, I was
hesitant at first because I didn’t trust my skill level or expertise to be able
to actually put together a fight. At that point I considered myself an actor
combatant and a fight captain—someone who performs and maintains what someone
else creates. However, I thought back to a few semesters ago when Anjanette had
told us to write down our five year goals in Audition Techniques. Ambitious me
had written down to fight choreograph a production at BW. That was probably one
of the last goals on that list that I actually thought would come true, and
here the opportunity was being laid out in front of me. So I took it.
From
the first rehearsal, ideas were pouring from my head. Before we started, Les
had us read an article called “After Postdramatic Theatre” by Bernd Stegemann
which commented and analyzed the ideas behind post-dramatic theatre. Already,
my head was buzzing. I had to sit down and deeply dissect the article before I
fully understood it, and what it gave me was a better understanding of what
we’re going for as we create devised theatre. Post-dramatic theatre challenges
the conventional ways of portraying drama, and deconstructs concepts of
character, plot, and story. Pioneers of post-dramatic theatre felt that
traditional drama had outgrown the complexity of reality, and that the best way
to then “mimic” or imitate reality was to go against expectation. I consider
myself to be one who thrives off story; that’s why my favorite aspect of
fighting is portraying the story. What this caused me to ask the cast of
Performance Ensemble was how CAN you do theatre without story, if our purpose
is to imitate and/or educate on the human condition? Do you really need characters, plot, etc. to
truly educate, or can you just hit the audience with seemingly nonsensical
symbols and expect them to be wowed?
While
all of this was very intriguing to me, it did lead to a bit of an issue. How do
you infuse a fight choreographer into a piece such as this? Fights take time
and planning, and most of that planning has to come from figuring out what to
story is you’re going to tell. Also,
since there’s not plot, how was I supposed to know what to prepare for? Which
scenes or characters I was supposed to use? When talking to Anjanette from the
beginning, we always said that we would “just figure it all out.” And as the
process started, I was okay with that, but I believe it was this lack of
definition that led to me having difficulty serving my purpose in the
production.
I
made a choice this semester to hold down not only one, but two jobs while I
worked on this show and went to school. One was a weekend job; one was a few
nights during the week. I thought I would be okay because I made sure I was
able to be at rehearsal at least one night a week. But this process moved very
quickly, quicker than I realized, and before I knew it, decisions where being
made around my contribution to the piece that I was not involved in. First off,
a major fight was going to be changed to a tap piece. I thought to myself
“That’s ok. It’ll be interesting, and after all, this is a devised theatre
piece.” But then they started to shape the opening fight between the two
families, and what I had hoped to be more of a mass battle was now a movement
piece with a thirty second section for me to insert a fight. My entire capstone
was being boiled down to thirty seconds. I wasn’t happy, but at the end of the
day, I couldn’t say anything about it because I felt it was mostly my fault for
not making myself more available. Also, because I wasn’t around, I didn’t feel
I was able to speak up and give tips on how to perform others parts of the
movement piece safer because the cast and artistic staff hadn’t built up a
relationship with me. There was probably also a lack of communication on both
sides of the coin that made it hard to develop the ideas for the fight all
together, but again, I blame this on not defining to role of fight director
early on in the production. I have absolutely no hard feelings toward anyone,
however. Actually, I’m extremely grateful for to them for reasons that will
become clear later.
All
of this aside, I am very proud of all the work I did do on the piece. Tracing
it back to the start, I loved being able to share aspects of my art form to
this wonderful group of people. It started with the initial discussion I had
with everyone about dueling and the idea of honor in the Italian Renaissance. I
found two amazing books on the subject of honor and dueling in
sixteenth-century Italy: The Point of Honor
in Sixteenth-Century Italy: An Aspect of
the Life of the Gentlemen, and The
Sixteethn-Century Italian Duel: A Study in Italian Renaissance Social History,
both written by Frederick R. Bryson. I spent time dissecting and pulling quotes
from these very dense texts to help give the cast an impression of the cultural
idea of honor. First, we handed out copies of the “bite your thumb” scene from
Act I of R&J (Anjanette’s idea, not mine, to give credit where credit is
due.) We assigned parts, and had people read it out loud twice. It helped put
me back into the mindset of the play, and give the cast a sense of what we were
dealing with. I then asked the very simple question “What is honor?” I
got a few slow answers of integrity, virtue, and what others think of you? I used these as a jumping off point to go
into my findings from the books. In my own words, I boiled down these ideas,
which were based on Aristotle and various writers and thinkers of the Italian
Renaissance, to this:
“Honor
is the perception of virtue from others, endowed by humanity, and not nature. A
truly virtuous man does not
have honor. He is a hardcore altruist, as opposed to the honorable man’s softcore altruism. Good reputation vs. doing
the right thing.”
The discussion began to liven up.
Ideas where thrown back and forth, including a reference to the movie Mulan. I then asked another question “What
does honor look like today?” From here, the discussion was taken from me,
as the cast began to equate honor with everything from rape to terrorism to
going to church as a child. My ideas of honor were challenged as I began to
think about how I am constantly worried about how I am perceived by others, and
I fear someone having the wrong impression of me and being seen as
“dishonorable.”
I wanted to get
these ideas of honor in their heads as I went into the next part, which was
sharing information on the culture of dueling. In the second of Bryson’s books,
which deals specifically with the elements of a duel, he details out an order
to things. The basic “order” of things goes as such: an insult, the mentita (or giving of the lie), the
challenge, the preparation (including the choosing of the weapons), and then
the eventual combat. Now this is a gross over simplification of things, but it
gives you the basic gist of how a quote “legal” duel took place during this
time period. I say that because the duels fought in R&J go through very
little of the process, which would typically include paperwork and legalities,
and I believe that raises the stakes of these duels even more.
As
I had been reading through these steps, I remembered that I had heard a similar
order of things before as it pertained to dueling, and that came from Dusten
Welch, our combat teacher’s, comedy sword fighting duo the Dueling Fools.
Having seen them perform once before, and having watched some of their videos I
realized I had watched a few before that consisted of the two characters going
through the order of things before their duel. So, I pulled the cast into the
computer lab and played them the following two videos, so that they could put
get some more historical background and, of course, laugh.
From
here came teaching the entire cast weapons basics, in case they were called upon
to use them in the show. Granted, this
is my first time ever having to be a teacher in this type of situation. It was
interesting to say the least. I worked very hard to put together an outline for
the class, and get access to the weapons. On the day of, I was very limited on
time, which I understand given that there was so little time for this piece to
be pulled together. What I thought would be a three-hour block ended up being
an hour and a half. Secondly, I had sixteen people in one room, which is a lot
whenever there’s only one of me. I had difficulty seeing everyone, and couldn’t
give as many corrections because of this and the time limit. There were some focusing
problems, which required me to eventually raise my voice. I guess I’d taken for
granted the automatic seriousness that most of my colleagues in this field have
towards the art form, and will need to emphasis if I do this again that yes,
this is all very fun, but there has to be focus and seriousness because we are
dealing with a dangerous medium here. Additionally, I was asked some very
interesting questions that I’d never heard of or thought of before, many of
which I had no answer. I had to boil it down to having them just trust me
because this is the way I’ve learned. If I was more experienced and further
down the line in my training, I may have been able to deal with these
questions, but alas, I am not and this is all a part of the process. At the end
of the night, I was a little bit worried, and took my concerns to Anjanette.
She gave me some basic teaching advice which I took to heart, and she assured
me that I was doing fine.
The
logical next step of this process was to start to choreograph the fight. At
this point, I’d been given my five fighters and the parameters of my scene, and
it had become abundantly clear that the ideas I’d crafted to that point were
going to have to be abandoned. Initially, I had this grand plan to have the
actors generate their own choreography, to keep in the theme of the
actor-generated piece I was working on. This was the idea I had initially
crafted in order to teach myself how to choreograph for the first time, and if
I had more time with the cast and the rehearsal period was longer, I probably
would have done it. Instead, I had to dig into my own previous training, as
well as ask a lot of advice from my friends in the stage combat world, to be
able to begin to put moves together that would tell the story of these characters.
Once I dug in, it was actually easier than I thought. I made certain choices
based on actor’s ability, such as giving less moves to an actor with less sense
of the weapons. I also made in-jokes and choices based on analysis of the
character itself, like giving “Tybalt” a punto reverso, and making him the more
aggressive character in the fight. The process of teaching the choreography was
a challenge because at the end of the day, most of these girls don’t have much
fight or movement experience. There were a lot of repeated corrections, and
some instances of forgetting choreography. Also, lack of time and absences made
it’s difficult to be productive. The girls are very enthusiastic, though, which
was a plus and kept me going.
Once
we were able to drill the choreography, the girls really came into their own,
and I was extremely proud of them. Also, once we got in tech, they looped my
section of music to make it longer, so the girls were able to take their time
and it didn’t feel like the fight was being rushed over, which was a main
concern of mine. Opening night came, and when the fight started, I sat up in my
seat, ready for anything. It started, and I won’t lie, I started tearing up.
They rocked it! All the intentions and targets were clear, no one went up on
anything, the timing and spacing worked out, and overall, they sold that fight
like pros. The reaction and feedback was incredible, and all the hard work that
went into putting that little piece of fight choreography together seemed
completely and totally worth it.
The
production as a whole was incredibly moving, and I made a point to tell the
cast before tech that they had really created something special. I saw all of
their fingerprints on the piece, and that is what truly made it beautiful. And
thinking about it all now, my fingerprints were on it too. Maybe not as many as
I’d hoped, but they were there and not just in the fight section of the show.
We all had an impact on everything that happened in the piece, and everyone,
myself included, should be extremely proud of what we were all capable of
putting together.
Tacking
onto this experience, I infused a lot of what I learned from Performance
Ensemble into the movement piece I presented at Testing Ground. I put together
a movement study that evolved into bits of my fight choreography, utilizing
methods of creating movement that I learned from watching Anjanette work, as
well as my previous experience in Sara Whale’s Improv and Choreography class. I wanted to do something with my initial ideas
I’d had for Performance Ensemble, and really be in control of the end result. The
end result was basically a loose depiction of a friendship gone awry.
Interestingly enough, most of the feedback from the audience consisted of
asking what the storyline was. So, I guess, in a way, I’ve come full circle. I
started wanting everything to have meaning when it came to telling a story, and
I ended leaving people asking themselves what the piece was trying to tell
them. In a way, that was a victory for me, personally and artistically.
So
what were the lessons learned? One— it is essential in any production, in any
capacity, to define your role, even if that means you end up contributing less
than you intended too. Two— one must
have a greater amount of patience when teaching others, especially if it’s a
style of movement that they are unfamiliar with. And three—what you get out of
a production is what you put into it. This can be said for almost everything in
life, but here it is extremely true. I wish that I had truly realized this much
earlier on than my senior year, but with every passing day as I reflect on my
time here at BW, I believe this. Luckily, my time here isn’t over. I have an
entire other production next semester, Dark
of the Moon, to hone my skills and apply the lessons I’ve learned, and I
can already see myself changing as an artist as I start up this process again.
A capstone is supposed to be the culmination of all that you’ve learned while
earning your degree, but I think it’s actually taken completing the capstone
process for me to realize what the culmination of my time here was really meant
to teach me. From here, there’s only really one thing I can do – Fight on.
