We decided that Maurice Parent will be my fight captain. That means his job will be to run fight calls and maintain both the safety and integrity of composition of the fight choreography. I’m really happy about this choice as he is an actor with a great sense of movement who will be great about making sure that everyone is being specific in all their work. He is not in any of the fights himself, which is often an advantage for this position as it lets him concentrate on what the actors in the fights are doing without worrying about his own choreography.
Fight calls, for those who don’t know, are special mini rehearsals held before each run or performance in which the fights are done twice; once just marked out and once at performance speed. Fight calls are essential for safety and also maintain the specificity of the choreography. I often describe stage combat as a combination of sleight of hand and ballroom dance rather than being any sort of martial art. Many of the moves are counter intuitive and it’s important that the performers practice them in order to maintain an effective illusion.
Earlier in the process Annie Kerins was appointed the dance captain. She is responsible for maintaining the dance choreography throughout the show. It’s a fairly large job in a production like this, and there will be rehearsals where she’ll be running dance numbers in Kelli Edward's, the choreographer, absence. I had a look at her book of dance notation and it was interesting to see how different numbers were notated according to the way in which they were choreographed, meaning that if a sequence was counted out according to the music then the moves would be similarly spelled out whereas if Kelli set moves according to word sequences they would be spelled out that way.
A great thing about the choreography in this production is that Kelli is finding unconventional ways to use conventional dance vocabulary. Since much of this musical is a show within a show, what she is doing works especially well in this context. There are a lot of complex structures she is creating using almost the entire company where each dancer is moving in time with the rest, and then they break into another structure where each dancer or group of dancers have very individual moves before rejoining the group.
Speaking of dance, today we were short two cast members because they were performing in First Night so Adrienne and I got to stand in for them for part of a dance composition rehearsal. That was all kinds of fun. We did a part of “The Telephone Dance” in which Kelli had progressions of structural changes in the choreography going from synchronized to individual movements. It was important that there were stand ins for the choreography as the timing of the changes has to be precise. It was a lot of fun. And I got to work out a funktastic upsidedown lift and spin sequence with Michele DeLuca that her partner will learn when he comes back (funktastic is of course a technical choreography term that is still missing from the majority of textbooks).
Happy New Year everyone!
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