You may remember, lovely lurkers, my dredging up of an old lecturette called “Drunk and in Charge of a Bicycle,” named after Ray Bradbury’s chapter from Zen in the Art of Writing?
Welp, I rewrote and refurbished it into an article for Writers’ HQ. Check it out here.
While my presentation titledThe Fight Is The Storyhas been a Denver Comic Con mainstay since its inception (often through the academic branch of the DCC, called Page 23), this year I am doing two presentations there, but neither one is The Fight Is The Story.
You will recall, lovely lurkers, my post here about theseven problematic badass female tropes? Well, Page 23 likes the idea, and I will be presenting this concept on one of their panels this year. I’ll let you all know as soon as I know what day/time it will be. Will this be the catalyst for Gamergate 2.0? Time will tell….
Side note on this: Writers HQ is having me write about the first of the 7: The Marion Effect, for their May selections online. I’ll keep you apprised of that too: if I get enough readership, it may turn into a series, which I’ll of course ask you for help with.
DCC proper wants me too: they have accepted me to hold a session on my concept of theThree Rules For Protagonists, which you have read about before right here. Honestly, I don’t recall whether this is a panel presentation or a more hands on workshop, but either way it should be a great time!
Wi-Fi (or indeed, any) online connection is famously absent over at Comic Con. So it’s time to start making some PowerPoints, people! Let’s do this!
Remember a few months back, when I posted a series of pleas, extolling the virtues of my Stage Movement class, so that students at Auraria campus would sign up for it? I ended up with a good number of students in that one, and now I’m beginning a series of pleas about a new, vastly exciting course.
Well it’s not new, exactly, but the last time it was offered was …. gosh 8 years ago? Is that true? Anyway, suffice to say I wasn’t expecting the good folks in charge at Metro’s Theatre department to ever offer it again. But guess what? This Fall, it’s there, with a real course number and everything. It’s called ADVANCED STAGE COMBAT, and I am pleased as punch to be teaching this again. (At least, I’ll be teaching it if enough people sign up.)
I’m planning on putting up a post dedicated to each of the things about this course I’m most looking forward to, so let’s start with what’s the very first and very last fight scene the Advanced Stage Combat students do: the big group fight scene.
Big group fights are challenging, as there’s more that goes into a 3 person or more fight than just orchestrating pairs. For the first assignment in this course, I have the students do a full-class-member fight scene. One year, it was an 8-person fight. Another year? It was 12. One group set the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet on a pirate ship’s port, including cannons, ladders, “water” and grog along with the biting of the thumbs.
If you’re a student at any of the schools on auraria campus, do sign up for Advanced Stage Combat. I need 12 people to join me, or it’ll get cancelled. Plus, it’s a very unusual thing for an undergraduate program to have this robust a Stage Combat training offered to its theatre students. You’ll see it (sometimes) in MFA programs, but this is something special to have on your undergraduate cv. Take advantage of it.
Daily Cross-Swords 