Captain Zorikh wins!

I finally got around to posting the video of the first grappling victory I got on camera!



I will be at the Acom Sports Prestige Grappling Tournament this Saturday in Fishkill, NY, competing and promoting "Hit the Mat" and "Redemption." http://www.acom-sports.net

Some background to the Grappling as a Theater Art workshop:

I first got into grappling because I wound up managing a female wrestling team. It started with my girlfriend and I going to fetish clubs and wrestling on the floor. At the time I was also building her up as a model to create action hero for comic books, trading cards, and a website. Soon one or two people had contacted her asking if she did wrestling sessions (where a man pays a woman for an hour or half-hour of wrestling). One of our early clients happened to train in Brazilian jiu jitsu and offered to train us. By this time we had recruited a few other young women we had met at various places into the team to also be characters and do sessions.

We basically made wrestling the “next big thing” in the fetish scene in 2006. We were booked for a few party performance gigs, which I directed. The most notable was something I called “Sadism and Socialism” in which Rudy the Red Rabble-Rousing Radical Reindeer rallied Happy, the Proletarian Worker Elf in rebellion against Mrs. Claus. We even did a skit at the Chinese New Year Celebration at Fighthouse, the martial arts studio where we trained, called “The Perils of Women’s Self Defense.”

The less said about how that wrestling team and I parted ways in this venue the better, but it did lead to me starting to make a short film I would call “The Redemption fo Captain Zorikh.” Before that film was finished, though, two of the featured performers quit the project. So I re-envisioned the work, found a whole new cast and started over. WE trained and rehearsed for 11 weeks, and by the time I was through, the movie now known as “Redemption: Find Out What You’re Worth” was a reality.

One of the things I discovered as a result of that movie was that grappling is a movement vocabulary that, like dance, can be used to tell a story, just like dance. And yet though martial arts have been adapted into dance for decades now, grappling has yet to break though. Also in the stage combat world, grappling is almost unknown (unless you count its uses in Pro Wrestling).

This led me to thinking of putting together a stage show using the grappling arts as a performance medium. We would perform skits using grappling to tell stories or as integral parts of the stories. I thought this might be a good fundraiser for the movie as well as raising the profile of the grappling arts. Life intervened, delaying the completion of “Redemption” and other things. Now however, several things are converging that is making the realization of this dream a possibility.

For over a decade I have been performing with the Faux-Real Theater Company. For the past few years I have been running the wrestling room at the Wicked Faire. I have been working with East Coast United Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, making videos or them and getting training. Putting all this together, I have decided that I am going to have some sort of performance at the Wicked Faire in February, and with that in mind, held a workshop at ECU BJJ last Saturday to explore a few ideas for this show.

To be continued…

Fundraiseing matches at Acom Sports NY State Grappling Championships #3

Here's the third match of the day in Captian Zorikh's "Redemption" fundraising challenge. This was in gi. Sponsors, watch closely...



So we got three points!

Stay tuned for the takedown and absolute matches!

Week 11: Final rehearsal and audition, Part 2

So we got the auditioners squared away, busy working with each other or regular cast members. Then Lou Nogueira of The Dojo, Wolcott, Ct, showed them a three-move routine, which they practiced with cast members, while I and the cast kept our collective eyes on them to decide who would take which open role...



The camera for this episode was held by Jeremy Salig, and the music is by Dr. Bronko Von Johnstein. The Sprawl fight clothes Lou and I are wearing was provided by the Sprawl Fight Shorts company

New scene - Captain Zorikh Runs the Gauntlet

The "running of the gauntlet" that I did in the rehearsal inspired me to create this scene in the movie. It is a pivotal moment in the story. I believe that sometimes there is not just one pivotal moment, an experience has to be reinforced by successive events to truly make a long-lasting impact. This scene occurs immediately afte another pivotal experience.

Latest screening of "Redemption" footage a success!

Although the attendance of the "Redemption" cast was sparse, "Zombie Hunters" brought nearly 20 people to the "Movie Madness Hour" at Otto's Shrunken Head on Sunday.

This was the most satisfying film screening experience I have had so far. A bunch of people with no foreknowledge of the movie, and who may or may not have been fans of wrestling, grappling, or martial arts, gave all the right reactions at all the right points in the footage. They expressed amusement at Avery's identification with cartoon characters, laughed heartily at Vince's fear of commitment, gave a satisfying "ooh!" when Avery slammed Doug on the mat, appreciated the comedy of Kristi-Lynn's disqualification, and the resultant stop and restart of the tournament, and applauded entousiastically at the end of the tournament matches. Even the epilogue, the scene in the hallway between Vince and Kristi-Lynn, got the laughs and gasps in all the right places.

After a the decidedly mixed reactions that "Combat Twister" has been getting, this was very encouraging.

And in a completely unrelated note, there is a small bird clinging to the screen on my window.

Video from Week # 6: Zorikh Talks to the Cast

In this video, I speak to the cast about what the movie is about, how you need to have a real downer to make the uplifting believable, and the need for the right person to play the Adversary. In the end I set up the cast into two groups to improv a very important scene.

Video from Week #3

Camera by Phil Fiumano of NY Rock TV
Editing by Captain Zorikh

The Purpose of This Project

Greetings, and welcome to the production blog of "The Redemption of Captain Zorikh." The picture of that handsome fellow you see is yours truly (about a year, 10 pounds, and two haircuts ago), Captain Zorikh. I am the writer/director/producer/lead actor/subject of "The Redemption of Captain Zorikh. Is this a vanity project? Heck yes, I won't deny it. But I would not feel right if that's all it was.

This movie is about athletic competition and the meaning of redemption.

Athletic training and competition is about working hard, having fun, and being the best there is at what you do. Redemption is about taking everything you are, have been, have done, have thought, have experienced, cashing it in, and finding out what you are worth.

We (the cast and crew of this motion picture) are in the entertainment business. We have the opportunity, nay the responsibility, to move and inspire people. It is the stated intention of this project to move and inspire people to work hard, have fun, and be the best they can be at what they do.