Some thoughts on the workshop for "Hit the Mat"

So the day of the workshop arrived and what had been looking promising was beginning to look bleak. Two people who had promised to be there (including one with his girlfriend) got called for work, one got sick, several others, it turned out, had decided to go to Santa Con.

Fortunately two friends came through, and I called on another originally to hold the camera, but he wound up participating in the workshop as well. Then, while we were waiting for the workshop to begin, two separate people literally walked in off the street to find out more about East Coast United BJJ. Jojo Guarin, the owner, was not present, so after I gave them what little info I had about it and told them that he would be back later, I decided to tell them about the workshop and invited them to participate. They both agreed. And while Jojo wound up getting called away on family duty, he was good enough to call in Walter, one of the ECU black belts, to lead the BJJ instruction portion of the workshop.

Walter led the six of us, a group diverse in age, size, and experience, in basic instruction in forward and backward rolls, breakfalls to the front, back and side, and the basic positions of BJJ, as well as how to do a rear naked choke. We then took a short break and I asked him to show us the proper way to do a leg-sweep takedown. We adjusted the takedown to allow the “victims” to control their own fall by executing a breakfall.

After the group had gained familiarity with that move, I spoke a few words about what we were doing here. To me, theater is like BJJ in at least one way: it is about “position to submission.” In both you are trying to get your opponent or partner into a position to submit them to your will. Everything in a play is designed to set the audience up for the emotional climax. If they laugh when they are supposed to, cry when you want them to, and give you a standing ovation at the end, you know you have made them tap out.

So we got started. I began with an exercise known as the “grid.” It involves the performers walking in straight lines and right angles as if on a grid. When two people are about to bump into each other, they must make a choice to engage or avoid engagement my moving on the grid. With these directions, the workshoppers seemed to avoid contact. I then told them to make a choice of an attitude. They could be confident, insecure, aggressive, or even a dick, if they wanted to.

With this new direction, they began moving with more purpose, seeking out engagement. Then I said that when two people came in contact, they could choose to engage in a takedown, and that they would have the option of deciding between themselves as to who would be taken down.

Here is where things started getting interesting. The people’s individual personalities began to come out, frequently influenced by their level of skill. Some people were more aggressive, some were more passive. Some avoided contact. One of them made a point of using as many different modes of ambulation as possible. One of the fellows allowed himself to be taken down each time. I told him to take down the next person he saw, which he did. Then he turned around and someone else took him down.

In a later episode, that same guy got trapped against a wall by three others and went down without anyone touching him.

Next I said that everyone who was taken down would stay down. Soon all of those down ganged up on the one person left standing and took him down.

One of the attendees happened to have their grandfather with them. I placed him in the exercise as a “force of nature.” He was allowed to roam in any manner he wanted, while the others had to avoid him. When once again the scenario led to all but one on the ground against one standing, he was quite effective in interfering with the pursuit.

After all this was done and we took a short break, I lined everyone up and explored some very brief, very simple choreography.

This whole workshop helped me blow through some preconceptions. I had been thinking that the grid would be an exercise in exploring the relationships of bodies in time and space like a modern dance or movement study, and that any stories told with it would be silent and subtly dramatic. I discovered that watching people’s personalities, people simply being themselves, is incredibly entertaining and fun. It gave me the idea that the performers should let their individual personalities shine forth in this show far more than I had originally conceived. Exploring the relationships of the personalities may be even more interesting than simply exploring bodies in motion. In fact, the motion of the bodies can be the tool by which we discover the personalities.

And in the category of “well, duh,” having a group of people do unified precision choreography requires a group of people with skill and precision in the movement vocabulary of the choreography.

There have been further developments in the concept of “Hit the Mat” since the workshop. I will elaborate on them in my next post.

Video coming sooon.

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…

And finally, I faced "Superman" in the Open Division

Here's my final match at the Acom Sports NY State Grappling Championships. I got paired up with a guy wearing a Superman shirt, so I decided to wear my Captain Marvel shirt. For all the good it did me...



In this video, I review my day's performance and say a few final words.

Thank you to all my sponsors for supporting me. Though my score total was lower than I had hoped, it was a learning experience and enabled me to make 5 videos.

The upshot of this is, however, that I have decided that this kind of casual, recreational training is not advancing my skills enough for the months that I have been doing this. If I ever want to be more than a genial goof, I have to get real training from a real academy. Fortunately, East Coast United Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has recruited me to make videos for them, and in exchange, will be training me. Watch this soace for the results!

So after two no gi matches and one gi match, I tried the Takedown Tournament...


My takedown game sucks.

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!

Fundraising mates at Acom Sports NY State Grappling Championships #2

Here's the second match. Remember, every point scored would earn me $ towards finishing "Redemption."



Total points = 0

My fundraising matches at Acom Sports NY State Grapplng Championships #1

As promised, here are the matches I fougt in at the Acom Sports NY State GRappling championships.

#1


0 points