Saturday, February 06, 2010
In The Wings - Aerial Choreographer - February, 2010
American Theatre Wing: "The aerial choreographer, Paul Rubin, creates flying sequences for the stage from start to finish. During a rehearsal of an original production titled Joseph, Rubin shows the equipment used. He also talks about his background as a magician/illusionist, and the highlights of his experience working on Peter Pan with Cathy Rigby, Wicked, and Curtains with David Hyde Pierce."
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6 comments:
I love the idea of an aerial choreographer, for several reasons. First of all, movement in the air is completely different from movement on the ground because you are basically defying the laws of gravity. Also, there is a magical quality to being in the air, and the actor doesn't quite know how that is perceived. To have someone that focuses all their attention onto that one task, of flying choreography, you can really make it look natural, like that person is supposed to be flying in the air. It is really quite a new beautiful art form.
This series is a really interesting program from the American Theater Wing to bring people into the world of theater. I hope that people other than those in the industry are looking at these videos and learning. Now, about the specific video. Theater is expanding in so many ways, flying, projections and video, and interactivity. In my mind, if I were working on a show with flying in it, I would definitely want an aerial choreographer working with me for several reasons. First of all, safety. These people have examined and trained with the equipment so they know its limitations and how it can and can't be used to keep an actor safe. The second is an artistic reason. These aerial choreographers have lots of experience with flying people in live performances so they will definitely have suggestions that the team might not have even thought about. Also, like the video says, they know how to make it look natural.
The technology behind flying people has always struck me as an incredibly cool job. While I have always guessed that something like flying in large productions normally required a person to head it, the idea of a aerial choreographer never really occurred to me. I guess I had just always assumed that in shows that used flying, either the choreographer or director worked with the technicians and operators that went along with the flying system to create the effects. The idea that flying received it's own choreographer makes a lot more sense then how I thought the system worked. I am surprised that this is the first time I have heard of a position like this since it has to be one of the more interesting performance based positions I have heard of.
The job of aerial choreographer strikes me as just being so cool! Not only is it fun, it really is extremely important. I have had the opportunity to play around with flying when we had it in a production that I worked on, and it really is ten times harder than you would think to make it look natural. All of your senses are completely confused when you get into a flying situation like that, and it's very difficult to make your movements look fluid and consistent. And without making it look natural, it really does take a lot of the magic away.
I was at a theatre conference this summer and went to a workshop by ZFX Flying Effects, and while we only learned some basic information about flying effects onstage, it really opened my eyes to the many possibilies of incorporating aerial effects into live performances. They can allow a person to run horizontally on a vertical wall around a room, and if they can do that, how can that effect be manipulated for a show?? The possibilities are endless and fascinating, and aerial choreographers are going to probably become more numerous and busy in the future.
I've always been fascinated by the folks who deal with flying people. On one hand, it seems like such a fantastic, incredible feat. On the other hand, I was surprised to learn that most of their hardware isn't all that different from what we use to fly static things, and they definitely push the limits of the equipment more often. Like many things, the folks whoa re good at it seem to live and breathe it, but even they don't treat it that formally. One of the things I live about theatre is how much specialized knowledge theatre folks have, but at the same time how informally most of it is applied. On the other hand, this does contribute to the fear that sometimes emerges, that since lots of what we do can't follow any existing formula, it's hard to be able to trust it completely - it comes down to human judgment much more visibly than most of the other things we interact with daily.
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