Move Master: VCU veteran fight director coaches actors
VCU veteran fight director coaches actors
BY CELIA WREN Special correspondent | Updated 2 days ago
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“Keep wailing, keep wailing! Keep wailing until they go by!” movement director David Leong urges as a satirical pageant of woe unfurls in a rehearsal room in Washington.
Two VCU alums — Cara Rawlings and Jonathan Becker — are depicting mourners-for-hire plying their trade during a 17th-century European war. Over the course of several seconds, the duo sink to their knees, dissolve into deliberately cartoonish sobs, then scramble up and race ahead to keep pace with a cluster of other VCU-trained thespians executing a somber march. Then Rawlings and Becker kneel and wail again.
Leong, the veteran fight director who chairs the theater department at Virginia Commonwealth University, rushes over to talk character motivation with Rawlings and Becker, both of whom hold master’s degrees from VCU’s theater pedagogy program.
Rawlings comes up with the idea that, at one point in the scene, the mourners should be surreptitiously counting their money. “That’s perfect!” exclaims Leong. He kneels and mimes the cash counting — trying out the gesture for size. Then he stands and asks to see the sequence again. “And then we’ll leave it alone,” he says. “We’ll polish it later on.”
This episode in December was just another stage in the construction of “Mother Courage and Her Children,” which begins performances at Washington’s Arena Stage on Friday, with film star Kathleen Turner in the title role. (The production runs through March 9.)
Arena Stage’s artistic director, Molly Smith, has shouldered overall directing duties for Bertolt Brecht’s classic, an antiwar parable about a businesswoman struggling to survive, and profit from, Europe’s Thirty Years War.
But to give the production flow and physical dynamism, Smith turned to Leong, a master fight director and movement coach who has worked on Broadway and elsewhere.
As the movement director for “Mother Courage,” Leong has been responsible for devising nimble, visually catchy sequences that bolster the production’s storytelling while smoothing scene transitions. The task is all the more critical and delicate because the action in “Mother Courage” (first performed in 1941) takes place over the course of more than a decade, with years sometimes elapsing between scenes.
Moreover, Brecht peppered the script with song lyrics that interrupt the narrative — part of his broader attempt to distance audiences from the story and force them to think about the underlying issues. For the Arena production, Leong was charged with crafting movement that would add dynamism and meaning to the songs, several of which will be sung by Turner, who is making her professional singing debut. (Contemporary composer James Sugg authored the production’s original music.)
“This is such a complex piece, so epic in size, and there are so many unknowns — it’s very much like creating a new musical,” Leong said in an interview at Arena last month.
His answer to the challenge was to recruit a group of his former students to help brainstorm movement ideas during two multiday workshops, last July and in December. The invitees now teach at institutions around the country: Rawlings and Becker are on the faculties of Virginia Tech and Ball State University, respectively, for instance.
The team also included a couple of current VCU MFA students: Brad Willcuts, now in the MFA program, worked as Leong’s assistant on the show, for example.
Volunteering their time, the Richmond-trained talents (14 of them in July, a smaller group in December) traveled to Washington. In the workshops, with Leong’s feedback and guidance, they generated scenes of physical storytelling — such as the satirical mourning described above, or the ominous, sole-slapping, weapon-cradling march that Leong informally dubbed “ ‘Stomp’ with rifles.”
Smith subsequently selected the sequences that best fit her vision of the production, leaving Leong and Willcuts to teach the movement sequences to the production’s actual cast — and tailor as necessary — during rehearsals, which started Jan. 2.
Leong says the workshop process worked well because his former students “know my aesthetic.”
Less familiar with that aesthetic, initially, was Turner, who participated in the July workshop, as some other “Mother Courage” cast members did. “She had her T-shirt on; she had bare feet; and she said, ‘I’m jumping right into it,’ ” Leong recalls. “Her input was really important.”
Speaking by phone from Arena Stage this month, Turner said her work with Leong — both during the July workshop, and during the rehearsal process itself, has been helpful and illuminating.
“I’m learning a great deal from David,” she said, calling Leong “extraordinarily knowledgeable” and endowed with the ability to “dream up these wonderful scenarios that tell these big stories without having a text.”
During the rehearsals, especially, she said, “he’s been working on slow-motion movement, on rhythmic movement, on snapping in and out of freezes, on very specific kinds of physical adjustments that tell the story also. It’s really quite fascinating.“
Moreover, she says, during his coaching session with the cast, “he’s making everyone look cohesive” — an important achievement when a production’s actors come from different backgrounds. (Turner’s stage credits include Broadway turns in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”)
By crafting movement that has narrative power, Turner says, Leong has helped lighten her load as she prepares to shoulder a role that is dramatic, comic and demanding on the vocal chords.
“This is my first musical,” Turner says, “I’ve got five numbers! What was I thinking? Anyway, my philosophy is you have to be willing to risk to the point of failure, or you don’t find out what you can do. And I am doing that, I am proud to say!”
But she’s confident enough to predict that “Mother Courage” — with its movement forged by a bevy of VCU-honed talents — will be well worth catching.
“You gotta come,” Turner says of the show. “It’s going to be a monster — in a good way.”
