Flashback Friday

In lieu of a post here, let me just link to a guest blog post I did for Zombie Orpheus Productions, over on their site, discussing the fight coordination and armoury work I did for them on The Gamers: Dorkness Rising and GAM3RS: Hands of Fate.   Click here. Go there. Read.

UWYO Workshop

No time for a proper post; I hope to catch up a bit in the coming weeks, as I might get some time between the end of classes and the beginning of full time rehearsals for The Fantasticks, which I’m directing and then touring in June. Biggest upcoming thing, though, is this weekend’s Third Annual […]

New Toys

Coming out of hiding for a quick post – there’s been a fair bit of interest in blank firing gun reviews, state-of-the-market posts, etc. so here’s a video I put together after rehearsal the other day. You can tell from the circles around the eyes and tendency to ramble that I’m tired, but these are […]

The Longsword/Broadsword divide

One of the relatively recent and ongoing debates within the Society of American Fight Directors revolves around a category we’ve been calling “Broadsword” for years. It’s a slightly problematic term, since it’s historically been used for a variety of things, and not at all specifically for the hand-and-a-half cruciform swords the SAFD uses to to […]

Blank firing penetration test

So in the Theatrical Firearms Workshop this afternoon, someone asked, after seeing some of the paper tests, if a blank would tear the same kind of hole through skin and flesh, or if we’re harder than paper. Good question, I said. Thankfully, I’ve never had to find out. I also didn’t happen to have any […]

Comedy of Errors

Several things have been keeping me busy of late, perhaps excusing the lack of posts here, but the man in one would be our first Fall production at the University of Wyoming, William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, slightly edited and re-staged to fit a completely modern setting. Here’s a brief unofficial promo I threw […]

The Things that Matter, & the Things that Don’t.

Things that probably don’t matter: The design of this blog. Feel free to argue with me here, but I opted not to keep paying for the custom design layout I had before, and you can see the difference easily. I’m guessing there’s some way I can go back and make it at least a little […]

Keeping it unReal

A recent lengthy expose’ by the Chicago Reader on Profiles Theatre has been causing quite the buzz in our theatre and stage combat circles lately. The pattern of abuses chronicled there only briefly and tangentially touch on stage combat, but the issue is one that effects us in several ways, and the overall aesthetic of “real” […]

Blank Firing Guns: Updates

This is a constantly changing market, in a slightly-less-constantly-changing field, so perhaps a state-of-the-industry check-in is in order, if I can dash one off. I’ve been submitting updates for The Theatrical Firearms Handbook, since it should be getting a second printing some time this Summer, and that’s had me thinking about some of this stuff […]

Spring Updates

Since it’s been a while, and I’d rather not clutter up my next themed post with personal updates, here’s a quickie on the last few months for anyone wondering: UWYO Stage Combat Workshop – this year it was held in mid-April, which was in retrospect a mistake; we got hammered by a huge snowstorm. One […]