Flying

As mentioned in the director's concept, I was keenly interested in creating the visual sensation of flying without using any wires at all.  To help facilitate this, I worked closely with two dance faculty members, Keely Song Glenn and Adam Dyer, to create the flight and movement that would become crucial to our storytelling. Keely and Adam were involved from the beginning of the casting process.  They helped me to structure and run auditions that would not only give us information about the auditioners movement skills, but also would provide us with a way to physically 'read' which actors were inventive, playful, resilient (it was very aerobic!), and open-hearted.  It was one of the most enjoyable auditioning processes I have ever experienced and many actors echoed the same sentiment to us after we were done.

After casting, each cast member got to experience both flight and being the support for flight during our initial stages of the rehearsal process.  Keely and Adam helped the actors to feel confident throughout movement and the flying 'lessons' and helped to shape the transitions for each of the set changes.  We made several adjustments to the flying throughout as costumes, set changes, and bodies in the space dictated.   

The most integral part of our flying, however, was the use of the army of shadows.  In Ella Hickson's version of the story, Peter is accompanied by an army of shadows in his first appearance in the Darling nursery.  I found this detail uniquely interesting.  As I thought more heavily about their role in the show, I began to see them as the secrets that Peter keeps at bay.  In our text, he is the secret keeper of Neverland and he alone is responsible for the burden, or shadows, that the secrets carry.  That army of shadows was the reason that Peter needed Tink's light.  She balanced out the shadows.  And in my limited understanding of the physics of flying, I knew that in order to create lift, there must be tension between the air above and the air below.  So Tink's fairy dust helped lift from the top and the shadows helped lift, quite literally, from the bottom. 

On the left, are some examples of ways that the actors created flying throughout our show.  We experimented with how to lift with pressure, create the illusion of flying with suspension, being literally lifted, and muscle tension.

---

Master Movement/Flying Sheet

Your browser does not support viewing this document. Click here to download the document.

This document is a list, from beginning to end of the show, of all the videos connected to each bit of movement and flying.  

We created this document to help our actors be able to access each bit of blocking and movement as we went through the process because we did not rehearse or create our show in chronological order.