What You Were Hired to Do
I want to go back to our definition of stage combat: the simulation of violent actions specific to the production requirements of a play. And to that, let’s add: “Less is more,” especially in a world where excess is mistaken for expertise.
Because as we go through the steps of creating a stage fight I want you to remember that ultimately the fight is for the audience. And they will forgive many a sin, but not self-indulgence. Ultimately, the fight that works is the one that springs naturally from the show. If any part of it looks added on, it will lessen the production as a whole.
The Commission
You just got your first job as a fight choreographer. Yay! Congratulations and bon courage. You should feel wonderful and a bit frightened, for at this point the trust of the design team, the expectations of the audience, and the safety of the actors are all in your hands. You are considered the expert. Very few will challenge what you say or do—at least not out loud. That silence can be misleading, and a trap. It places an additional burden on you to question your own choices, because others may not.
Before starting to work on the fight, make it clear to yourself exactly why you were hired. Most commissions fall into one of four categories, each requiring a different approach. The reasons could be one of these or a combination:
Types of Commissions
Isolated Action — A single moment: a slap, a fall, a stab—events that were once left to actors to improvise.
Safety Oversight — No formal fights, but heightened physicality. You are there to assess, adjust, and ensure safety.
Narrative Combat (“the fights”) — Sustained sequences where the script defines intent, but the structure and mechanics are yours to build.
Spectacle — The fight exists primarily to excite the audience. Scale, clarity, and visual impact become primary concerns.
In almost all cases, you will also need to function as an instructor. Actors arrive with widely varying levels of experience, and it is your responsibility to bring them to a common standard so the work can be performed safely and consistently.
At the same time, never lose sight of the original commission. You should be able to state clearly: “I was hired to deliver ______.” Then deliver it—cleanly, efficiently, and with the least amount of fuss. As a member of the design team, you are expected to prevent headaches, not cause them.
Of course, you must always adhere to your own professional standards, for they are there to protect you, the actors, and even the theatre.
The Non-Negotiables
Safety and repeatability are not optional considerations to be weighed against schedule, convenience, or enthusiasm. They are the foundation upon which all stage combat rests, and the fight director must be willing to insist upon them even when doing so is inconvenient. Directors and producers will often be balancing dozens of competing pressures: rehearsal time, scene work, technical demands, budget limitations, actor availability, and opening deadlines. It is therefore the responsibility of the fight director to establish clearly what is required for the violence to be performed safely and consistently. A movement that succeeds only under ideal conditions is not ready for performance. The actors must have sufficient rehearsal, sufficient spacing, sufficient understanding, and sufficient repetition for the sequence to remain reliable under the realities of live theatre: fatigue, nerves, emotional intensity, costume limitations, changing stage conditions, and simple human inconsistency. The fight director cannot assume others understand these requirements instinctively. They must advocate for them directly and professionally.
Clarity of action must also be defended. Directors will sometimes push for greater speed, more chaos, or more “realism” without recognizing that stage violence exists for an audience seated at a distance. The audience must be able to understand what is happening, who is in danger, how the balance of power is shifting, and why each action occurs. Confused violence weakens both storytelling and tension. The fight director must therefore resist the temptation—or outside pressure—to substitute complexity for effectiveness. The audience is not grading technical vocabulary. They are following dramatic action. The responsibility of the fight director is not to impress other choreographers, but to create violence that communicates cleanly within the production as a whole.
Structural integrity is the principle most likely to be damaged by outside pressures, particularly late in rehearsal. Cuts are made. Timing changes. Furniture moves. Entrances shift. Actors begin pushing pace. Emotional choices expand beyond the originally rehearsed structure. The fight director must protect the architecture of the sequence as these pressures accumulate. A fight is not merely a string of exciting moments. It is an engineered dramatic structure with timing, spacing, rhythm, escalation, and recoverable pathways built into it. Once that structure begins to erode, safety and storytelling erode with it. This does not mean the choreography must become rigid or inflexible. It means that modifications must be made intelligently, with full understanding of how each change affects the whole system. One of the fight director’s responsibilities is knowing when to accommodate production needs—and when to say no.
Flexible Variables
While certain principles must remain fixed, many other aspects of stage combat must remain flexible. This is one of the most important professional distinctions a fight director can learn. The purpose of the choreography is not to showcase the choreographer. It is to serve the production. That requires a willingness to adapt constantly to the practical and artistic realities of the show.
Length is always negotiable. Directors, producers, and audiences experience time differently than choreographers often do. What feels thrilling in isolation may feel excessive within the pacing of the production. A fight that overstays its welcome weakens tension rather than increasing it. The fight director must therefore remain willing to shorten, simplify, compress, or restructure sequences in service of the larger dramatic rhythm of the play. The audience should leave wanting slightly more, not waiting for the fight to end.
Complexity must also remain subordinate to performance reality. Intricate choreography may be appropriate when working with highly trained performers, generous rehearsal schedules, and productions centered heavily around combat. In many productions, however, excessive complexity simply creates unnecessary risk, inconsistent execution, and actor anxiety. A simpler fight performed with confidence, clarity, and precision will almost always appear stronger than an ambitious fight performed hesitantly. Complexity is not inherently sophistication. The fight director must be willing to remove material that exceeds the practical capacities of the production.
Style is equally adaptable. Different productions demand different relationships to violence. Some fights require realism and restraint. Others require broad theatricality, stylization, ritualization, comedy, melodrama, or spectacle. The fight director should not force a personal aesthetic onto every production. A successful comedy fight may fail completely in tragedy. A realistic knife assault may feel absurd in a highly stylized fantasy world. The choreography must emerge naturally from the tone, world, and storytelling language of the production itself.
The degree of theatricality must also remain flexible. Some productions benefit from visible illusion and overt performance language. Others depend upon near invisibility of technique. Neither approach is inherently superior. The appropriate choice depends upon the production’s relationship with realism, presentation, genre, audience expectation, and directorial vision. The fight director’s task is not to prove how “real” or “flashy” the violence can be, but to determine what level of theatrical expression best supports the production as a whole.
In all of these variables, ego becomes the enemy. A fight director who cannot simplify, cut, adjust, re-stage, or rethink choreography in response to the needs of the production will eventually become a liability rather than an asset. Professionalism lies not in protecting one’s choreography at all costs, but in understanding what truly serves the show.
Types of Work
Let’s take a look at each of these jobs:
The Isolated Action
The best time to work a simulation is after the director and actors have had a chance to be familiar with the scene. This can seem strange to directors, who are worried they will impinge on your work. But if you show up and they haven’t at least blocked the scene, you run the risk that your work will not flow with the nuances of the narrative. So convince them that the best results come from your working with their impulses. Tell the director to let the actors explore that physical moment completely – to go with what feels right. But with only one restriction – no actor is allowed to touch another actor. They can raise their arms, pretend to push, to kick, whatever. But absolutely no contact.
When you arrive, ask to see the scene. The younger the actors and director, the more likely they are going to try to tell you everything about the scene. Don’t let them. It only wastes time. I find it helpful to say “Show: don’t tell”. Of course, you don’t need to see the entire scene, merely the five minutes of it leading up to and then the minute after the moment of violence. This gives you so much more information than you ever could get from simply reading the script. And who knows? Perhaps they have learned that for this production, what works best is a shove rather than a slap. How wonderful! That means they are creating something organic, something living, something specific to this production. And even more importantly, you will see where the actors need to be at the start and finish of the simulation.
Now you are ready to create the simulation, to teach the technique. And you can do so with the benefit of collaborating with their efforts. You provide the illusion, taking the audience sightlines into account, calibrating the precise amount of transferred force you want the audience to believe. The actors feel immediately that the illusion is theirs, with that wonderful sense of ownership, of being fellow artists with you to create a seamless action that sprang smoothly from the world of the play.
You’ll most likely not need to work with them again until a week before tech, just to make sure that they have not changed the mechanics of the fight and to answer any questions or concerns that have come up in interim. But do take special care to re-evaluate the sightlines. A slight change in foot position can accidentally ruin the illusion to the audience members in the furthest seats.
Safety Oversight
Some productions are not thought of as “fight shows,” yet still contain moments of significant physical danger. A domestic argument may escalate into grabbing, shoving, or striking. A rehearsal process may encourage actors to “follow the impulse” physically in pursuit of emotional truth. Directors may ask actors to explore anger, panic, desperation, or dominance without fully recognizing how quickly uncontrolled physical behavior can emerge from those exercises. In these situations, you are often brought in not to choreograph a formal fight, but to establish safe structure before someone gets hurt.
One of the most common misconceptions in physically aggressive acting is the belief that trained or emotionally connected actors can safely improvise violence simply through trust and instinct. While some physically based training disciplines can produce interactions that appear spontaneous and highly reactive, even those systems rely upon carefully established foundations. The participants share a common vocabulary, understand exactly how force is communicated and received, and operate within pre-established boundaries. What appears chaotic or improvised is usually far more structured than it seems from the outside.
This is an important distinction. Actors cannot safely “just attack each other” because the scene feels emotionally intense. Safety in stage combat does not come from emotional commitment alone. It comes from repeatable structure, mutual awareness, and disciplined control. When rehearsals emphasize impulse without establishing those controls first, physical interactions often begin escalating unconsciously from rehearsal to rehearsal.
Part of your responsibility in these situations is therefore educational. The actors and director may need to be reminded that any simulated violent action requires clear procedural agreement. At minimum:
• the action must be appropriately cued
• both actors must understand exactly what will happen
• either actor must be free to stop or refuse the action without pressure or penalty
• the movement must be performed consistently as rehearsed, without spontaneous variation
If the production is unwilling to operate within those boundaries, you should seriously consider removing yourself from the process. There may be pressure to allow “real” contact in pursuit of authenticity, particularly in emotionally intense rehearsal environments. Resist it. The fight director’s responsibility is not to validate unsafe process, but to prevent harm. Professional standards exist precisely for the moments when enthusiasm, emotion, or artistic ambition begin overriding judgment.
If the cast and director are receptive, reassure them that structure is not the enemy of honest performance. Properly constructed stage violence does not suppress emotional truth; it protects it. When actors feel physically safe, they are often able to commit more fully and more fearlessly to the emotional life of the scene. Your task is not to eliminate impulse, but to channel it safely through repeatable mechanics. The victim must remain in control. Both actors must work together to create the illusion. Energy should never be driven harshly into the partner’s body, nor directly toward vulnerable targets.
In productions built heavily around emotional improvisation or physically aggressive rehearsal methods, continued oversight may be necessary. Actors under stress will often begin pushing pace, increasing force, shortening cues, or drifting away from the agreed structure over time. Part of the job is remaining vigilant against that gradual erosion before it becomes dangerous.
Narrative Combat (“the fights”)
This is what most people imagine when they hear the term “stage combat”: the duels of Shakespeare and classical theatre, battlefield engagements, tavern brawls, riots, ambushes, sword fights, knife fights, and all of the sustained sequences where violence becomes a major storytelling event. These are the fights that audiences remember, discuss, and anticipate. They are also the sequences most likely to place enormous artistic and logistical demands upon the fight director.
Unlike isolated actions or safety oversight, narrative combat often grants you substantial creative influence within the production. You may be determining the number of combatants, the use of weapons, the pacing of escalation, the visual tone of the violence, and even the overall duration of the sequence. In many productions, directors will defer heavily to your judgment in these areas simply because they do not possess the same technical background. This freedom can be exhilarating, but it also carries risk. The greatest restrictions placed upon a fight director are often self-imposed: unnecessary complexity, excessive length, visual indulgence, or choreography that calls attention to itself rather than to the story.
In these sequences, you are functioning as more than a technician. You are, in effect, contributing narrative structure to the production itself. Violence changes relationships, alters status, resolves conflicts, reveals character, and redirects audience attention. Every tactical choice communicates something. Who advances and retreats, who hesitates, who fights cleanly, who fights desperately, who dominates space, who loses control — all of these become part of the storytelling language of the play. The fight must therefore emerge from the same dramatic world as the rest of the production rather than feeling like a separate performance inserted into it.
This level of responsibility demands preparation. Narrative combat rarely succeeds through invention alone. It requires research, planning, structural thinking, collaboration with the director and designers, awareness of actor capabilities, and constant attention to pacing and clarity. You are no longer simply staging movement. You are helping construct a major dramatic event within the production.
Homework
Most young fight directors dramatically underestimate how much preparation the job actually requires. Many enter rehearsal having thought only about moves, weapons, or style, while remaining almost completely unprepared for the practical realities of the production they are walking into. This is especially dangerous because the fight director is often treated as the room’s authority on violence, movement, weapons, and historical behavior whether they deserve that authority or not. Once people assume you are the expert, they will frequently stop questioning you. That makes ignorance particularly hazardous.
Preparation is therefore not optional. It is part of the job.
Gather information from every source available to you. Speak with the director about tone, pacing, and narrative intention. Speak with the other designers so you understand the visual and practical world the violence must inhabit. Listen to the music selected to underscore the fight. Look at scenic renderings and costume research. Learn what furniture will be present, what surfaces the actors will move upon, what practical limitations the lighting may impose, and whether microphones, masks, hats, capes, armor, blood effects, or restrictive costumes will alter movement.
Do your own research as well. If the production draws from a specific historical period, learn what violence from that world actually looked like rather than relying upon inherited theatrical clichés. Read interviews with the playwright when available. Read reviews or production notes from prior stagings, not to imitate them, but to understand what problems other productions encountered. The more informed your choices become, the less likely your choreography is to feel generic or disconnected from the world of the play.
You must also understand the capabilities and limitations of the performers themselves. Learn who has movement training and who does not. Learn who has dance, athletics, martial arts, or combat experience—and just as importantly, who believes they do. Learn about injuries, restrictions, endurance, balance, mobility, and comfort level. Choreography that ignores the actual capacities of the actors is not ambitious. It is irresponsible.
Whenever possible, walk the actual performance space before choreography begins. Measure distances. Examine entrances and exits. Study sightlines. Check the floor surface for slip, rake, unevenness, resilience, and noise. Determine how much usable playing area truly exists once scenery is installed. Many fight sequences collapse during technical rehearsals simply because the fight director built the choreography in an imaginary space rather than the real one.
The goal of all this preparation is not perfectionism for its own sake. It is prevention. Every unanswered question eventually becomes a rehearsal problem. Every assumption becomes a potential redesign. The last thing you want is to rebuild an entire sequence during tech week because no one thought to mention body microphones, a revolving platform, low-hanging scenery, or a costume that prevents the actor from lifting their arm above shoulder height.
Good fight direction begins long before the first punch is thrown.