You might find it odd that I have combined those two thoughts into one section, but the more I think about it the more I realize that the two cannot be separated. The actor will rarely be the choreographer, of course, but he cannot hope to be able to act the fight without understanding how the story of the fight develops. Just as actors break down the script in order to understand and then transmit the playwright’s intent, they also need to break down the fight in order to bring meaning to the movements.
Human communication begins and ends with the face. The raw emotion plays on the face before the brain has time to transform the thought into speech or gesture. That’s why we look at the face in order to judge the real meaning of what someone is saying – words can lie easily; but faces hide little.
Combining moves to form an interesting and believable fight is a skill far beyond what is taught in even intensive stage combat instruction, but there are some basic principles to keep in mind. First, don’t try too much. A few carefully chosen and well rehearsed moves will add to your production whereas larger sequences tend to fatigue the audience. In my first years as a choreographer I often overtaxed my fighters’ endurance and my audiences’ patience.
It seems obvious, but match the move to the intention of the character. Let the emotional impulse of the character inform what kind of attack or response seems most natural.
Each move will come from an impulse and each in turn will have a consequence. Imagine a force slowly growing in strength, weight and size composed of anger and manifesting as a ball of fire welling up from one of the characters. It is restrained by use of words for a while, but at some point reaches such an intolerable level that it must be released by physical action. It flies to the other character, who must dodge it, absorb it, or command it to return to its owner. Sometimes that ball of fire is controlled so that the aggressor might have two or three moves before committing to the one which is supposed to actually do the damage. Sometimes the fire is so overwhelming that the aggressor can only lash out in a simple direct attack. But however it manifests, the release of energy affects and changes both the aggressor and the defender. Both are burned by this fire; both have to adjust to a new world.
Then it’s the defender’s turn to deal with that fire. Even If he chooses to evade the attack, he still hasn’t evaded the reality of the anger. If he absorbs the attack, the physical damage changes his emotional response. If he commands or takes control of it by blocking the attack, he also has to evaluate the situation and see if the fire has dissipated. He may choose to send it back as a new attack, changing his role from defender to aggressor. He might add his own anger to the fire, increasing its strength and changing the dynamics of the fight. Two actors could spend hours just breaking down all of the ramifications of these actions – how it affects their breathing, their stances, their movement, balance and focus. Where does the fire come from – specifically? From where in the body does it spring and how does it travel down the arm, through the sword and exactly where (to the square inch) is the intended spot on the defender’s body that the aggressor wants to burn with that ball of flame. Did the action work? How are the characters changed by the results of the action? And we’ve only been talking about the first two moves of the fight.
And of course, all actions must be accompanied by sound. Grunts, groans, yells, moans, even loud breathing – from the moment the fight starts until it is over, the vocal cords must be engaged. I know that it seems really embarrassing to just blurt out something, but there must be sound. If not the fight becomes an aural black-hole, and that is deadly for any show.
Another nice thing about talking during the fight is that it makes you to breathe, something that actors forget to do once the fight begins. Breathing relaxes you, and relaxation helps you control the pace and provide meaning to the movement. Staying silent only leads to stiff acting and a poorly acted fight.
Sometimes actors will be told to slow down the fight. It may be that the fight has become unsafe, but perhaps something else is happening. You see, many times it’s not that the fight is too fast, but rather that it looks rushed, and there is a big difference. It isn’t the speed that makes it look out of control – it’s the dropping of the storyline. For instance, there are times where I’ll watch a rehearsal and see so indication of intention, the inner monologue – something that could be described as …
“I’m going to attack her!” followed by moves 1,2,3.
Where what I would rather see is …
“I’m going to attack her here!” – move 1; “That didn’t work, so I’ll strike her here” – move 2: “OK, then, she’s left herself open on that side so I’ll cut there” – move 3.
So then the fight will go only as fast as your thoughts can take you from each move to the next. You may end up doing the fight just as fast as you were doing it before, but what we’ll see is that each move is finished cleanly before moving to the next because each move had a purpose that either succeeded or failed. Each phrase of fight is as much a dialogue as anything else in the script, and the outcome of each move leads the character to choose the next action. If we don’t see the choices, we can’t believe the fight
So no matter how long the fight, you have a little homework to do, and you can do much of this on your own. Go through all of your moves, attacks and defenses. Decide why you make that particular move. Does it succeed or fail? Because of that, why do you choose the next? This may take about a half hour on a very short fight. Then do it again until you can follow all of your moves based on what you want, how you’re going to get it, evaluating if it worked, and then trying something else. (does this sound familiar? you’re right, it’s the same work you do with spoken lines.). Understanding the emotional inner monologue of the fight makes it easier to remember the moves. And if you forget a move? It doesn’t matter: you will go to the character’s next intention. And keep in mind that the audience doesn’t know the choreography, so whatever you do is “right” as long as you stay committed to the intentions.
Then in the fight rehearsal, you have to bring all of that homework with you, but then be ready to be surprised and change by the intentions and reactions that you see on your partner’s face. If you are open to the process, many if not most of your reactions will have to change. Your character is not only going to respond to the movement but to your understanding of what your opponent is trying to do. The same wonderful experience of learning and change that happens when two actors work with the script can happen when two actors work with a fight.
The outcome is that the fight will look even more dangerous, but actually be safer, for the fight won’t roll away from you out of control. You’ll be communicating directly with your partner, and by extension to the audience. And you will have a kick-ass fight!
If the choreographer has approached building the fight with this level of care and precision, the actors will find it easy to find the emotional flow and really be able to tell an interesting story through the fight. If the choreography is weak, perhaps visually striking but lacking in clearly defined emotional intent for every action, the actors and director will have to provide it. Luckily we are trained to do exactly that – make even poor writing seem real and interesting. So we might have to do the same with choreography.
If it falls into your lap to create the fight, then think in simple terms. You could begin with establishing in your own mind the essential story points that must be transmitted to the audience 1) overall, 2) for each scene, and 3) for each fight or confrontation. So read the play a couple more times and jot down some of the critical things that absolutely must happen within each fight. These are the barebones basics, not whatever is written in the stage directions.
As a matter of fact, black out all of the stage directions with a heavy felt-tip pen. Really. Block them out, all of them, even the ones not related to the fight. The ones that describe the blocking, the gestures, even and especially the horrible ones that give line readings. You know, the ones that supposedly help the actor by adding angrily or knowingly or brightly or whatever is in parenthesis after or before the line. These aids are fine if you merely reading a script, but they are the worst thing you can show to an actor preparing to act in a play. Slavish observance of stage directions only leads to lifeless directing and uninspired acting. An actor should be exploring all of the ways to say a line. And although we can’t allow the same freedom when it comes to a staged fight, you, the choreographer, have to allow yourself the freedom to work out a fight that is specific to your actors, your set, your concept of what the play is trying to say. And don’t worry about being true to the original version of the show. The original choreographer set the fight based on the director and actors he had to deal with. In a different production, he would be the first to change the fight to fit the new circumstances. You must do the same.
So in a production of, let’s say, Man of La Mancha there is a big fight that pits Quixote, Sancho and Dulcinea against the muleteers that you have to choreograph. The stage directions are detailed and have the actors performing some very difficult moves with a lot of props. Well, there is no harm in reading the stage directions once if you need to get an idea of what is required from the fight, but then simplify. Write down what really needs to happen. For this scene that’s pretty simple, really. The muleteers must be defeated and sustain some non life-threatening injuries, and each of our three principles must have at least one moment within the fight in which he or she contributes to the victory. Everything else is negotiable. However long or short the fight is, whether it is to be serious or comedic, whether props are going to be used and how, all of that is up to you.
Start with a basic outline of how the fight should progress in order to tell the audience what they need to know. I like to daydream the scene first in a fully imagined “real” space with the characters as vague out-of-focus shadows. Then I allow them in my imagination to approach and retreat from each other as the conflict progresses without seeing what their arms or weapons are doing. At this point I’m just trying to get a feel for the way their personalities make choices. In a short amount of time the basic blocking of the fight becomes clear. I write these down in outline form, and then keep playing the mental movie over and over, allowing the characters to become a little more sharply focused each time. Each time, a bit more of the characters and then the specific attacks and defenses almost manifest themselves. Before long the fight is complete, and I can fill in my outline with all of the specific choreography.
Since memorization is never as interesting as motivation, I like to keep the number of routines that each actor has to memorize down to a minimum, and I strongly suggest that you do the same. But that doesn’t mean that the fight has to be boring and repetitive. Let’s resurrect that little bit of fight notation we used before and build a small fight. Each actor will only have to know seven moves, but we can build a very long fight if we want to and the audience will never see a pattern.
Side A Side B
Side A did seven moves, and Side B performed a complementary set of moves. If these moves are performed at a steady pace, one beat per move, the fight has a certain feel. If the actors break up the rhythm, let’s say by freezing for a split second after every third move, it looks like a completely different fight. Why? Because good actors can’t help but fit in a bit of emotional response to even the slightest pause, and we as the audience pick up on that and read in motivation. If we stick to that fractional pausing after each three moves, we can perform the fight as an endless loop and the audience won’t notice a pattern until the third time we run the basic routine, if then.
Want more? Each actor already knows what the other actor is going to do, so in a short time he really knows fourteen moves without having memorized anything new. So now loop the two routines together. The first actor will perform all of Side A and then continue right into Side B, then A then B, ad nauseam. The second actor starts with Side B, and then continues to A, then B, then A, etc.
Now lets add the legs. Try a full movement pattern across the stage. Have the first actor only going forward, one step with every move. The other actor only retreats – one or two steps back whether the arm is attacking or not. You’ll notice that the “intention” of the attacks changes dramatically when the body is in retreat.
Right now is a good time to have them do what they really want to do – step forward any time they attack, step back every time they block. Just let them run through it a couple of times to get it out of their systems. As you go through the full routine notice how some attacks seem stronger than others now, some are more important and some are almost incidental.
Now for a real brain teaser. Have them step forward with each block; step backward with each attack. Even if you don’t use it in the fight, it’s a great exercise. By stepping forward while parrying, it can show a character in complete command of the fight, whereas backing up while cutting or thrusting gives a look of desperation.
To see how to change the look of the fight even more, try having all attacks in one phrase be tightly controlled thrusts and all parries be extremely small deflections. Now try the same combinations but using all full arm swinging cuts. The matching blocks will have to appear as though they have to absorb so much incoming energy that it would shake the entire body. For another exercise, when an attack is followed by a parry, try maintaining blade contact during the entire movement (called a yield or ceding parry).
Now try one phrase but repeat one of the moves. It doesn’t matter which one, but let’s say move # 4. Counted out, the actors would perform 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7. Suddenly that phrase has a burst of a sustained attack that puts the person on the defense. Now try it with two moves repeated in succession. Let’s say 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. It breaks up the fight, adds a different dynamic, and the actors can instantly incorporate it into the fight.
How would you describe the different moods that each variation creates? By carefully mixing parts of each of these variations, you can create a wonderfully nuanced fight full of character development and an interesting storyline. And we haven’t had to add any fancy moves or augmented the fight beyond the original pattern.
I have only touched on some of the more obvious variants that can add a different look to what are essentially the same moves. But isn’t that what we are already trained to do as actors? We take the same lines that hundreds of other actors have spoken but then filter them through our own interpretation to create something unique. We can also say the same line in any of a hundred different ways, depending on our intention. Those same skills apply to movement, so we can take a seemingly simple fight and fill it with passion, tension, and excitement.
If you have been a director for any length of time at all, I’m sure that the following has happened to you. You’re in the middle of a rehearsal, trying to work out a bit of business or a tight piece of blocking, and one of your actors stops any bit of forward progress with the phrase “but my character wouldn’t do that”. It just takes the wind out of your sail, doesn’t it? You of course don’t want to stifle the actor’s efforts to make the character his own, and yet at the same time you are desperately stifling your own impulse to strangle him.
In stage combat, this problem is magnified, for the actor may be required to perform a fight and yet the interpretation of the character is of one who is weak. How do you justify a strong action from a weak character? But more importantly, how do you get an actor to break away from his first choice on playing a scene, which is usually facile and shallow?
I have had some luck with variations on movement exercises designed to break the actor away from preconceptions. First, have them pick an animal that they believe most closely matches the attributes of their character and play the scene that leads to the violence and the violence itself as that animal. Let them go to extremes, really exaggerate the animal attributes. It doesn’t take long for actors to realize that any animal, no matter how weak, will defend and even attack a much larger animal if it feels threatened.
And so for a character who is “timid”, the use of violence may not be the first intuitive response, but it is hardly outside of the possible, and should be explored in rehearsal. (In my limited experience I’ve found that it is the insecure and fearful who will often lash out physically when they feel challenged and cannot confront their challenger with strength of character.). Actors should also be reminded that their character is not their property yet, and is not even fully formed. It is only through the exploration of rehearsal that the discovery and creation of a character takes place, layer by layer. What a character might not have done in the first week of rehearsal might indeed be natural by the sixth week. But every time that an actor says “no” to any choice, he cuts himself off from what he might have learned.
There is one particular Laban exercise that I love putting into my advanced stage combat classes. Laban normally has the actors explore taking on the qualities of light vs. heavy, fast vs. slow, straight vs. circuitous. In a series of exercises, the actors take each quality to its extreme and then combine one from each pair, and finally include them into the playing of a scene. For stage combat I change the last pair to strong vs. weak, since I can’t have the actors change a movement direction. Naturally, the actors will first choose a combination with which they are most comfortable, and this is the one that they tend to choose 95% of the time whenever they act. Often it is something like fast-strong-light, so then after they have worked out the scene that way, I challenge them to explore the polar opposite choice, for example slow-weak-heavy. This brings out some wonderful acting, and if they can’t actually use it in performance it often gives them a tool through which their character becomes a complete three dimensional person. For every “strong” person has periods of weakness, and every “weak” person has moments where they find tremendous strength. While one attribute might be predominant, it is never one hundred percent of that person’s life.
I hope you can see by what I’ve said so far that I place the highest priority on a plot and emotion driven fight. That doesn’t mean that I won’t throw in some “fancy” moves or even cliché bits in order to add more pizzazz to the fight, so long as it fits the tenor of the show and doesn’t violate the production’s limit of propriety. That means that, depending on what the director is trying to create, for some productions of The Three Musketeers I’ll put in every cheap bit in the book, and in others I stay true to a more “realistic melodramatic” form.
The one thing that I can’t do too much with is when I’m faced with the director who wants to add a fight for a very different reason: making actors happy. It comes up in a lot of college and high school productions trying to do a big show. The director and producer get worried before auditions that not enough men/boys will show up. So they let out the word that there’s a good chance that if you get in the show, you’re going to get to swashbuckle. Well, there aren’t that many shows where you can actually do that, so when the show is finally cast the director feels obligated to add some fights that aren’t required for the show.
Most of the time, these fights drag down the pace of the show, and often add confusion, not clarity, for the audience. Staged fights, just like characters’ emotions, are supposed to come up as the consequence of what has happened in the plot. When the emotions are too large and aren’t supported by the actions, it becomes melodramatic. When a fight in part or in whole is not tightly connected to all of the production values and plot, it becomes a disappointment.
A truism when dealing with fighters is that the bad guy makes the good guy look good.
How fast should it go? Establish a flow.
Each acting moment takes time in a fight. FEEL. Head butt to run to door break it down and slow down.
Energy versus control. Injuries: no victims, only volunteers.
[protecting from sliding – floor or shoes?]
maintain weapons during the run
Lastly, put the choreography in early, and give the actors only so much as they can deliver competently. The choreography should be memorized at the same time that lines are due. If they are still struggling to remember the sequence of moves, they can’t be acting the fight, and that will only diminish the overall production. For the same reason, any portion of the fight that is not polished by the time you go into tech week should be cut from the show.
So do less. And what you do end up with, do perfectly.