Staging a fight

What's your role as Fight Choreographer?

My role as Fight Choreographer is to ensure that any moments of staged violence or physical action on stage are performed both safely and in a way that tells the story that we want to tell. Staged violence and action can include moments of combat, such as a slap or a push, a full fight, but also less obvious moments such as a fall, lifting people or heavy objects, a grab or performing on or around difficult pieces of set.

My job involves drawing on my knowledge of stage combat techniques, movement and biomechanics, and using this to collaborate with the ideas of the director and the actors, as well as with other creatives, the technical team, the crew and the production team. My goal is to translate the action that’s written in stage directions in the script into physical stories that are believable, engaging and repeatable so that they can have the desired impact on the audience while making sure the actors can perform them over multiple shows with no injuries. 

What is your goal when working with actors?

When I am working with actors, my goal is to ensure that they have autonomy over their own safety and actions, and that they are empowered to drive discussions on key aspects such as their creative choices and ideas, and their concerns and boundaries. It's really important to recognise that safety is subjective to the actor and is context specific, and that safety includes not just physical safety, but also emotional safety, mental safety and vocal safety.

Fight scenes also often occur at times of heightened emotion in a play, and they can be pivotal storytelling moments. My goal is to make sure I create choreography that aligns with the actors chosen character intentions, and also the actor's physical range.

Stage combat techniques should support the story that the actors want to tell rather than inhibit it, and should allow the actors to fully commit to the performance they want to deliver without fear of injury to themselves or others. A fight scene that is not choreographed to help the actors can jolt them out of the performance, or can even be a source of anxiety throughout the whole show.

Fight scenes can be incredibly exciting to perform, so it is my goal to help the actors to find the fun, the enjoyment, and the playfulness in the work, because I want everyone to enjoy the job that we decide to do. 

Samuel Buckley, Eddie Orton and Tibian Wyles. Photo: Pia Johnson

Can you give us an example of an exercise you've done with the cast during rehearsal?

The cast of 37 are an incredibly playful ensemble of actors. We worked with a number of exercises for the fight scenes, both in preparations for learning stage combat technique and also in developing the performance of the scenes themselves. My favourite exercise is a game of mine that I call The Rising Dead. The task with this game is to perform the fight sequence with full performance energy, but at the very slow-motion pace – around 30% of the normal pace.

While doing this, the actors are asked to talk through their character's internal monologue out loud and in slow-motion. This results in a scene that looks and sounds like it's being performed by a group of zombies –hence the name, The Rising Dead. The outcome is that the slow motion gives the actors time to notice, and to react to everything that's going on around them, and the externalised internal monologue helps them to add detail and texture to this storytelling.

This is more difficult to do when you are performing a fight at full pace, with so many other things to focus on, so it is a good technique to expand the storytelling detail of a scene while keeping everyone safe. It is also highly amusing for everyone to perform and for us to watch, which helps to unlock playfulness and create a positive feedback loop with the scene. 

How does your work help actors manipulate conflict in their performance?

The Fight Choreographer's work helps actors manipulate conflict on a number of levels. In the first instance, the moves that a character chooses to use in violence each tell a different story. For example, the script may say that one character slaps the other. However, an open handed forehand slap tells a different story to a backhanded slap. A quick slap on the wrist has a different story impact than a slap delivered with a full swipe from the shoulder. In this way, choosing the appropriate choreography for the character and their intentions gives us the base framework for telling the story we want to tell. In exactly the same way that choosing certain words will alter the meaning of a sentence.

Secondly, the choreography itself will be textured by the performance choices that we make. This includes technical choices such as pacing and rhythm, and creative choices such as the character's vocal, physical, and emotional reactions before, during and after the violence. For example, we tell a different story if a character is slapped and then cries, versus if they're slapped and they laugh. We say that the audience doesn't care so much about the move itself, but they care about how the characters feel about the move. Linking with this, then we can manipulate the conflict by the soundscape that we create around the conflict, including vocal sounds, breath, body impact sounds, weapons and sounds from other actors on stage – and of course, the entire scene is manipulated by the choices of the sound and lighting designers. 

How does your work help actors manipulate space in their performance?

Creating an impactful scene of stage violence is closely reliant on how we manipulate space. On a technical level, the distance between actors is one of the key safety aspects we use when we are performing the illusion of hits and strikes. On a creative level, we can manipulate the tension – the perceived danger – between two characters by changing where they are standing in relationship to each other and where they are standing on stage.

For example, by slowly bringing two characters closely together until they are just out of reach, we will increase the dramatic tension, and we can use this to wind up the characters and the audience so that they are ready for the fight when it begins. However, if the characters step too close to each other, or too far away from each other, we break this tension and we lose some of the impact of the scene.

In terms of positioning on stage, in general terms, a character who is standing upstage and centre will appear to be in a dominant position, while a character who is standing downstage and, on the periphery, will appear to be in the weaker position. We can use this to help describe the relationship between the character's status, which influences how we feel about the characters, who we think is winning or losing, who we think is stronger or weaker, and it can increase the dramatic tension the audience feels throughout the fight scene. We can also use spacing to highlight key moves or moments in the choreography and arrange the choreography in a way that is more aesthetically interesting to the audience.