"Professional Fight Director and Stage Combat Instructor" is apparently one of the best jobs one can possibly have when attending a cocktail party (though for the record, I would like to state that I always say "Playwright" first).  A surprising amount of intelligent and educated people are unaware that the job actually exists.  And once they do know, there is a lot of curiosity about how our work is done.

Recently I've been teaching a whole lot of Intro to Stage Combat workshops in various settings, and I have a few more coming up in the near future.  I've been saying for quite some time that the basics of stage combat are essential skills for actors, as well as incredibly useful for other disciplines within theatre & film.  I would also say that taking such a workshop could also be a really interesting adventure for those outside of professional entertainment. 

I've written a whole lot about this subject  (a dissertation and several articles) and have been the subject some interviews and so on in this capacity as well, so some of what I'm saying here I've said before, but anything I'm repeating is worth writing about again.

The first priority of a fight director is the safety of the performers.   For a profession with such a badass reputation, the practitioners spend a whole lot of time and energy being concerned with the well-being of everyone involved. 

Stage combat has more in common with a combination of ballroom dance and stage magic that it does with any actual fighting discipline.  Once an illusion is decided upon, it becomes a matter of figuring out how to best execute it within the skill level of the cast and in the time allotted.  This can be as "simple" as someone being slapped and/or falling down, or as complex as a duel to the death with chainsaws.  The illusion must also further the story being told and support character development.  If the fight director has done their job well it should be nearly impossible to determine where the director's work ended and where the fight director's has begun.

I'd like to take a moment to discuss why the the study of stage combat is important and why acquiring some familiarity with the skills involved in portraying violence in performance should be given some priority across the various disciplines.        
     

In order to maintain some momentum in the aftermath of my dissertation defense and subsequent graduation, in the past few months I did a couple of book reviews for scholarly journals.  Both reviews will be appearing in the next few months.

My review of Eugenio Barba's latest book, On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House (Routledge: 2009) will appear in the next issue of New England Theatre Journal, and my review of John Donohue's Kage: The Shadow (YMAA: 2011) will soon be appearing in The Journal of Asian Martial Arts.

    "Be well versed in the arts of pen and sword."  -  Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

I recently joked that on principle,  scholars of John Milton and Paradise Lost should all skydive.  In part because the opportunity to fall screaming from Heaven like Lucifer himself would be wonderful fieldwork.  And also because the study of great literature should be visceral.

This was because not so long  ago I went skydiving to celebrate my graduation from my doctoral program, and also because lately I've been having more and more realizations about what I've come to call "fightaturgy," or, the dramaturgical revelations of the analysis of violence and movement implied in a performance text and their effect on character development in a play.  I brought this up in a recent conversation with my friend and colleague Ryan Hartigan, which led me to realize that I need to write about this if I'm going to keep talking about it. 

A few of my current projects have some great examples: