Stage Combat in Glasgow

A Guest Blog with Janet Lawson

So why learn stage combat?  Over the course of an acting career most, if not all performers will be called upon at some point to perform a fight or an act of violence.  The ability to enact a violent encounter in a way that is convincing to an audience, appropriate to the style of the production and its characters and, most importantly, safe for all the performers, is an important skill for actors.

Stage combat isn’t just about learning fight techniques: it’s not a martial art; it’s a performance art.  You can employ the skills that you use to break down a text into actions and intentions equally to a fight choreography.  Why are you fighting?  What was the trigger for you to start fighting?  What are you trying to achieve at this moment?  How does it change at the next moment? Why does it change?

In fencing you wear a mask.  In martial arts your face is a mask; no pain, no emotion, just the determination to win.  In stage combat your whole body, including your voice, expresses what you are when you fight: skill, experience, state of mind, state of body, relationship to your opponent, pain, injury, defeat and victory.  You can wear your “angry face” and fight generic “angry”, or you can learn to carry the specificity of your acting into your fighting.

Stage combat is not about winning or losing. It’s about partnership.  Looking out for your partner not just to keep them safe but to make them look good and, by making them look good, you look good.  It’s never “This is my side of the fight and that’s yours,” or “I’m comfortable working at this pace and you just have to deal with it.”  It’s all about working together; reacting and responding to what you give each other.  In that way you can perform the same moves but convey a totally different fight every time you do it, and each one is truthful.

A stage combat masterclass will give you a basic vocabulary of unarmed stage combat techniques, with consideration given to safety and staging issues and then it will develop those moves into a simple choreography.  Working with a partner to improvise a scene for your fight, with or without lines, you can explore your performance of the moves to find the truth in your fight.

Janet Lawson is a professional fight director and stage combat teacher with the BASSC, she is the Chief Instructor with StageFightScotland. She teaches Stage Combat for the Full-Time programmes at Acting Coach Scotland.