Violence Design Lab Podcast

Many of us find ourselves designing theatrical violence for high school or middle school productions or teaching stage combat classes to theatre programs that focus on younger performers. Or perhaps the play you're designing has a child involved in the violence. We quickly discover that working with younger fighters can be a very different experience than designing with adults.

In this episode, I discuss 4 of the major challenges dealing with this age group, give you six teaching strategies for working with them more effectively, and five tips to help you design violence that best showcases the younger performer.

You've done your audition and gotten a callback! But the director tells you that not only will you be reading from the script to see how you work with specific characters, but that there will be a fight callback to assess your stage combat skills as well! What's that going to be like?

This week's episode is here to relieve your anxiety, explain the process and give you some easy to remember and achievable tips to help you rock your fight callback and maybe land that fighting role!

Also, I look at the callback from the other side of the audition table: as a violence designer. I explain my method for preparing for fight callbacks, running them, and getting the most out of them afterward.

Today, let's discuss the dramatic work that your fights should be doing. Fights do more than simply move the plot along.

Fights should also:

1) reinforce the setting and underscore the tone,

2) reveal character

3) cast the future of the play into doubt.

I also cover how to use your fights to reinforce the characters we expect to see (Physicalization of Personality) and how to break those expectations for effect (the Dramatic Change), as well as how to create and maintain dramatic tension, and more!

You didn't think fights were just a string of cool stage combat moves, did you?

Today on episode #22 of the Violence Design Lab podcast, I'm discussing a book I think every violence designer and fight choreographer needs on their bookshelf: Meditations on Violence by Sergeant Rory Miller. I consider it a foundational work for those on our field, so I want to make sure you're up to speed on it.

This book is a great asset and if you haven't read it, there's an Amazon link at the bottom of the show notes to help you find it. I don't claim that everything Miller says is gospel truth (and even he tells you to disregard things that fly in the face of your experience or common sense), but the book is worth the price just for the thoughts about the nature of violence that I guarantee it will provoke in you. And after all, thinking about the deeper levels of violence, its motivations, its goals, its execution, and its aftereffects, this is what will separate your work from the run-of-the-mill fight choreographer.

Today I want to talk about something I never learned in a stage combat workshop or a college theatre class. In fact, it took over twenty years for me to really understand it. What is this mystery topic? Working with fighters who are middle-aged or older. Now that I'm a few months shy of 50, I have a whole different perspective on this issue compared to when I was twenty.

So pull up a chair, whippersnapper: let me tell you a story.

In this episode I give you seven tips for working with older actors who fight, some suggestions on how to help them become better fighters, and tips for how to tailor your choreography for older characters who are still fighting...after all: there's a reason that a fighting character would survive to old age!

Start designing fights for productions, and the need for weapons quickly arises. Where do those come from? The theatre? A rental house? From you? Today I talk with R&D Choreography founder Richard Gilbert about the ways a weapon inventory can benefit the working violence designer. We discuss some strategies for building up your stockpile, how to make it work for you, how to track where your weapons are and when they should be back.

The topic for episode #19 of the Violence Design Lab podcast comes to us from a listener in the U.K. who wanted to know my approach to incorporating the story elements of a script into the fight choreography that I eventually give to the actors. It's a great question, and it's nice to focus in on a smaller scale after a few large-concept episodes like my series on melees.

If you choreograph fights for a class or an exhibition or for fun but without a pre-written script, your options—your artistic canvas, if you will—are wide open. You can create anything you like, limited only by your available weapons and your athletic skill. The world is your oyster.

Violence in a play script or screenplay, however, does NOT happen in a vacuum. It's not a blank canvas. There is highly specific work it must do in the script, and certain elements that must be included. This is the place to start planning your choreography—with what I call the Essential Elements....

This week I had the honor and privilege of chatting with Todd Campbell, Fight Master with Fight Directors Canada. He and I dove into some strategies on training actors to fight--not only in traditional stage combat but also in historical styles. He explains the tiered training system of the FDC, and how HEMA research benefits and augments the kind of fights we can do on stage.

It's a great interview and I learned a lot: give it a listen!

In this episode, we're covering the second half of our discussion on melees! Today we get down to brass tacks: what format are you using to tell this story, what are the two major styles of melees, what are feature fights and chaos moments, and how Twyla Tharp taught me to choreography battle scenes!

Today on the Violence Design Lab podcast, we're talkin' melees! That's right: Group fights! Rumbles! Battles! How to define them, how to negotiate them with directors, and most of all, how the heck to design them!

This is Part One of a two-part series.