CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A group of theatre students is gathered in a rehearsal room at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They are each paired with a partner, and I watch as they shove each other in the chest, knee one another in the gut and then punch their partner’s stomach. I can hear the pops and thuds from the contact of their bodies, and I see those on the receiving end of the punches double over and moan.
The violence I witness is fake. The students are in a stage combat class, and they are learning how to create the illusion of a fight. The two-semester class is required for all acting majors, and it is taught by theatre professor Zev Steinrock, an Illinois alumnus who is a certified fight director and choreographer.
The students learn both unarmed combat, or hand-to-hand fighting, and armed combat, such as fighting with swords and knives. As part of the class, they took a skills test at the end of February with an adjudicator from the Society of American Fight Directors to become certified in unarmed combat.
“They’re learning how to manage distance between themselves, their weapon and the target, and the sleight-of-hand magic so the audience thinks it sees something that doesn’t happen,” Steinrock says.
Students have been coming to Illinois for years to learn stage combat, first from Steinrock’s predecessor, nationally recognized fight director Robin McFarquhar, and now from Steinrock, says theatre professor Latrelle Bright, the resident director of Illinois Theatre productions.
Steinrock tells me he has three goals for his students: to learn how to stay engaged with their acting in a high-stakes situation where they have a lot of adrenaline and must focus on the specific details of a fight scene; to learn how to train themselves in a movement discipline; and to gain experience in the most frequently used stage combat techniques.
Among those techniques is learning how to fall safely and convincingly. The students I’m watching begin the class by practicing falling onto mats on the floor. Steinrock instructs them to tuck their heads and roll onto their shoulders. He says they should be moving forward rather than downward and dispersing their energy across the floor rather than into it.
Safety and trust are crucial to the class. Students learn how to safely simulate violence by using energy instead of force, Steinrock says. In some cases, they use their angle to the audience to hide the fact that there isn’t any contact. The energy of their movements makes it appear as though they’ve used force or been hit with force. The sound effect of an impact, or the “knap,” can be made by an actor hitting himself in a way that’s hidden from the audience or by another actor away from the action making the sound.
I watch as Steinrock teaches a move where one person knees another in the gut. The sound is made by the first actor slapping his thigh, and the actor being “struck” positioning his arm to hide the thigh slap from the audience.
“Technical aspects need to be specific for safety. If you are an inch to the left or an inch to the right or three seconds late on a move, you could do some serious damage to someone else or yourself,” says Shannon Donovan, a graduate student in acting and Steinrock’s teaching assistant. “You need to be serious and focused and extremely careful in the beginning stages of choreography and in building it up to speed.”
Trusting a partner in a combat scene takes time. Steinrock likes to tell the class that they “move at the speed of trust.” He’ll find a different way to choreograph a scene if the actors are uncomfortable, says Bright, who has worked with Steinrock on three productions.
Many of the students in Steinrock’s class used what they learn to act in the theatre department’s production of “Dracula, A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really,” performed at the Virginia Theatre in November. Bright directed the production, and Donovan played Dr. Van Helsing, the hero of the story who is a woman in the play, rather than a man as in Bram Stoker’s novel.
The play contains a lot of over-the-top violence, and much of the fighting centers around Donovan’s character. She has been taking stage combat workshops for years, and she is certified in most weapons and in unarmed combat.
“I’ve been training my whole life for this kind of role,” she tells me.
She and Steinrock incorporated a new move into one of the fight scenes. Donovan’s character was thrown onto a table during a fight with a female vampire. She flipped the vampire off her with a scissor kick and then launched herself off the table in an action taken from the windmill move in breakdancing.
While the fighting is an exciting way to raise the stakes, it also must help tell the story, Steinrock and Bright say. In the case of the Van Helsing character, her fight with two vampire brides of Dracula demonstrates her strength. When she fights Dracula in the next scene and utterly fails to subdue him, it makes him seem even stronger, Steinrock says.
“Violence has been part of humanity since the dawn of time. I think it’s a privilege to be able to tell stories of violence,” Donovan says. “Some people are actually facing that. The theater is supposed to hold a mirror up to real life. It’s an important part of humanity, and storytelling should not shy away from the chance to explore violence and mortality and intimacy through theater.”
Learning stage combat allows the students to add marketable skills to their resumes — helpful as they will be competing against hundreds of other actors for a part and necessary when a short rehearsal time doesn’t allow for learning a new skill, Bright says.
In addition, the students are practicing something that makes them uncomfortable or scares them, Steinrock says. He wants to help them learn to do things that feel hard, he says.
Julia Clavadetscher, a senior majoring in acting who performed in “Dracula,” says her first experience with stage combat was as a sophomore, when her character was killed in a dagger fight in the theatre department’s production of “Coriolanus.”
“When I first started, I just really liked having a sword in my hands. You’re holding weapons. It’s just cool,” she says.
Since then, Clavadetscher tells me, stage combat has taught her about more than just fighting.
“This class is really helping me reflect on how I learn and how I approach things,” she says. “It’s taught me a lot of skills that I wish I had learned in high school about how to approach academics, even though the class is about fighting.”
And, she says, it’s fun.
“I like to believe I’m a gentle person, but I can use this untapped side of me to fake punch someone in the face or do a roundhouse kick,” Clavadetscher says. “It’s almost cathartic.”
Editor’s notes: To contact Zev Steinrock, email zev@illinois.edu. To contact Latrelle Bright, email lbright@illinois.edu.
