Overview of Stage Combat

Series Summary

Fights have played a crucial role in theater tradition ever since the days of Roman tragedies. Back in the time of Homer and Ovid, realistic battle reenactments were encouraged, if not mandated. Should a minor actor happen to lose a hand or a head, a replacement was simply recruited from one of the conquered countries. With the advent of the Renaissance, an enlightened approach to theater fighting arrived in the person of Shakespeare, who can count fake stage combat as one of the many innovations of his illustrious career. He saw no need to sacrifice the lives of his players, unless of course they could not remember their lines. Few historians recall that after the performance of one of his main plays, the curtain would fall, only to rise again twenty minutes later to reveal a wresting ring featuring pre-WWF grudgematches between such stout thespian heroes as The Mighty Othello and Falstaff the Fighter. Also included in these popular post-play programs were comedy routines such as the Three Gentleman Stooges of Verona, much later shortened to The Three Stooges for the American viewing public. Such after-hour routines helped the players to perfect their stage combat skills for prime time presentation of the plays.

In this series of free performance videos, our expert actor demonstrates how to throw and take fake punches, how to fall backwards and sideways, and how to perform the Stooges eye poke. He also discusses placement in front of the stage audience to hide all of your professional trickery and have them believing that you are fighting for real!

Video Transcript

"My name is Robert Selander and today I'm going to be teaching you some of the basics of stage combat. What stage combat is it's a pretty much, well basically it's fake fighting. It's the kind of fighting that you see on stage, like when you go see a play or any kind of live performance where you see in a scene or something, someone gets into a fight. There's a punch thrown, a slap in the face, anything like that is stage combat. So what I'm going to be teaching you today are some of the basic moves. I'm going to be teaching you first of all safety, second of all what naps are and a few different kinds of naps, then we're going to go into punches, kicks, choking, hair pulling, poke in the eyes, grabbing the nose and then we're going to go into two basic techniques for falling down. So, well let's get started."