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Staging a fight

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Fight

To fight monsters and slay dragons, members of Truman State’s theatre department are studying stage fighting to prepare for  playwright Qui Nguyen’s “She Kills Monsters” — a show about a teenager’s discovery of the world of Dungeons and Dragons. The show will “slash and shapeshift its way into your heart,” according to a 2011 New York Times review. The show offers the department the challenge of stage combat scenes that require significant preparation to conduct safely and convincingly. Senior Jessica Cashion, assistant fight choreographer for the show, says she put her athletic training and theatre majors together to study stage combat. She says the two majors fit together perfectly for becoming a stage combat specialist because she is able to look for things that might be unsafe for the actors and determine how to conduct the scenes in a manner that will be convincing to the audience. Cashion says she first got involved with stage combat as a fight captain for the show “Bedroom Farce,” a 2013-2014 Truman production. A fight captain’s responsibility is to oversee the fight choreography with the actors and look out for the actors’ safety, she says. Since then, Cashion says she has looked for more opportunities to study fight choreography. When theatre professor David Goyette announced a tryout for an assistant fight choreographer, Cashion says she jumped at the chance. “Together, [Goyette and I] are conceptualizing what we want each fight to say,” Cashion says. “Stage combat is all about using violence to tell a story.” Cashion says there are various factors to take into account when choreographing a fight scene — different types of fights tell different stories. For example, she says having two skilled fighters fighting rather than a mix of skilled and unskilled fighters can change what happens and what story is told. “We’re telling the story of who’s winning and who’s losing in the moment,” Cashion says, “But we’re also telling this larger story of this encounter that suddenly words and acting has not become enough for them to settle their disputes, so they’ve turned to violence.” Cashion says fight choreography encompasses the tension that drives characters to violence and how that violence affects the overall storyline. Freshman Kitty Corum, a fight captain for the upcoming show, says she is working alongside Cashion to teach the actors how to safely and properly perform their fight scenes. Corum says they are teaching actors how to use rapiers, daggers, quarterstaffs and broadswords properly. “Broadsword is definitely my favorite [weapon to work with],” Corum says. “There’s a lot of power, but also a lot of agility, which is not expected.” The safety of those involved is the most important consideration when choreographing, teaching or acting a fight scene, Corum says. She says being aware of the space surrounding the actors is very important. Corum says fighters use a “finger check” to check distance before a fight. By sticking their thumb and pinky fingers out as much as possible — and keeping weapons at least that far away from each other —  they ensure that if an actor misses their target, they don’t harm their scene partner, she says. “Being aware of your body physically when you are in a fight takes a lot more concentration,” Corum says. “As an actor on stage, you have to be aware of where you are and who you’re interacting with, but your safety is at risk during a fight, so you have to be extra aware of what exactly is going on and you have to be in control of your own safety at that point.” Senior Rachel Hoffmann is performing in the upcoming show, and is involved in some of the fight scenes. She says the point of stage combat is to learn how to conduct a fight in a way that doesn’t injure fellow actors. “[Cashion] is really incredible,” Hoffmann says. “She speaks really clearly about what she wants and she’s good at demonstrating things and very good at answering questions about seeing when you’re doing things wrong.” Hoffmann says Cashion is good at spotting when a fight scene is not being performed properly, even if a motion only is slightly off from what it is supposed to be. Cashion is encouraging and organized as assistant fight choreographer, Hoffmann says. While there are a lot of challenging scenes, Hoffmann says the scene she is most excited about is a montage where the actors kill a lot of different monsters at once. “We don’t know what [the monsters] are yet, but we’re going to be killing a lot of them,” Hoffmann says. “It’s probably going to be the longest and most intensive [fight scene] just because there’s going to be hundreds of monsters — by hundreds, I mean like eight, but it’ll look like a lot on stage.”     Editor’s note: Bethany Boyle, News Editor, and Melissa Bradford, Editor-in-Chief of Detours Magazine, contributed to this story.

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