“The first thing to remember is to keep your correct distance,” Ned Mochel tells me. I face Scott Cummins and extend my right arm to a point near the center of his sternum. “The second thing is to maintain eye contact so that he knows when you’re going to start the hit.”
While we wait for rehearsal to begin I ask the four men and two women performers how they first got into this relatively new field. Though their backgrounds differ–martial arts, gymnastics, dance–most mention a two-semester course in stage movement at the University of Illinois taught by Robin McFarquhar (who was brought in as a choreographer for this show).
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Heavy-weapons master Steve Ommerle, the other outside choreographer, calls the company to the stage in preparation for the ensemble piece called “In the Coliseum.” After giving them some background on the Roman circus (“You are slaves with no rights whatsoever. Killing is, literally, how you live. Knowing this will affect the way that you fight”), he demonstrates several gruesome ways in which a gladiator’s career might be terminated. Since the chief weapons in this fight are three-and-a-half-foot broadswords, most of the fatal wounds involve blades passing through bodies; when the victor administers the coup de grace, he gives the weapon a slight twist. This not only heightens the death agony, it’s explained, but opens up the wound so the killer can retrieve his weapon.
During the next break I wonder aloud about the educational potential of stage combat. But Mochel quickly points out that, like any other martial art, stage combat involves learning how to kill another person. “If a child came up to me and said, “I want to learn stage combat–I’m always fighting out on the street and I want to channel these aggressions,’ I’d tell him, Take up football!” Cummins suggests that a child already fighting might profit more from acting lessons, learning to verbalize his emotions rather than continue expressing himself physically.
