The art of war: even in a digital age, fight choreography means knowing where the blows fall

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2005 by Julie Bloom

TOWARDS THE end of Kill Bill Volume 1, Quentin Tarantino's homage to the Kung Fu movie genre, Uma Thurman single-handedly battles 88 men to their deaths. With her back coiled, samurai sword flailing, and long legs slicing, she hurls her body through the air in a whirlwind dance that destroys her enemies one by one. This highly choreographed sequence combines the age-old drama of combat with the staggering capacity of new technology. * The man responsible for this exhilarating spectacle, Yuen Wo-Ping, has been choreographing riveting fights for over 30 years, but it's only recently that he and his fellow fight choreographers have gotten the attention they deserve. Last October at the 10th annual American Choreography Awards in Los Angeles, Yuen Wo-Ping earned an award for Outstanding Achievement in Fight Choreography for Kill Bill Volume 2. * The award for fight choreography was introduced just two years ago after the release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which Wo-Ping also choreo graphed. Teresa Campbell, an executive producer of the American Choreography Awards, said the ACA decided to add the Fight choreography category because, "We felt this is a field that should be honored next to dance. It is its own physical art form." A committee of experts in stunt, dance, combat, and martial arts work judges the nominations. This year Woo-Ping and his team shared the award with George Marshall Ruge, who choreographed the swashbuckling sequences in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

Fight choreography is hardly a new art form. Since before Romeo slew Tybalt, fight scenes have provided pivotal moments in a drama, defined a character, and offered a cathartic release. When words are not enough, actors use their bodies to express anger and frustration in an explosion of movement. In a field that is becoming at once more technical and creative, today's fight choreographers use sources as diverse as Kabuki, Elizabethan sword play, and Chinese opera to create their deadly effects.

Although a staged fight looks spontaneous, the actual moves must be precise. Few people understand this better than Rick Sordelet, a fight director of Broadway shows who also teaches at the Yale School of Drama. Last fall while on the set of the TV show "Guiding Light," where he also is a stunt coordinator, he prepared actress Crystal Hunt for an upcoming face slap in a ritzy country club garden. Sordelet guided Hunt's hand with his while she rehearsed slapping her co-star across the face. Keeping her hand relaxed, she opened her arm, bent at the elbow like a door and then closed it quickly. After several tries, she struck the actor's cheek, but because her timing and technique were right, the slap only looked and sounded painful.

IT IS ESSENTIAL for the audience to believe that the actor is capable of the movement he creates. "No matter what it is--a slap to the face that leads to a grab for the hair--it all has to connect naturally," Sordelet says. "If an actor looks like a wimp, it's not going to be believable for him to slam down the other character, but a bonk to the eyes or a glass of wine to the face might work instead."

One of the key elements in choreographing fights is safety. In the fight scenes that Sordelet created for the musical Beauty and the Beast on Broadway, the character of Lefou falls 51 times. If you're doing six performances a week--well, that could seriously add up. The actor who plays Lefou wears specially designed padding around his shoulders, lower back, and the heel of his hand, so that he's safely stumbling throughout the performance night after night, week after week.

Safety wasn't always a concern in the early days of Hollywood. Crawling under stagecoaches and using real explosives on the set was common practice, and in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), a horse was accidentally killed on screen. Today, fight choreographers like Doug Coleman of Master and Commander and George Marshall Ruge of Pirates of the Caribbean work with cameras, special effects, digital technology, and locations to create scenes that are both safe and visually mind-blowing.

"Every movement is independently staged," Coleman said. "Each punch and fall is carefully constructed, and I utilize every prop available to me." For the ship and sword battles in Master and Commander, the actors trained for six months and the crew numbered 500 for scenes filmed mostly on boats out at sea. "It's not just people that have to be choreographed, but also the cameras," says Coleman. "In film you're basing the movement on camera positions, so you have to make sure each hit is choreographed to a particular camera angle."

Ruge, who was also responsible for the fight scenes in The Lord of the Ring trilogy, says he begins his process with the script as a template. "I visualize the sequence in my mind and begin with a 'beat sheet.' I start the choreography process based on visual concepts and rhythms that evolve to specific action beats. As I build this action, I use videotape as well, and then think about innovative ways of shooting the action." Working with the actors, Ruge first shows them the physical action using stunt doubles, breaking it down into phrases. Then they rehearse until it becomes second nature.