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

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2005 by Julie Bloom

WHETHER THEY study gymnastics, martial arts or dance, Ruge says actors must have an awareness of their own bodies to make his sequences convincing. "You can always tell when an actor has had movement training," he said. "He understands instinctively how to respond with his body."

Working with professional dancers guarantees a certain physical awareness but also presents a different set of challenges for fight choreographers. In San Francisco Ballet's production of Romeo and Juliet, the sword battles between Mercutio, Tybalt, and Romeo require both physical prowess and compelling acting. So do the fight scenes in Kenneth MacMillan's famous production of the ballet. Marty Pistone, who choreographed the fights for SFB's 1994 version, which the company has revived several times, worked closely with artistic director Helgi Tomasson to integrate his scenes into the ballet. "Helgi gave me the bars and measures in the Prokofiev score where the music swells for the fights. Incorporating steps like glissades and pas de chats, I created a series of sword pas de deux, where the dancers move weapons instead of their feet." Customizing each weapon and each phrase, Pistone developed back-stories so each dancer understood their character's motivation in the fights.

The success of Yuen Wo-Ping, whose father was a martial arts master, has opened the way for films like Hero, a Chinese epic that takes fight choreography to a new level of artistry using wires and special effects. In a defining scene, the camera cuts back and forth between a brutal sword fight and a calligrapher's impassioned brush strokes. As the momentum builds, the sweeping arm movements that create the red-inked letters merge into the slicing blades until the line between port de bras and combat is lost. The choreographer Tony Ching Siu-Tung, who also choreographed fights for this year's House of Flying Daggers, made a film that is balletic in its technical beauty and provides a glimpse of where fight choreography is heading.

And now even modern dancers are getting in on the fight trend. Kriota Willberg, a downtown New York choreographer who has studied stage combat and used it in her work, says, "Violence is provocative; it's the new nudity. There is no more immediate relationship than the one you're in with someone who wants to hurt you."

That immediacy was not lost on Jerome Robbins, who choreographed his own fight scenes in West Side Story, both for the Broadway musical in 1957 and for the movie in 1961. With mere switchblades, the leaders of the Jets and the Sharks, locked in mutual hatred, demolished each other. Whether it's a single punch to the face, a rumble that goes wrong, or a flying samurai sword-battle, each movement in a fight scene creates an emotional response. At its best, fight choreography becomes its own living art.

Julie Bloom is a journalist in New York City.