Selling the Danger: Combat Masterclass with Benjamin Curns

On Monday, the campers were advised to "trust no one and give people every reason to trust you" at a combat workshop led by ASC actor Benjamin Curns. This workshop focused specifically on knife fighting, which Ben described as “the nastiest, because you have to get so close to your opponent to do some damage.” Most people consider the only dangerous part of the knife to be the point, but Ben revealed that almost all of the different parts of the knife can be used to harm. The advantage of using a knife is that one can easily switch hands with a knife as opposed to bigger and more cumbersome weapons.

Ben began the workshop by giving a general overview of how to perform a knife fight in a safe and convincing manner. Combat can be dangerous if the fight partners are not effectively communicating about their actions. To ensure safety, you must use constant eye contact and big cues to let both partner and audience know where you’re coming from and where you’re going.

As precautionary advice before the fighting commenced, Ben reminded the campers that they would not actually be fighting. “We’re learning how to miss and keep your partner safe. It is athletic, but it is not a sport. Everything is predetermined. No one is going to best anyone.” He warned that combat is completely dissimilar to martial arts or boxing, where opponents are trying to harm each other and win the fight. Instead, the goal of stage combat is to have the audience walk away and say that the fight looked real and intense. The job of the actor is to sell that there is danger at every moment, while all the while preventing any actual danger from happening.

After Ben’s introduction, the campers formed a circle: “The Arena of Death.” Counselors Emily and Dan demonstrated how a fight would begin, slowly pacing around the circle maintaining eye contact. Ben pointed out that despite the discrepancy of Emily’s and Dan’s body types, difference in strength wouldn’t really affect the fight because of the size of the weapon. The campers were asked to find the story in the counselors’ physicality. Campers noted how Emily’s bent knees and slow approach put her on the offensive, while Dan’s engaged left hand signified his preparedness for defense. When both switched from the ice pick grip to the standard knife hold, the campers knew that the fight would soon begin. Even without dialogue, the campers could gage the fighters’ relationship and identify their intent.

The campers then partnered up to try their hands at knife fighting. All laughed as Ben unknowingly paired the campers playing Juliet and Romeo together. Today the star-crossed lovers were going to have to battle to their deaths! First, Ben asked the partners to approach each other slowly, and once they were close enough, to leap into fight stance.

After the campers were comfortable with these initial steps, Ben entrusted them with wooden knives with dulled points. If a camper dropped a knife, the offender had to drop and do ten push-ups as punishment. The campers performed all moves at a decreased tempo, as Ben required that the campers “go crazy slow as if this entire room is filled with molasses”. The fight the campers learned began with a hand-to-hand combat sequence, with their knives temporarily hidden in belts or pants where the fighters could easily access them with their right hands. After the partners threw and deflected several different punches, the fight escalated to sword-play. Once the knives were drawn, the opponents went through a series of cuts and stabs. Some of these moves, if performed in actuality, would be pretty brutal, including a stab to the back that goes in between two ribs, directly to the heart. At the end of the fight, one actor would be left with a big debilitating armpit wound and no weapon, while the other stood doubly armed and triumphant.

Once the campers perfected those sequences, Ben distributed a dialogue of two or three lines from various Shakespeare plays to each pairing. The edition of lines from Macbeth, King Lear, and The Comedy of Errors helped the campers to place their motivation for fighting. Reciting lines in the midst of the fight brought a new passion to the choreography. Several pairs performed their short scenes for the whole group, which were thoroughly convincing after two hours of polishing. Ben praised the performers for remaining slow and safe in the heat of the moment, noting that the presence of an audience increases the temptation to speed up. The young fighters reluctantly returned their wooden knives but left the Masonic building with new skills under their belts.

--Emma Lo

Knife Fights

As we begin week three, we've been phasing out of our workshops and phasing in to our Pre-Show rehearsals. One of the recent workshop days, known affectionately as “Combat Day,” involved all of the campers. Some were in an unarmed combat workshop with Jeremy West and some were in an armed workshop with ASC actor, Ben Curns.

Rather than finding some way of giving Broadsword lessons with improvised cardboard tubes, the weapon these campers learned to work with was a makeshift knife -- or paint-stirrers, to be more precise. Before he even handed out the paint stirrers, Ben proclaimed this maxim: “Every cool fight is safe. Not every safe fight is cool.” And before the campers held those stirrers, Ben and Emily (one of the counselors trained in stage combat) gave them all a lot to think about in terms of how to stand, how to hold oneself, and how to react to a partner in a way which is both cool and which promotes the safety of yourself, your partner and everyone else around you.

The campers started exploring the different knife grips, a variety of “I am ready to fight” stances, and then paired up ready to tell some stories. Whether you’re fighting or dancing or just talking to each other, you are telling stories about the relationship you and your partner have. How you move together tells what that that person means to you, how angry or scared or hurt or young or old that other person makes you feel. When Ben started teaching them a choreographed fight, which he demonstrated with Emily, every pair of campers copied each move in the fight as they learned it bit by bit, but every fight was different. Some of the stories told by the fights were stories about one of the two combatants being frightened and not wanting to fight. Some of the fights told stories that looked deathly serious. Some of the fights looked more like dances, because of the years of ballet training the two combatants brought to the space. Half the class would work at a time, which gave everyone a chance not only to work, but also to watch the others working, and sometimes presented the opportunity to give comments as well. For instance, “She points her toe when she thrusts with her knife. Did you notice? She’s like the ballerina of death!”



Throughout the workshop Ben reminded the campers again and again, “I would rather see a slow fight which is totally clean than a faster fight which is even remotely sloppy.” So the campers stayed slow, stayed cool, stayed in communication with each other, and stayed safe. By the end of the workshop, there were a lot of really impressive looking fights, all worked through with patience and careful attention to detail. In Emily’s words, “Perfection is all I ask.”

End of Week One

We’ve finished the first week of camp, a week full to the brim with workshops. Already the campers have had classes in music, stage combat, text analysis, mask and movement, clown, and dance with actors from the ASC and from other theater professionals. To highlight just a couple of these, I’ll share a bit about Greg Phelps’s music class and Jeremy West’s stage combat.

Greg began his class by walking through some elements of music: rhythm and melody, harmony and dynamics, all the components which make it dramatic as its own art and add to the drama of a play. Next the campers analysed some songs in Shakespeare’s canon, suggesting adjectives to describe the different pieces. “Come away, come away death” is pretty hardcore sad, all about unrequited love and wanting to die because of it, whereas “Oh Mistress Mine, Where are you Roaming?", a song concerned with the shortness of life and the sweetness of love, has a gentler melancholy. Before long the campers used these ideas to work together and write their own song of “Under the Greenwood Tree.” Guitars, ukuleles, violin, melodica, Irish drum and beatboxing combined to make a many-layered song, one they could all be proud of. Throughout the process, Greg emphasized the power of “yes.” When people work together creatively, disagreement stops progress, so whenever there were two different ideas on the table, almost every time we found a way to incorporate both ideas into the song, using every person’s creativity to the utmost.

Stage Combat is probably one of the subjects that campers get most excited about learning, and that parents are least excited about their children trying out. In Jeremy West’s class, there was no end of precaution in the process, because safety is so crucial to the performance of any sort of effective combat. The campers learned several different punches and slaps, where each camper’s hands do not even touch their scene partner, but the two work together to “sell” the action and to make it look convincing to the audience. After slaps and punches, they went on to hairpulls and drags, again actions that look terrifying, but are incredible to watch when you know that the actor who looks as though he is the victim is actually the one in control of what’s happening in each scene. Because of an odd number of participants, Rebecca Speas (one of the counselors) was working with one of the campers, and in the scene they were creating, Speas was ripping one camper around by his hair yelling, “Learn your lines! Learn your lines!” to which he frantically yelled in reply, “I will, I promise!” Two minutes later, they laughed and switched roles, this time with the camper yelling, “I’ve learned them. There are no more!”

Other parts of the class included lots of practice in how to fall safely, and how to do a sitting, a standing, and a jumping role, giving all of the campers all the tools they need to act responsibly and safely onstage.

Besides the workshops, and, of course, rehearsals, Dr. Paul Menzer, the director of the MLitt/MFA program in Shakespeare and Performance, came to lecture about Shakespeare and text. He brought in an Arden Complete works of Shakespeare in a large heavy volume, a laptop, a smartphone, and a flashdrive, and made the point that they are all the Complete works of Shakespeare. Each one is a piece of technology used for conveying information, just vessels for their contents. But here is the paradox: despite containing all the same words, the vessel does make a difference. Whatever we might say, the medium changes the message.

Armed with this mindset, Menzer lead us to explore how books and papers and inks and handwriting and printing and the whole culture of text were different then than they are today. How do theses differences change the way we understand Shakespeare, and what might that mean for future generations, when books are no longer the primary means of accessing literature?

Menzer also touched on how much individual characters in the plays say about themselves and the characters around them by their words, by the way they are addressed, or by how they address others. Ophelia is constantly in a lower status than the characters around her. She has no nurse or handmaid, the people she talks with while sane are the Prince, her father, and her older brother, all of whom are telling her what to do. Also interesting is that when she goes mad and drowns, Ophelia is the only character in all of Shakespeare’s canon who reportedly drowns and does not miraculously return. Menzer asserts that it is possible that Viola, a character who beginsTwelfth Night nearly drowned, and who has a similar situation to Ophelia, could be Shakespeare’s second go, second take, second life for Ophelia. It was a fascinating lecture, and got the kids all thinking.

Other stuff happening at camp so far?
*Many trips to Split Banana for gelato.
*Campers memorizing their lines in their rooms, in the shade outside, in the laundry room, in the library and in any number of crazy accents.
*Conversations about everything they’re learning.
*Self motivated rehearsals for the upcoming talent show, “What You Will.”
*Music is everywhere. Campers picking things out on a piano or a new uke or just singing while they walk. And the counselors sing lullabies to the campers to put them to sleep.

More about the weekend activities coming soon!