The answer is simple, but seems to get a lot of resistance by smaller theaters.
“Yes.” If there is any contested physical action on your stage, you need someone there to be in charge of it. You need a Fight Coordinator because your actors will be safer, and the show will look better. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.
Many directors I’ve worked with (as well as actors) have said things like “It’s not difficult, we’ll figure it out”. In my experience, this usually doesn’t go well. Common problems include, in no particular order:
- Looks slow and unrealistically safe
- Your actors will want to be safe and not hurt their partners, so they’ll take extra care they wouldn’t need if taught properly, and it will hurt the performance
- Looks sloppy, and like the fighters are untrained
- Looking like a trained fighter (let alone a martial artist) takes time and practice. You can fake it, but you need to be shown how.
- Looks very frantic and dangerous, to the point where people will fear for the actor’s safety, not the character.
- This usually comes from not enough practice. An actor can feel like they really know the fight well, and when crowd adrenaline hits, everything gets faster and less controlled.
- Someone gets hurt
- Self explanatory.
- The audience always knows
- The crowd for a West Side Story performance may not be filled with dancers, but they can tell if the performers don’t know what they’re doing. Fights are the same way. You don’t need to be an SAFD Certified Teacher to look at a fight and say “Yeah, I don’t buy it.”
I look at it this way: If you are running a production of West Side Story, you get a Dance Choreographer. Outside of some isolated situations, you don’t ask someone who might have taken a dance class in college to choreograph complex dance sequences. It’ll look bad, and someone might get hurt.
And it’s been my (admittedly limited) experience that shows with larger fight sequences do look for someone with experience to handle the fighting. But in shows where there’s a couple of shoves, a fall, and a slap or two, many just trust their actors to “figure it out”.
Reasons for not going with a fight coordinator I’ve been personally told:
- Falling isn’t hard, people do it all the time
- And they get hurt. Maybe not every time, but once is all it takes.
- We don’t have rehearsal time for this
- I take a pretty hard stance on this one. To me, this says “I don’t take my actors safety seriously.” I get that we all have lives and time is the one thing we can’t make more of. But if the integrity of your performance and the safety of your actors is important to you, you’ll find a way to make time.
- We don’t have the budget to hire someone
- Money isn’t the only way to compensate a Fight Coordinator/Director. Good quality video of what they’ve worked on, proper credit in the program and advertising materials, and offering for them to use your space for workshops and projects are all great examples of ways you can try to meet your prospective coordinator half way. This won’t get it done for everyone, but it’s a start.
- [Actor] took a class in college on stage combat, we’ll just have them do it.
- First, fight experience doesn’t always translate to the ability to write, block, and teach a fight and safe stage combat techniques. That’s like saying “I went to school once, so clearly I can be a teacher.”
- Second, your actor has enough to worry about. They have lines and blocking to remember, and they probably didn’t sign up for this extra responsibility when they auditioned for your show. And when you’re taking people’s safety in your hands, it’s absolutely extra responsibility.
A stunt coordinator recently said to me in a class “You always have one in you.” If you get hurt, you can’t do it again. Why gamble with your safety / the safety of your actors? Why take a chance on your show being less than it can be?
Bottom line: You need a music director if you’re doing a musical. You need a dance choreographer if there’s dancing. You need an intimacy director if there are scenes of intimate contact. You need a fight coordinator if there’s any fighting in your show. This isn’t about gate keeping, it’s about the safety of your cast and the quality of your show.
If you’re an actor, you need to be your own advocate and insist on having someone present who can keep you safe.
If you’re a director, you owe it to your cast to keep them safe and give them the tools to put on the best show possible.