Hold the Damn Chains

The importance of keeping it simple

So, about 7 years ago, I did a Halloween show with the Mystic Mercenaries. One of the scenes I was doing was as a violent patient who was brought out to socialize once a year as part of my treatment. I had on a straight jacket, but instead of straps we used chains. The gag was that I was going to break free, and use the chains to fight, spinning them like poi.

The issue was, how do I keep the chains secured around my back so I could jump around like a literal lunatic and still be able to break them free on command? Let me enumerate the things we tried, on site, because we hadn’t tested this in rehearsal (which is absolutely a failure on my part).

• Loosely tied bread ties
• Scotch tape
• Thread
• Yarn
• Probably a few other silly ideas…

None of that worked, obviously. Some didn’t hold while I was jumping around, and some wouldn’t break readily enough. This process took about a half hour. My friend Heidi (Artistic Director of For the Whim Productions) was in this show and trying to help me figure this out. Sean asked me to grip the chains through the sleeves for a second so they could figure out the next crazy idea. I did so. Heidi just stopped, looked me dead in the face and said without an ounce of malice, “Just hold the damn chains?” We all stood there dumbfounded for a good 20 seconds.

See, the chains were long enough for me to grab them through the straight jacket sleeves and still have them wrapped around my back, giving the illusion that I was chained up nice and tight. It was perfect for what we needed. I jumped around and bounced my silly ass off walls. Sean said the code word that was supposed to make me sleep, I broke free, hijinks ensued.

So what am I getting at here? That day we spent way too much time trying to reinvent the wheel. That this should have been worked out well ahead of time is a valid point, but not the issue here. “Hold the Damn Chains” has become a mantra for Sean and I when working together. We’ll often spend 10 minutes trying to work something out, then one of us will stop and say “What’s the ‘Hold the Chains’ solution to this? There has to be one!” Pro-tip, it’s usually Sean trying to bring my ass down to Earth because I’m overthinking the situation. Sometimes we don’t find one, and we take the time to work through the issue and come up with an innovative solution with more moving parts than we’d like. Sometimes there’s an easier way, but we elect not to use it for some reason…

We all want things to be amazing and spectacular, and we’re sure we’re the first ones to come up with this amazing way to do something. But the more actual or metaphorical moving parts you add to any given system or situation, the more points of failure there are. Eliminating those points of potential failure are vital to any performance, whether combat is involved or not. But it’s so easy to get caught in a loop where you keep trying to push through because your vision is just so damned brilliant.

Sean and I wrote a fight last year that had someone block a downward reverse-grip stab while in a kneeling position. The easiest and [arguably] safest way to block that while unarmed is with a cross block. We didn’t do it that way because we thought it would look cooler and less “martial-artsy” if he caught the attack with open hands, reinforcing each thumb against the palm of the opposite hand. Seven performances in, he dislocated his right thumb because his hands weren’t close enough together, and the downward force was probably a little more than it needed to be. The good news is, the injury wasn’t severe. There was plenty of blame to go around, but the short of it is we could perhaps have prevented this from happening by Holding the Damn Chains and having him cross-block from the start.

I was in a show here several of us had to carry someone tied to a plank of wood and then place it upright in the center of a shallow pool of water. We spent a night working on this (2 days before opening) and couldn’t get the body mechanics down so that the 4 people carrying the 5th would be able to safely get him in position. Eventually, I just took the director aside and said “Look, I’m just going to do this scene barefoot, and step in the pool so I can make sure the board is planted properly. Easiest solution, and we’re outta time for anything else.” It took us a whole night of rehearsal to Hold the Damn Chains.

Something I’m planning to get into more detail about in a future post is working with the body mechanics of your performers (and yourself). If you keep turning a particular way or your body just snaps to a particular parry after that one attack, or getting into a particular guard is really uncomfortable or awkward, it’s worth considering changing the choreography. Especially if you’re in a time crunch (and we almost always are), why work against yourself? Sometimes you just can’t make it simple, and it’s necessary to spend the time retraining those movements. But almost always, simple and clean is better than complex and sloppy. Hold the Damn Chains

I’m not advocating putting in minimal creativity and effort. Most things are worth taking a few minutes to consider if there is in fact a better way to do something. Innovation is so important in any creative endeavor. But if it really feels like you’re swimming upstream, and your instincts are screaming that you should keep it simple, Hold the Damn Chains.