Even though this won’t be the last time you see an original work written (co-written in this case) and performed by me, I felt like it was important to talk about my first attempt at writing my own material/catching a beating on camera.
Even though a lot of actors tend to fall into the profession and study professionally along their career journey, I did most of my studying in college rather than picking up the profession later in life. Even though certain classes pissed me off or seemed pointless, I was grateful for the opportunity to experience different styles of acting during my time in school.
One of the best classes within the theater program had to have been my Stage Combat class. In a nutshell, it’s a class that teaches you how to fight on stage without anyone having to get hurt, assuming you can remember all the choreography. During this semester we got to learn the basics of weapons combat as well as hand to hand combat.
For our hand to hand combat final, we were required to partner up and come up with our own original fight scene with a minimum amount of required choreography. I teamed up with one of my good friends in the program, and together we went back and forth with ideas of what we wanted our plot to be and what combat techniques we wanted to use.
Everyone who knows me may not be aware of this, but in any given scenario I’d rather be doing something funny than something serious. Drama is cool and obviously not everything in life can be a joke, but if there’s an opportunity to laugh, should we not laugh?
She and I ended up writing a comedic scene about a brother and sister who are always trying to outdo each other. It might not be award-winning material, and the focus was more on the choreography than the dialogue, but I thought(and still think) that it’s pretty funny.
Even though the scene was short, it took us weeks to get all the choreography down to the point that we both knew that neither one of us would end up seriously injured.
I wouldn’t call myself a perfectionist by any means, but we practiced this scene until it almost became effortless. Even today, people still ask me if I really got kicked in the face during a certain scene.
When the time came to put on our display, despite everything not going according to plan, the scene ended up flowing together very well. My only complaint was the camera angle that it was shot from. It made certain scenes look believable and others look just okay. Ultimately, it was one of those things you had to “be there for” because we were one of the few groups that received a 100% score 😎
I haven’t had to be in a simulated fight scene since but it’s something I’d love to make a regular part of in my career. Definitely one of my favorite acting experiences so far.
