Category: Rehearsal Methods

The rehearsal and practice methods described in this blog are meant to be like a buffet: pick the things that you like. Use what works for you at this time, in whatever order works for you. Also, you may find that you use a different method every 5 minutes, or that you spend a whole hour using one approach.

The goal of the blog is to give you a sense of the many different ways that one can approach a fight scene. The purpose is to help you discover as much information about the scene as possible, and help you maximize your performance.

I encourage you to continuously re-visit this category, as I’ll continue to post new methods as I come across them.

General Advice For Rehearsal And Practice

Move As Fast As You Can Think

Run the choreography at a speed at which you can easily remember what comes next. Do all of the actions and any acting beats — pauses in movement, but not pauses in intention — in the right order without stopping. Usually, this is a much slower speed than our egos want us to move at! However, when […]

Movement As Dialogue

As promised, we’re looking at methods and exercises for rehearsing a fight scene! Today, we begin with a foundation concept when approaching your fight choreography which lays the groundwork for the upcoming series. In many cases, actors remember the sequence of the choreography and think that they’ve finished with rehearsing their scene. However, think of the […]

Bring it! part 2: how to practice in class

Yesterday we talked about the importance of committing to your goals within the scene. Now, this doesn’t mean that you make the choreography as fast as humanly possible with as much viciousness as you can manage. If all you’re doing is trying for fast and vicious, you’re not actually committing to the scene. You’re committing to […]

Protected: Working Your Fight with Music, playlist

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Trust yourself

I had a post ready-to-go on working the scene with focus on how to discover a rich variety in each and every moment, while deepening your character work and strengthening your connection to your partner. Important work. And then I thought about it again, and decided that, today, this is more important to say: Trust […]

Working Your Fight Scene: learn the moves first

(This may post be a little late as far as the timeline is concerned for this particular workshop, everyone already has their choreography.) Train slow, because anger will give you speed in the fight. – Fiore dei Liberi (paraphrased) While this quotation is specifically referring to martial arts, we can still draw wisdom from it for stage […]