From the Windy City Times
April 22, 1999

Fighting Like a Girl
by Mary Shen Barnidge

Who make better fighters— men or women? If Xena and Hercules duked it out, who’d win? Only the fight choreographers who meticulously plan and execute these characters’ battles know the answer to that question. Kirsten Fitzgerald and Dawn "Sam" Alden (the "Sam" stands for Samson), two of Chicago’s foremost fighting women, are experts on that topic. As women in an overwhelmingly male-dominated field, both have had to do a lot of thinking about the effect of gender on fighting ability.

"I don’t approach men and women differently," Fitzgerald says as she prepares to rehearse a fight from the upcoming National Pastime production of Ioncsco’s Rhinoceros. "It has more to do with their body size and what they are capable of doing comfortably."

She turns to Dominic Conti and Anthony Wills Jr., the actors who will perform this quasi-slapstick scuffle. "Dominic, you’re going to run up and jump into my arms like a kid, OK?" The 6-foot-4-inch Conti gathers himself and proceeds to do so, swinging his long legs up until his whole body is positioned horizontally, cradled in the 5-foot-l1-inch Fitzgerald’s arms. She holds him in the air as comfortably as if he were a baby. After setting him on his feet again, she repeats the move with the smaller Wills.

She then has the two men execute the move, with Wills leaping into Conti’s arms. ("Remember, Anthony, you’re going to be wearing a dress and high heels when you do this in the show," she reminds the latter.) Once they are competent at this, she instructs them in how to use the action as a launching maneuver for Wills to vault over Conti’s shoulder. Again, she first runs through the sequence with both men, easily throwing each of them over her own shoulder by way of demonstration.

Elsewhere, Alden prepares to conclude another successful run of Babes With Blades, the all-female stage-combat showcase conceived in 1997 for Footsteps Theatre, where she served as the company’s resident fight choreographer until January.

"A good fighter is a good fighter—I don’t think it’s gender-specific. But I think men and women fight differently," Alden says. "Men’s history of chest-thumping usually stands them in good stead [in stage combat] because they’re used to fighting to look good. But sometimes I’ll run into problems when someone has to lose a fight—I usually have to explain that just because he wouldn’t take this, it doesn’t mean his character wouldn’t. Now, when women imagine situations where they’d fight, it’s usually a situation where they’d kill—almost all the serious fights in Babes are to the death—so they might come to fighting more slowly at first. But once they do, they tend to go for blood."

As female fight choreographers, both Alden and Fitzgerald are pioneers in their field. Like many fighters, they started as actors. But each found a reason to make fighting her specialty. For Alden, it became a matter of necessity. "You can’t always count on the director to be trained in this," she says. "As an actor, I’d had some bad experiences in plays with fights when people didn’t know how to do it and there was no one to teach them properly .... I figured there had to be a better way. If I was ever going to do a play with violence in it, even if it’s just a slap, I didn’t want to hurt someone else and I didn’t want to get hurt myself."

Fitzgerald, who studied theater at the University of Kansas, learned to fight from a female teacher who had difficulty making her way in the field. But Fitzgerald still was drawn to a career in stage fighting.

"I come from a huge and very physical family, with six brothers and sisters," she says. "I also have a background in tai chi and some karate, and those were very relaxing, but they sometimes got a little tedious. In stage combat, there’s always a motive for the movement, and that’s what makes it interesting."

Sex and Swords

Fighting is a universal phenomenon, unrestricted to any one segment of humanity. But Babes With Blades has attracted a large audience of gay women professing to find a lesbian sensibility in it.

"Some of it is our society’s perception that women—feminine, heterosexual women—don’t fight, and therefore fighting women have to be lesbian," Alden says. "But in last year’s BWB show, we had a very erotic fight—"The Softest Thing In The World" with Kara Pasierb and Tere Parkes—and whenever the rest of us in the company saw that fight, we had to go shower afterward.

"There is a sexual dimension to fighting .... It’s power, it’s physical prowess and it’s physical proximity," she adds. "But all the Babes are OK with that— we’re secure in our sexualities .... No one’s dating within the company that I know of."

Fitzgerald has likewise considered the lesbian overtones inherent in female-on-female violence. In Yuba City, National Pastime’s gritty 1996 saga of "how the West was really won," she and two other actresses per formed a two-on-one fight that gay playgoers insisted on calling "the lesbian fight," though there were no specifically homoerotic elements in its conception. She notes that fights often have an erotic dimension, for the audience at least.

"Heterosexual men and women find it very invigorating to watch other men and women fight, too. There’s almost always a sexual energy to a fight. You’re physically and mentally connected to another person, or persons—-especially in wrestling, as opposed to boxing, because your bodies are closer. The bottom line is still the dramatic intention—what do the characters want and why are they fighting?" The slightest hint of a smile crosses her face as she confides, "The erotic part of it is just a little added perk."

That "little added perk" can be dangerous, however, unless both choreographer and fighters are on their toes. "It’s called ‘choreography’ for a reason," Alden says. She remembers another sexy fight where everyone was enjoying the erotic by-play but her. "It was one we did in the 1997 BWB show—"The Suggestion Of Violence," where I used the bullwhip—and the stage manager’s booth would be packed every night with the rest of the cast watching the fight, but all I was concerned with was whether the damn whip would crack properly!"

Therein lies the irony of this experience: Since this combat is staged, and not real, the fighters cannot allow themselves to succumb to the illusion they have worked so hard to create, lest they become a safety hazard to one another. A big part of the choreographer’s job is making sure everyone remembers this.

"When you get into the context of production, emotions run really high," Fitzgerald says. "But you are reminded every night at the fight call [a run-through of the fight before every performance] that you have a dual reality. Yes, you are the character, but if a wall falls down or if someone breaks a finger, you will have to do something about it."

For most experienced actor-fighters, this is second nature. But sometimes actors who have no previous fight training are cast in fighting roles, and choreographers must work with that in mind.

"I’m very lucky to be working so much with the same companies—mostly National Pastime and A Red Orchid—because I already know, going in, who most of the people are and what their limits are," Fitzgerald says.

"Some people do get carried away with the fantasy, and those are people I don’t like to work with. If I have to do it, I’ll try not to have them do certain moves—things that might present a hazard to the other actors. I’ll focus on the dance aspect of the fight, and I’ll make them do it over and over until the thrill is gone—not for the audience, but for the actors."

Alden concurs. "Stage combat is not therapy, and if I think that someone is there to work something out, I will not teach them," she says. "Fighters have to be extremely well-adjusted and self-aware, because the stakes are so much higher. If you’re too much in love with the weaponry, you’re not looking at the fight from a practical standpoint, and that does not engender trust in your fight-partner. And if your partner can’t trust you, the fight will look terrible."

That isn’t to say stage fighting doesn’t still pack a punch, so to speak, for the participants.

"It’s a wonderful blend of mental and physical concentration," Alden says. "With acting, you’re supposed to stay ‘in the moment’ onstage, but your mind can still wander off in other directions. Stage combat requires you to be vigilant and focused at all times, and that can be such a rush. So [with stage combat] you can be violent, and you can experience that excitement—-but in a safe and a contained atmosphere."

So if someone were interested in trying this out—not as a career, necessarily, but just for fun—where would they start? Alden recommends taking a class from the Society of American Fight Directors. She notes that since this group has a well-regulated system for training instructors, a beginning student can feel confident the instructor will know his stuff.

"Look at their work, see if you’re in tune with them, listen to them talk about why they teach," she says. "If this is a teacher you can’t learn from, for whatever reason, then you’re wasting your money and their time.

"This is a skill—like a sport," she adds. "If you don’t learn the correct moves you’re going to lose the game. But when everything goes just right, it’s the greatest feeling."