Keeping It Believable, Not Real—Stage Combat

When you burrow down to its essence, Martin Noyes’ Stage Combat class—which is being offered in the Adult Conservatory for the first time this winter—is an oxymoron. The 32-year veteran fight director, who has choreographed fights for such SCR productions as Hitchcock Blonde, The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, Ridiculous Fraud, Bach at Leipzig and System Wonderland, teaches safe combat, which may earn a place next to jumbo shrimp in the oxymoron hall of fame.

Offered Saturdays from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. and running from Jan. 20-March 9, 2024, Stage Combat is exactly what the name implies. Noyes teaches students how to create safe, believable fights on stage. Stage violence is an art and maintaining the illusion of realism in a safe manner is the primary lesson awaiting Noyes’ students. The class is for students with some acting experience. Its prerequisite is one semester of acting training.

“None of this is real, so I don’t want to hear anyone say that looks real,” Noyes said. “What’s really happening is the audience knows it’s not real, but it looks believable. Do you believe what just happened?”

Noyes will teach illusions across the “violence” spectrum, everything from a Three Stooges-like face slap to learning the six different punches (jab, hook, straight, cross, roundhouse and uppercut) and when to use them, to non-contact kicks. Everything works up to a full-bore, complex fight scene. Noyes said if time and progress permits, he’ll teach weaponized combat with fake knives, swords and even what he calls “unarmed and weaponized combat.” That means hitting someone with everything from a phone to a rolling pin.

“How do I throw a punch to make it look like I hit you when in reality, I haven’t touched you? All of these things are done in a way such that the illusion of combat is what we’re trying to achieve,” he said.

Noyes spends the first few class sessions teaching the art of the fall—how to roll, tumble, trip or otherwise let the illusion of the punch/slap/kick lead into the reality of gravity. And like the arsenal of punches, there’s an equal list of ways to fall—the faint, the break fall, the slip fall and what Noyes calls, “the bonk.” That’s the type of fall that happens when someone gets “knocked out.”

“I want them to be able to do it safely and with repeatability, so they can do it over and over again,” Noyes said. “The three things I stress are safety, believability and repeatability. It’s a very useful thing for an actor to fall down, to create the illusion that something has happened to my body and I must lay down on the ground. …

“From there, we go into shoulder rolls. If you trip, like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin or the other old-school comedians, how do you trip, roll forward and stand right back up again?”

Noyes also plans to introduce combat games designed to build confidence, hand-eye coordination and reflex training. Students will shoot video of their fight scenes and analyze them for believability.

“It’s a great teaching tool to watch yourself and tell me if you think that scene looks believable,” he said. “That’s what you have to do in stage fighting. You have to control your body and keep yourself moving forward in a forward, positive, confident direction while playing a character creating the illusion of combat. Most people haven’t done this before and they walk away from class where they’ve learned something new they can add to their actor’s toolbox.”