The art of stage combat and speech explored in workshops

FRIDAY, FEB. 3: Eye gouging, choking, biting and hammerlocks — Bermuda’s school students are being given the chance to learn all of these techniques…for the stage of course.

Acting coach Brian Coffey is well versed in all on-stage violence as a teacher of stage combat and will be on the island next week to conduct several workshops on the subject. He will also be teaching what Coffey describes as the “core element” of any stage actors career — vocalisation and speech.

Coffey has a Master in Fine Arts in Acting and is an experienced coach in areas of acting, auditioning, movement and vocal production.

The workshops are only open to students at participating schools.

Coffey said that the two main reasons for learning stage combat are safety and making a fight look convincing.

He told the Sun: “On- stage combat can be dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing. I knew an actress who took a knee to the cheekbone and it shattered her cheekbone and she lost the sight in her eye.

“What most people don’t understand about stage combat is that it’s never separate from the story line. On-stage violence has to further the storyline. I call it theatrically heightened violence and it is done to keep the actors safe.

“It is choreographed very minutely, like a dance, and it’s very structured and you don’t deviate.

“The techniques are really about making the audience believe what is happening.

“The victim is the one who has the big acting roll because they are the ones selling the violence. It can require hours of rehearsal time.”

He described the various stages of what might seem like a simple move — an on-stage slap in the face.

“There is a contact slap where you can’t hide it at all but that’s a case of redirecting the energy — you bring the hand to the cheek and pull it back towards you and your partner snaps their head and does a vocalization. Mostly we miss entirely, we might be about six inches in front of the face and an inch below the chin.

“The audience sees this big preparation, hear this muddle in the middle and see the big end and put it together as ‘oh she slapped that person’.”

Other techniques include eye-gouging, the roundhouse punch, stomach punch, elbows, how to kick safely, fighting rhythm and how to bring it all together.

Coffey will also teach students about the importance of voice and speech as an actor. He said that these skills are learned throughout an actor’s career.

“It’s a very long process. The major concerns for us here in the US and in England is that you do this every day or every other day. Our breath is something that we have to go back to how we drew as a child.

“Babies breathe properly, as we grow older we are told to stand up straight be quiet, and throw your shoulders back and all this inhibits us and we start to breathe from our chest instead of our diaphragm.

“All of martial arts do diaphragmatic breathing. It allows the actor to project to the back of the house without yelling. It’s breath and a mental focus.”

They include elements of breathing, the practice of sustained open sounds on long vowel and the use of nursery rhymes as the basis of vocal production. The workshops are to take place at Saltus Academy, Berkeley Institute, Warwick Academy and Somersfield Academy as well as local and private middle schools.