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Fight Direction
Violence enhances every production - fights must move a plot forward, define characters, and excite the audience.
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Why hire NYCSS for Fight Choreography?

We have one guiding principle as fight choreographers - ensuring we bring the production's vision to life by creating violence that enhances the production and reveals character in a way that words cannot.

NYCSS view fight choreography as a collaborative, creative process.

We tailor make our choreography based on the vision of the production, the input of the director, the specific production, and the ability level of the cast. We want to know what you're working on and what you have to work with!

Once a director articulates why the fight is needed (and what they want expressed through the moment), then NYCSS will give options on how to express those things.

We can also explore unscripted moments and interactions where violence or the threat of violence will reinforce and complement the story at hand.

Let us come alongside you in the process of bringing a story from the page to the stage.

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Grounding Fights in Martial Reality

Martial Reality provides important specificity that gives the fight its authenticity.

NYCSS uses the combination of martial arts knowledge and physiological understanding of how a specific injury physically impacts a human being in order to choreograph a fight. This combination grounds the fight in a reality that no audience member understands cognitively, but they know instinctively. On a visceral level, every human understands what looks real. Your audience won’t be able to verbalize why a punch doesn’t look right, but on some level they will intuitively recognize something’s off – and that will take them out of the world of the production, even if just for a split second. An audience that sees an NYCSS fight recognizes and is impacted by the realism – even when the given circumstances are fantastical.

We consider every aspect of the violent scene, such as:

– Physiology

– Psychology

– Martial Technique

– Character ability

– Actor ability

– The larger context of the scene in question

Rules of Choreographing a Fight

The choreography in a fight should always reveal character. If there are two characters, the violence should tell you more about them. The fight then becomes a storytelling tool. When you choreograph a fight, it follows the rules of storytelling; it should have a beginning, a middle, a climax, and an end. That is what a successful fight achieves. Even in fantastical fights, there needs to be rules to the world we are existing in. By starting from that foundation we can create a believable world because there is martial integrity, choreography, and rules.

Whether it’s a fight or a moment of violence, it must result in the audience understanding the characters more deeply.

 

Understanding the Struggle of the Fight

Struggle and Conflict as Humans

Struggle is a human concept, a human reality. We all experience struggles in living and struggles in dying. As storytellers, we incorporate and weave that struggle into our tales. The struggle is why we tell these stories. The struggle in the fight reveals more than simply character, than simply telling a story – it reveals our humanity.

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If you're interested in creating something that evokes a visceral reaction from your audience - then you're in the right place.

Our fight direction gives productions the ability to utilize violence as a storytelling tool.

Directors, actors, scriptwriters, etc. spend an enormous amount of time working on how to best create conflict. This is critical because conflict is the whole reason we have a story to tell. We may enjoy the characters or be interested in the world they live in, but there is no story to tell without conflict.

But here’s the thing – if we have conflict, that can be physicalized. That’s what we can do with violence. We can take a scene, take a character, take a moment and enhance it immeasurably. In a simple slap or a wince, we can reveal incredible amounts about a character and catapult the story forward.

At NYCSS, we create and perform character and story driven fights. This means our choreography is not merely a pause in the story for people to beat each other up. It’s a unique, powerful, and compelling way to reveal who a character is and to tell their story in a brief, simple moment. Punches, chokes, swords, knives – they are only successful if they are serving the story through violence.

We create moments of violence which reveal characters in a way that is impossible when only using the script.

We have one guiding principle as fight choreographers - ensuring we bring the production's vision to life by creating violence that enhances the production and reveals character in a way that words cannot.

NYCSS views fight choreography as a collaborative, creative process. We tailor make our choreography based on the vision of the production, the input of the director, the specific production, and the ability level of the cast. We want to know what you’re working on and what you have to work with! Once a director articulates why the fight is needed, what they want expressed through the moment, then NYCSS will give options on how to express those things.

Let us come alongside you in the process of bringing a story from page to stage!

Book us for your production today!