How to Fake Your Own Death
The beauty behind stage combat and faking it until you break it
How to Fake Your Own Death
To put it simply, there is beauty behind a fake death on stage.
It’s called fight choreography – a form of choreography where you combine acting and extensive movement to create a fake death in front of hundreds of people – and I’m here to tell you all about it, along with Erik Meixelsperger, actor and fight choreographer in Des Moines, Iowa. You know when you watch a theater performance, and there are swords, knives, or hand-to-hand combat? That’s when you bring in a fight choreographer, who makes sure it looks seamless, and no one gets hurt.
Meixelsperger has been a fight choreographer for a little over 12 years. Ephemera asked him why he got into fight training, and it kicked off this discussion about deaths that went wrong, a blood packet that didn’t work, and the highlights of working as a fight choreographer and actor together.
*This interview has been edited for length & clarity.*
Q: Okay, what does a fight choreographer do?
A: So a fight choreographer takes the energy of a fight that a director ideally wants to have on stage and starts to translate it through a safe form of physical storytelling.
Q: Controlled chaos on stage?
A: Yes. But talking to a director is the first thing that would happen and say, what is it you're looking for? About a 30-second fight and this person's really got to win but we got to think this person's going to win for a second. Are there any weapons? No, there's no weapons. It's a fistfight. Great. Is it more theatrical or is it more realistic? It's much more realistic. Are they trained fighters, these characters? No, they're not. They're just on the street fight. Or yes, they are. So getting all the information and then delivering to the director what they asked. In a safe, controlled way.
Q: Do you think most of the fight masters are actors first?
A: I think they should be. I think that one of the reasons why I started developing my own form of combat was because I was growing sick of the combat that I was seeing today–which was very dance-like. You could spot when it was coming from a mile away.t wasn't really getting any danger anymore. And so I think the reason why is because they were leading it from a choreography standpoint, not from an actor's choices standpoint.
Meixelsperger really likes to dive into the character's motivations for fighting. He’s using this same technique for Dracula at Drake University, the show he is directing & fight-choreographed in November of this year.
Q: Okay, folks. They want to know about Dracula though.
A: Well, we open November 21st and run to the 24th and it is a whole new take on Dracula, I'd like to think. And it's not your standard prescription of Dracula, so no, we're abandoning the tuxedo and long cape, instead making him more of a Carpathian warrior. He's still going to have a cape of some sort, but you'll have a massive scar on his face and a lot of Dracula productions are romantic because, in the end, it's about him loving Mina. But we decided that it's not romantic to prey on women in the middle of the night, and drain them of fear and blood and turn them into something that they have no desire to be. So we're kind of going for a true fight of good versus evil with this one. And yes, there will be blood.
Q: I feel like you need to put that in every tag at the end. Every single tag.
A: (with a Transylvanian accent) And yes, there will be blood.
A: Put that on the poster.
One of the trickiest things about stage combat is the stage, and how to execute things. Sometimes, directors have a crazy vision for things that just can not happen safely in combat.
A: That's tougher to do in a round theater, you know?
Q: Oh yeah. Have you ever choreographed for it in a round theater?
A: Oh yeah, yeah. I choreographed a production of The Scottish Play (Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”) with Hand to Hand and Swords. I had thankfully just done The Scottish Play, and I had played him, but it was a completely different take, a completely different version. And they wanted to do it in the round, and they also wanted people to be drowned on stage, and I was like, ‘well, that's not actually going to happen, but there's other options you could look at.’ Yeah. Yeah, and it was tough, but we ended up making it work because they had a very hands-on (in a good way)creative lighting designer who helped me out to kind of dim it enough so that the audience couldn't see if things were being missed, but it was light enough so that the actors could still see their angles and not punch someone in the face.
Q: So there's the term fight master in stage combat. Define that for us.
A: So right now I'm a fight choreographer, meaning I've got level one certifications in multiple forms, right? A fight master is somebody who's certified in the upper level of all those forms and can certify other people. So right now I can teach my students, but I can't give them a certificate that says you are officially a member of the Society of American Fight Directors.
Q: Which is an actual thing?
A: Which is an actual thing, the SAFD, Society of American Fight Directors. And so there are not a ton of them, but those that are are highly sought after. So yes, it's just somebody who, you know, like my fight choreographer taught me like everything. And then I had to go through a fight master for him to officially look at my final after I had all my hours and say, okay, you put something together, you're either going to get certified or certified recommended. Certified recommended is like the higher form. It's the black belt.
Listen to the full interview here:
See you in the afterlife.