Weapon Wednesday - THE STORY

Hello Fight World!

First of all, I'm really excited to be one of the newest members of the Fight Jam team! I’ve been asked to take over the weapon Wednesday blog posts, and so for my first post I’m going to go outside the box on this one.

This week’s weapon: THE STORY

Now what the hell am I talking about? I was sitting and thinking about what weapons I enjoy a lot, and what knowledge or opinions I would like to impart to the larger fight community. What is a great weapon to start with that connects to as many elements as possible? What is the best weapon I’ve ever used? What is the most important weapon to master?

It got me thinking about what my favorite parts of Stage and Film combat are in the first place. Anyone who has studied any kind of stage combat knows that at the heart of what we do we have one supreme goal: To tell a story. I mean yeah, we also are majorly concerned with safety and looking badass, but at the end of the day the best fights, and the fights you remember, are the ones where a great story is told.

More often than not, the best parts of any fight (and the parts that elicit the largest reactions in audiences) are the parts that aren’t “fighting” at all! When two mortal enemies square up to duel and there is a long moment of stillness as each one waits for the other to make the first move, the entire audience holds their breath. When in the middle of a fight a combatant is genuinely surprised when suddenly they are holding their opponents weapon, the audience laughs. When a floury of moves suddenly halts and the main character looks down and realizes he’s been run through, the audience experiences that realization with him. Almost invariably the best part of the fight is where no “moves” are taking place.

To illustrate this point I present you with two fight scenes. Neither uses any words to tell the story during the fight. One is clearly from a film, and one is clearly some students doing a fight test. Nonetheless you can unmistakably see the difference in levels of storytelling. Both clips are fight scenes with my favorite weapon, the restoration era smallsword.

Clip 1




Clip 2 from the motion picture: The Duelists




As you can see in the second clip the fight has maybe 6 moves but the story is SO much more fascinating. The moments before the “fight” begins…the sneeze…the fear of the point.

The best weapon we have in the world of theatrical combat is the story. Without it all we have are a bunch of moves, which are cool, but not memorable. In fact now that we’re 5 sentences away from it, do you even remember most of the “moves” you saw in that first clip? How about the second?

The stories we tell in our fights are the reason we do them in the first place. It’s REALLY easy to forget that the moment we put a cool piece of steel in our hands.


Next week I’ll get back to the regular weapons blog post. Until then, stay kosher.
-Zev