Controlled Violence 4 + 5: Swords and preparation for assessment

We're drawing closer to the end of stage combat for this semester and I am going to miss these lessons. I believe I have learnt a lot about angles, how to disarm people and how to look after my body so I can keep performing for longer. For week 5, Derren brought in his replica long swords for us to experience. We only spent one lesson on sword handling as we will be doing more medieval fighting next semester, so Derren just wanted to give us an introduction. For this intro lesson, we learnt how to construct our weapons, from putting on the handle to tightening the grip. We then learnt some basic figure-of-eight swipes with one hand and then with two. We also learnt how to bow with our sword, something that would make us look more professional in castings or scenes where we need to use swords. It was extremely interesting and I look forward to studying sword fighting in more detail in semester 2.

Week 6 of stage combat consisted of us spending the entirety of the lesson choreographing our 2 minute fight scene for our assessment. As we have worked together previously on fight scenes and seem to have good fight chemistry, Ieuan Dolloway and I decided that we would partner together for this assessment. Derren told us that it would be best if, in our scenes, we used everything we had learnt in the previous weeks; this includes some swordplay, disarming knives and guns and general hand-to-hand boxing. To make the fight last 2 minutes, Derren also told us to create characters and include some dialogue. Ieuan and I decided that our scene shall be set in a museum. My character has interrupted a high-level drug deal, and is now being held at gunpoint. This scene still requires a lot of work, especially on the dialogue side, but I believe we have a good premise and some good basic moves in our initial basic scene. We will now be spending reading week rehearsing and adding to our scene as we both want it to be as successful as possible. I'll be sure to upload the finished product for week 7!