Fighting For Fun

Keep your eye out for my new book, Fighting For Fun: A Set of Helpful Reminders About Fighting for Film and Stage.

About the book

I was never very good at rote memorization. Whenever I learned something new, the instructor would say "Do it this way." My first question would always be, "Why are we doing it that way?"

Understanding the principles of how things are done has allowed me to find new and better ways of doing things. It also allows me to determine whether or not the old ways are still the best. When I learned the art of fight choreography, I translated the specific "Do this, do that" into fundamental principles based on the WHY we do this and do that. Understanding those principles has allowed me to create stage combat moves that I was not specifically trained to do.

By adapting those principles, fight choreography has blossomed to the limits of my own imagination and the inspiration of the people I work with. This book is an attempt to approach stage combat from the concept of fundamental principles and putting those principles into practice. The specific moves contained here are the most common ones I've used for fight choreography and they demonstrate those principles in practice.

This is not intended to be a complete and comprehensive list of fight moves, but the basic building blocks from which almost all fight moves have been adapted; understanding how and why these moves are performed, the way I learned to understand them.

Read some excerpts from Fighting For Fun

See behind-the-scenes at the photo shoot

The book should be available in mid to late November of 2011.