Vanessa Finney: It鈥檚 a given that a film or a play will have a director - and when dance is involved, a choreographer. But when performers get up close and personal, they often need more focused guidance. That guidance comes from those trained in intimacy direction and fight direction, which are whole fields of expertise unto themselves. I recently spoke with Rocio Mendez, who is fight and intimacy director for two current productions at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Macbeth and Jane Eyre. I asked how she learned the craft.
Rocio Mendez: I trained at stage combat, including high school and went to performing arts high school in New York City. I also went to Harlem School of the Arts for after school curricula where we also had stage combat and did shows with stage combat. Actually, my first professional show ever was Macbeth. I played the second witch. Isn鈥檛 that crazy? Full circle. And then college stage combat, and I went to an acting conservatory, American 老夫子传媒al and Dramatic Academy, which required us to take stage combat and dance and movement. So I've been doing stage combat since I was basically 13.
VF: Fascinating. What drew you to it?
RM: What drew me to it, honestly, was probably my father because he was obsessed with action movies when I was a kid. So I grew up on Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee, Steven Segal, all these kind of old school 70s and 80s, badass dudes who just constantly have it running, you know, at home. He was in the army. So I just grew up loving action movies and martial arts movies. I also did martial arts as a kid, some karate. And then as I got older, I decided to experiment. And I've trained in kung fu, karate, taekwondo, and muay Thai.
VF: What do you like about that, doing martial arts?
RM: I mean, there's something about it鈥攁side from making me feel strong, and healthy and fit鈥擨 don't know, there's something really fun about it, you have to improv. You know, you learn these moves, and then you gotta figure it out, particularly if you're training to fight or sparring at all, which I think is really fun. And there's also this awesome level of respect and honor in martial arts that I really admired, too. You know, it just makes me happy.
VF: And here you are. Making money from it.
RM: And here I am.
VF: That's wonderful. I would wish that for everybody.
RM: I know, who would have thunk it.
VF: So let's hear a clip from the current production of Macbeth at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We'll hear Macbeth and Macduff in mortal combat. The actors are Kevin Kennerly and Jason Wright. Can you set the scene up for us?
RM: Sure, essentially, Macduff finally finds Macbeth at a war scene battle where they're trying to take over the castle. And Macbeth has been avoiding Macduff because the witches have told him to avoid him if he wants to stay in power, but they finally meet. And this is the final battle between Macbeth and Macduff to see if he stays in power.
[clip of Macbeth]
VF: That was a bit of the infamous sword fight in Macbeth, running through this fall at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. That definitely creates the illusion of real violence. In a scene like this, are you choreographing moves pretty unilaterally? Or how much collaboration is there between you in the director or the actors?
RM: There's collaboration between all of us from the start. I'm going to talk about this specific situation: The director, Evren Odcikin, and I had many conversations on how we wanted this fight to go. And essentially, we set up storytelling. We wanted to make sure both characters look like they were excellent fighters, we wanted to make the audience be sort of on their toes, and on their feet with, 'Who's gonna win this fight?' You know, he's good, and he's good, and then they're kicking each other's asses. And we wanted it to go up and down. And we sort of just laid that order out in terms of storytelling within the fight. And then when it came down to the actual choreography of the fight, me and Associate Fight Director, Carla Pantoja, we did come on with choreography, because we had very minimal rehearsal time. So we wanted to expedite it a little bit by having a plan we could deviate from. For example, Kevin would be like, 'That actually is a little bit uncomfortable for me. Can I do it like this?' And I'd be like, 'Okay, yeah, do it like that.' And again, it's something that was happening naturally in his body anyway, so we let that happen. Same with Jason, he would be like, 'Actually, it'd be really cool if I tried to like this because it feels more natural to me.' And we adjust to do what feels best for the actor. Because at the end of the day, they're the ones doing it four nights a week for months and months at a time, I want to make sure it's sustainable in their body.
VF: Exactly.
RM: So I try for it to be as collaborative as possible, as long as we're sticking to the story that the director would like, and that we created together, right? As long as it doesn't deviate from that, I'm pretty much down for whatever and love to collaborate with the actors in creating whatever choreography we're creating.
VF: Safety is an obvious concern with stage combat. So when you're choreographing a fight scene, how do you accomplish that?
RM: Safety? Well, I think first, it needs to be very, very, very specific, and starting very, very slow. For example, what you see in the show Macbeth, when you watch it is not how we start it, right? We start by being like, why don't you try hitting to the left bicep nice and slowly, boom. Try hit to the left thigh boom, and like, slowly, but surely, it gets a little bit faster and a little bit faster and a little bit faster. So, it feels like it's real when it's all completely choreographed and safe choreography.
VF: Do you find that most actors take to that naturally? Or is it a whole new set of movements that they need to learn?
RM: Yeah, unfortunately not. Every actor is different. Thankfully, the actors that were cast in Macbeth, for the most part, have movement and flight experience. So, it's not completely new to them. But we did have some actors where it was completely new to them. And they're starting from scratch. I personally think it's my job as a flight director to make everyone look good, no matter their skill level. I'm going to do whatever I can to do moves that are a little bit more fluid in their bodies to make them look good, whether they have experience or not so it seems like they're an experienced fighter in the show that they're doing.
VF: Do you find yourself tailoring moves to the specific actor based on what they got?
RM: Yeah, that's something that I try to do. Because if they do something naturally, it's just going to look better. Like the way my body moves isn't necessarily going to look the same on another individual body. So even though I might come up with some moves that I look really good doing, and I have an idea for, if that actor as we're doing it says, 'Hey, actually I feel more comfortable when I go towards it to the right instead of the left?' I'm usually like, 'Yeah, do it.' Because that's something they feel natural, it's their instinct, and I want them to feel comfortable. And again, make them look good on the stage.
VF: And other than safety, the obvious concern are there any other concerns or techniques that you need to teach?
RM: Safety is number one, no matter what, if there's anything that could cause potential harm or danger that I see, I change it as soon as possible to make sure that there's no risk of injury or of someone getting hurt, which unfortunately, sometimes it does. You know, at the end of the day, nobody's perfect accidents happen. We're human beings and sometimes people do get hurt or injured, which is unfortunate.
VF: What usually causes that, just misjudging the distance between two characters?
RM: Yeah, it could be that. Sometimes it's just nervousness. And then, you know, a wrong move is made. Sometimes people just forget. Like people forget lines, people forget choreography. We鈥檙e all human. Someone steps a certain way when they're supposed to step the other way, someone swings a sword a certain way when they were supposed to do it another way. And we do teach as much as we can safety protocols. For example, when you wield a sword, there's something called 鈥渃asting.鈥� When you go to supposedly hit a person - let's say I'm going to hit your arm with a sword, and you're going to block it or 鈥減arry鈥� it, there's a technique called casting where you go for the hit, the attack, but you actually cast it forward as opposed to trying to go through the body. So, there are techniques to prevent people from actually hitting each other.
VF: And you have such an extensive background in different martial arts. Do you ever find yourself pulling moves from those disciplines?
RM: Yeah, all the time. Actually, in Macbeth, there's a part where even though Macduff is wielding two swords I pulled from kali and escrima sticks, which is a Filipino martial art. So even though it's two swords, I created something that would happen originally with kali sticks, just because I thought it would be a fun move to do. So yeah, I pull from my backgrounds all the time.
VF: Very interesting. I want to pivot now to your other duty this season at OSF, that's intimacy director for Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte's original book is considered one of the first feminist novels. It was published in 1847. And the clip that we have actually gives a glimpse into that literally fierce independence. So here's the marvelous Jenny Greenberry in the starring role. She's trying to fend off the advances of Mr. Rochester, played passionately by Armando McLean. This is from the current production of Jane Eyre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
[clip of Jane Eyre]
VF: That was a clip from the current OSF production of Jane Eyre directed by Dawn Monique Williams: A different kind of struggle there. So for listeners at home, what's going on physically in the scene? And how did you approach staging it?
RM: What's happening physically in the scene is Jane is essentially torn with Rochester because she's in love, but has found out that he has a wife. So in the scene, she's basically trying to get away from him but doesn't want to. So there's a little bit of a back and forth physically because Jane wants to kind of get out of there, but also wants to stay. She's torn. And essentially, he ends up grabbing her and kind of trying to hold her, and I believe his hands are around her waist and her back is to his chest. And she eventually makes him get off of her. And then towards the end when he asked her to marry him. She says 'Yes!' and they kiss and everyone's so happy. And it's their first kiss in the show, so everybody's been waiting for it.
VF: Yeah, after the marriage proposal! So this is such a different scene that we hear about sometimes in the movie sometimes, where nudity is involved in lovemaking on camera in front of a set - that's its own thorny situation, I think. What was the different challenge for this? Obviously more subtle.
RM: Actually, this can be a little challenging too. So he says his line, 'Stop prancing like a frantic bird,鈥� or something like that. So when we were first doing it, it was a little bit of a struggle trying to figure out what he meant by that. Does this mean that she's pulling away from an arm? How is she like a frantic bird? How can we physically do what he's describing?
VF: You had to interpret the text a little.
RM: Yeah, a little bit. We experimented with a lot of things. We probably did like three or four different kinds of versions of what this frantic bird kind of thing could be and settled on where we settled on in the show. But it took a while for us to get there, because we wanted it to make sense.
VF: Good goal.
RM: Sometimes it just takes a little bit of play and a little bit of patience, and like accepting failure and mistakes.
VF: Oh, so like life?
RM: Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
You can see Jane Eyre and Macbeth on stage through October at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
