KICK HIGH “I’m really excited to see the audience’s reactions to our fight choreography. Our fight choreographer is incredible, so our choreography looks very realistic despite the fact that many of us are inexperienced. I even showed a video of our fights to my piano teacher, who yelled in shock when she saw me appear to kick someone across the face,” said Wren Gawa ’25.

Rehearsals for the next school play She Kills Monsters are in full swing both literally and figuratively. This year, some students acting in the play are working with Joe Wright , a professional fight choreographer, to prepare for scenes that involve fighting and other physical contact that would be portrayed between two people.

“A fight choreographer is someone that breaks down violence in a show into the moves that make it look like people are fighting to maintain safety for everyone involved … while also telling the story through movement and violence,” said Theater Director Gary Lehman.

She Kills Monsters incorporates fighting and other stage combat as it tells the story of Agnes Evans, an ordinary teenager who sets out on a journey to discover more about her younger sister, Tilly, after she was killed in a tragic car accident. Tilly, who was an enthusiast of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, created a game module before her death that Agnes later finds. In playing the game, Agnes gets to know her sister and her life better.

“It is set in high school so it is the same age as the actors,” said Lehman. “It sounds like it would be a sad show and there are definitely sad moments. It is also a very fun and funny show. So, it is a pretty well-balanced show. In the last five or six years, this play has been one of the most produced plays in high schools across the country.”

The play features colorful costumes for many of the Dungeons and Dragons monsters and unique props like the weaponry that is used in fight scenes with the monsters.

“Some of it is with weapons,” said Lehman. “We have multiple sizes of swords. We have a huge war hammer. There is a double-sided battle ax and a staff. There are all kinds of different weapons that are used, as well as hand-to-hand fighting.”

Some may associate choreography primarily with dance and music. There are similarities between the two types of choreography. 

“I keep equating it to dance choreography,” said Lehman. “It is someone who is trained in dance and can break down the music and the emotional parts of the song and the show and push that into movement. It is essentially the same thing except instead of dance and music, it’s violence and fighting and falling.”

Even for experienced theater students, however, fight choreography may be a new, less familiar aspect of acting. This was one of the reasons that the production tapped a professional fight choreographer.

“There are a lot of new challenges,” said Lehman. “While I have been directing, we have not done anything with this level of fight choreography. So, it is a new skill for people to learn. That’s another fun element.”

Another important aspect of the fight choreographer’s job is to ensure the safety of the actors. This is especially true when there is physical contact or weapons are being used.

“They should always be safe,” said Joe Wright. “Anything that I ask them to do should be safe and safe repeatedly and repeatable the same way each and every time because it’s not enough to do it right once because we’re not doing this for the camera.”

Cast members are currently attending separate fight choreography rehearsals in which Joe works with the actors and directs scenes with fighting and stage combat. In the current initial phase, the fights are broken down into discrete steps.

“What we’re trying to do is equip the students with a movement vocabulary that is usable and functional throughout everything they’re about to do and then, we make that scaffolding and build off of it for each individual scene,” said Wright.

The school plays often require significant rehearsal time and commitment from the cast. Learning fight sequences can be an especially challenging, time-consuming process.

“The biggest challenge is that it takes a lot of time to teach a small number of moves,” said Lehman. “When you watch a comic book movie and there are these huge fight sequences, know that every move of that takes a lot of time to actually get it down. We spent nearly 45 minutes to an hour on a fight sequence that will take less than a minute.”

Even as rehearsals progress and actors learn the steps of the fight sequences, other challenges may arise. Speeding up stage combat to make it look realistic can be difficult and each step in the choreography is crucial to master.    

“If you miss your cue or if you don’t know when to go, it all falls apart,” said Alana Andrews ‘26.