Cloak and dagger stuff

Students learn staged swashbuckling from a master of fake fighting

We might be on the deck of a pirate galleon as the hero skewers the captain. Or we might be in Old Castile, where a masked avenger takes care of the despotic land owner …

On the stage of the Wisconsin Union Theater, Paul Dennhardt, left, teaches a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students including Susan Nanning, right, the art and science of rapier and dagger play.

Alternatively, we might be – and are – on the stage of the Wisconsin Union Theater. At this moment, fight director Paul Dennhardt is teaching a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students the art and science of Elizabethan rapier and dagger play through the Department of Theatre and Drama.

Dennhardt spent his own youth doing musical theater and tap dance; his parents had been in show business, performing knockabout comedy in night clubs across the country. Young Dennhardt was expected to become a professional tap dancer. However, he fell prey to the romance of the rapier, via such movies as “Zorro,” “Scaramouche,” and Richard Lester’s “Three” – and “Four” – “Musketeers.”

“I was enthralled,” he recalls. “Later, I took a workshop in stage combat. The instant I picked up a rapier I was hooked.”

Since those days Dennhardt has buckled his swash at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre and Arena Stage, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Pioneer Theatre Company in Salt Lake City and many more theatrical venues. He also has done more than his share of teaching, for the last 10 years at Western Illinois University as head of its movement program. He traded that, he says, to become fight director in the UW’s Department of Theatre and Drama because of the university’s reputation for excellence.

But that was not the only quality he found here.

“I interviewed here last March, and was so impressed by the intelligence and talent of the students,” he says.

One such is Molly Weyers, a senior from Superior, Wis., majoring in theatre. She is learning much about how the human body works and what it can do in Dennhardt’s class, she says.

“You have to learn to relax, but at the same time look extremely tense for the dramatic action,” she says.

Dennhardt says the requirements for this seeming impossibility include focus and communication. “The training really prepares actors for the demands of performing classical theater and also sharpens acting skills.” Weyers, for example, might use hers in a theater outreach career, “helping members of different communities get their creative juices flowing,” she says.

Dennhardt speculates stage combat may teach physical, mental and interpersonal skills so effectively because it requires performers to execute complex actions without hurting each other. To that end, “they really have to listen, see each other, share energy, eliminate unnecessary tension and look out for each other,” he says. Consequently, the most common injury in Dennhardt’s classes is the occasional twisted ankle.

In addition to aforementioned benefits, stage combat makes a valuable point about the nature and uses of violence, Dennhardt says.

“There is an element of spectacle, of course, but there are also clear consequences of the violence. And those consequences may be horrific and always integral to the action of the play or film,” he says. “Violence usually is not gratuitous in the theater.”